You might be the greatest salesperson on the phone in your organisation but when your new prospect calls you back to order, the person answering the phone on the frontline of your organisation has not been trained in telephone sales skills and his/her manner loses you the order. First impressions of your company are made by a person’s phone answering manner in the first 15 seconds.

I called a company the other day in response to a big expensive advert in the newspaper. I wanted the special offer they were advertising but the person answering the phone told me she had heard nothing about a special offer and it would be prices as normal. I could not really believe what I heard. This company was spending huge dollars on advertising but the marketing department had not yet had time to alert the people answering the phone about the offer and how to sell it. What a waste! (more…)

When I am away on business, I am very dependent on getting my voicemail messages from my office phone each day so that I can respond within 3 or 4 hours. Enquiries and proposals are requested but I am aghast at the number of people to whom I can actually respond. Here are some of the scenarios that have occurred.

1. A lady literally whispered her message down the phone so, even at full volume, I could not hear it.

2. A man mumbled his name so I could not catch it despite repeating the playback repeatedly. I then had to ring the number back without knowing who I needed to speak to. Needless to say, the person who answered the phone had no idea either.

3. Another person said his telephone number so fast, I had to play the message repeatedly to grasp it.

4. One lady left her number and it was a fax number when I called!

5. Three people left mobile numbers to call back on and the response was that this number could no longer receive calls (only 2 hours after they called me). ( They were out of credit, I presume.)

6. Clients I knew called and did not leave their number so it took me a considerable amount of time to track the number down from a hospital bedroom that had no phone directory. That was assuming I remembered the name of the company they worked for! (more…)

After finding out your customer or prospect’s needs and wants, every good sales presentation (whether it be by phone or face to face) must include the following ingredients:-

1. Benefits of the product or service to the customer
which are relevant to the customer’s needs

2. Testimonials (what other people have said)

3. What the real value is (from a monetary sense)

4. Some expression of urgency, why they should
buy now.
Testimonials make your sales presentations more credible both on the phone and face to face.
When salespeople call me to tell me they are the best in their field or they are the leading supplier of a particular product, I find that a complete turn off. However, if they quote someone else as saying that about them, it seems to sound okay. (more…)

As I work from a home office, I have to tolerate at least 4 – 6 telemarketing cold calls a day. And when I say tolerate, I mean tolerate. Nine times out of ten these calls are irritating because they make all the mistakes that I teach not to do. They make prospects want to hang up on them immediately. Well, if they make me want to hang up on them, I am sure you would feel the same. Just make sure that you don’t do any of them. (more…)

You have done your prospecting call and been asked to send out some information. You may be like many salespeople – happy to prospect on the telephone but when it comes to following up, you are not so keen. Here is where you might experience fear of rejection or a bit of call reluctance. What can you say?

There is really no point in sending information out unless you plan to follow it up, because it is usually in the follow up that success is achieved and the sale is closed. It is important to ask the customer how long he/she thinks they need to review the information and then schedule a time to call back to discuss it further one day later. That way the customer knows you are going to ring back and that they have committed to have read the material by then. Here are some tips:- (more…)

A telephone call to a happy customer is the ideal way to find referrals and new prospects. This call should be a natural part of the sales process but, sadly, not a lot of salespeople bother once they have made a sale.

So what stops you from asking for a referral?

Perhaps you feel embarrassed having to ask or perhaps you feel you might be putting your customer in a difficult spot, because he may not know anyone to recommend to you. Well, like there is a process in every step of the telesales call, there is also a process for asking for the referral. It is easy when you know how. Then you will have more confidence to do it.

The obvious people to give you referrals are your customers who have recently bought from you. When you call them one or two weeks after they have bought from you, to check they are happy with their purchase, they will not only be impressed that you bothered to call, but they will be only too pleased to assist you. (more…)

Questioning in the sales process is so powerful when the technique is applied correctly. After you have grabbed the customer’s interest with an opening statement, you need to ask questions to find out what the customer really wants. It is almost as if you have to do this in order to earn the right to talk to them about your product or service afterwards.

However, the right type of questions need to be asked and this is where so many telemarketers go wrong. You need open-ended questions that get you more information – questions that keep the customer talking about themselves. These questions begin with “What, Why, Where, When, Who, Which and How”. So many telemarketers ask questions that will get a “yes” or “no” answer. These are called closed questions. They should be left until the end of the conversation when the customer is ready to buy the product, e.g. “Based on what we have discussed would you like to buy now?” (more…)

Sometimes when you telephone the receptionist at a company and ask what the name of a person is in a certain position (like the sales manager or the product manager), the receptionist may get suspicious of you, believing you are in telesales and that you are going to waste that person’s time. He /she doesn’t want to transfer your call and tells you that the person is unavailable.

I find that it is better to use this first call as an information gathering call. Pre-empt the call with: “I wonder, Mary, whether you can help me?” Nobody minds helping others. Listen for the name of the person and use it. Have your questions ready, like: “I am wondering who makes the decisions in your company on sales training?”, “How many salespeople do you have?”, “Do you have your own trainer?” You reply, “Thanks Mary, you have been very helpful. Could you tell me what time would be a good time to speak with Mr ______ on the phone?” You can even pre-empt your questions with “I want to be sure that what I have to offer will suit Mr ___ so I wonder if I could ask him a couple of questions?”

If you have smooth-talked Mary well enough and the person is there, she will be sure to transfer your call through. If not, call back later or the next day and say, with a smile and authority in your voice (stand up to get the power in your voice), “Good morning Mary, I would like to speak to Mr ____ please”. There is less likelihood that Mary will not transfer you through if you say it with authority and without putting a question mark at the end of your sentence. You may then thank Mary for transferring the call. (more…)

The most important thing to remember when making appointments is that you are selling the appointment, not your product or services.

Therefore, you do not want to be talking too much. You can expand on what you have to offer when you get to the appointment. (more…)