Whenever you mail information out, only 1% on average will call you back.. You must follow up the mail-out or you will be missing the opportunity to make a sale with 20 – 25% of the people you have mailed. Your job is to inspire them and invite them to buy.
For many sales people, the follow-up call is much harder than the initial cold call, prospecting or lead generation call. It requires the skill of getting the customer into a conversation before asking for the order.
In recent trainings I have done I have heard this kind of thing on a follow-up call; (It’s the postal inspector check which goes nowhere)
Example 1
Salesperson: Did you get the information (or the quote) we sent?
Customer: No, I have not seen it.
Salesperson: Okay, I’ll send it again.
Example 2
Salesperson: Did you get the information (or the quote) I sent you?
Customer: Yes, I did and I am not interested
Salesperson: Oh, okay then bye.

In the first example, the customer could be saying he did not get it, just to get rid of you and he succeeds. What you could do is answer with “That’s okay, if you are online now, we could run through the information together on the website” or “That’s okay, are you sure it is not sitting in your in-tray? If it is, we could run through it together over the phone and I can answer any questions you might have.”
In the second example, the salesperson could have used an objection handling technique like an open-ended question “I’m curious, what would we have to change to make it of interest to you?” By doing that you may get the customer into a conversation about what he is looking for.
THE 2 BIGGEST MISTAKES
The biggest mistake in both examples is that the salesperson starts the call with a closed question which can only get a “yes” or “no” answer so the conversation can never get started.
Another mistake is when the sales person starts the call with “I’m just following up on the information I sent you”. “Just” belittles what you are about to say and you never want to say “follow-up”. Simply say, “I’m calling to get your feedback on the information I sent. What specifically was of interest to you?”
THE FORMULA FOR A PROFESSIONAL FOLLOW-UP CALL. Read the rest of this entry »

Instead of collecting all the business cards at tradeshows and networking functions and doing nothing with them, why not follow these people up? Again they may not want to buy now but they might sometime in the future. For example I am not in the market right now for a new car, but in 2 year’s time, I might be. If a car salesman keeps in touch with me by continuously giving me ideas of cars to choose for the future, who is the first car salesman I am going to go to? The one who is front of mind of course.
I suggest you buy a card scanner to record all those business cards. Then find someone who works in the Philippines for $2 an hour to put them into an excel spreadsheet, send them back and then you upload them into your database. It is a quick way to build your database fast. The more prospects you have, the more you will sell.

You would know that, as your existing customers drop off, it is important to keep filling the pipeline with potential customers (i.e. prospects). Cold calling is vital to practice in order to stay in business.
“Yes, but where do I find leads?” I hear you cry. “Lists you buy are never accurate and cost a fortune!”.
I have finally found the solution. We have invested in a very expensive piece of software which accurately finds, live off the web, any type of company you want in any town/state of Australia and the world. It gives you the name of the company, the telephone number, the email address, web address and street address. We can download this to an excel spreadsheet and you can then upload it into your database to do a telemarketing campaign, an email campaign or a postal campaign. We can even organise a postcard campaign for you. We can even give you the scripts for your campaigns of any type. Read the rest of this entry »

How To Double Your Sales In One Week

You have probably realised that telesales is a combination of a numbers game and a skills game. The more calls you make, the more sales and appointments you make. So this month, let’s look at how you could increase your activity, i.e. the number of calls you make so you get more success.

I am coaching someone this week who told me he makes 25 calls a day. My immediate train of thought went to wondering what on earth he was doing with his time if he could only make 25 calls a day. Now this guy was not selling anything but an appointment to meet with his director. He should be able to make 10 calls an hour minimum and if he called for 5 hours a day, that would be 50 calls per day. On average he was getting 1 call in 10 to agree to an appointment . That would mean he would get 5 appointments a day instead of 2. Here is where I found the time was being lost. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it Time To Refocus On Your Customer Service To Win More Sales?

I am pleased to see some companies realising that people like to deal with real people rather than automated voicemail messages. Westpac and NRMA are advertising that they have returned to having live people to answer their phones rather than the recorded message like “Press 1 for this and 2 for that etc.”

The worst telephone customer service experience ever is provided by Vodafone as far as I am concerned. When you ring them, they have the audacity to say that you will be answered by a live person called Lara. When you ring the Vodafone customer service number, you are indeed answered by Lara – and Lara is an automated voice . She gives you multiple choices of topics to choose (this goes on an on) and it could take 4 or 5 minutes to get through to the department you want. Then you get a recorded message telling you the wait time to be answered will be approximately 30 minutes. Unbelievable! I have had to do this several times because they keep cutting off my remote internet service, and I am fed up having to spend hours on the phone each time to get the problem sorted. . I tried to end my contract with them as I simply did not want to deal with them anymore.Their billing department informed me that I would still have to pay for the remaining 6 months or I would be taken to court for breaking the contract. Call this telephone number 1300 650 145 to hear how real this is and please make sure you never have this sort of customer service in your company. No wonder Vodafone has a class action against them. Incidentally I have tried emailing my complaint, to which I get a reply that they will reply in 5 days Then I got a reply with a number of frequently asked questions which did not answer my issue at all. Again, unbelievable! I had to start the complaint process all over again. Clearly Vodafone are avoiding speaking to customers and losing them in droves.

If you do have a large volume of calls, at least have a voicemail messaging system offering to call the customer back within an hour.

For 12 tips on how to improve your customer service Read the rest of this entry »

To be successful in sales, one of the most important things to be sure of is that you never allow negative thoughts of failure to even enter your head.
I’ll give you an example of how allowing a negative thought into the mind lost a sale for someone last week. My husband and I have shares in a winery in South Australia and a salesperson rang me to see if we would like to buy some of our own wine for Christmas. I told the guy that I am sure we would be interested but that the best person to speak to would be my husband as he likes to decide which wines we buy. I told him when my husband would be available and sure enough, the guy rang back at the time specifiied. I answered the phone and I said I would transfer the call to my husband. Excited and ready to buy, my husband went to pick up the phone and unfortunately I put the phone down too soon before he actually connected with the guy. He was cut off. Now we both expected the guy to call back and he didn’t. He must have assumed my husband was not interested in buying and had hung up on him. My husband tried to do “call recall” to get the number to call back but it was a number you could not call back. Wow, what a waste of a big sale that that guy could have made. He let a negative thought get the better of him. He thought we had just hung up on him.
Next day another wine society called with a great offer. My husband bought it.

What To Do When You Get A Negative Thought Read the rest of this entry »

The only difference between a rich person and poor person is how they use their time.
How could you use yours 10% better?
Robert Kiyosaki

We always learn better when we have a bit of fun so I have put the principles of a good telesales/telemarketing call into a song. Please listen to it, tick if you like it and share it with someone else if you can.The more people practice these principles when they call, the less rejection they will get. Go to

Telemarketing Song Or simply search on Telemarketing Song at www.youtube.com

Here are the steps of a successful telesales call once you reach your decision maker.

1. Build rapport by mentioning something you know or have seen about the person or the person’s company.

2. Create an interest grabbing statement – one sentence with one major benefit to the customer.

3. Ask no more than 3 open-ended or direct questions

4. Demonstrate listening skills by repeating back what they said

5. Present your offer with a) benefits,b) a testimonial proving it is good c) create $ value in your proposal, d) create urgency to buy

6. Do a Trial Close before a real close

7. Handle the objections

8. Close

As you can imagine I receive a fair number of telemarketing calls myself and if I am in the middle of focusing on something hard, I am not always receptive when I get interrupted to be sold to out of the blue. The other day a telemarketer was trying to sell me on the idea of using their accountancy practice and quite frankly, if I had not been so absorbed in what I was doing, I might have been interested. I just quickly said, “Not interested , thanks, good-bye” and gave him the brush off. Now I thought that would be the end of it but the telemarketer had another go. He obviously knew what I teach and that is that “no,” means “no, not now” and “not forever”. He also knew that sometimes when you ring someone, they are in a completely unreceptive mood and the next time you ring them they are perfectly charming. It just depends on what is going on for the customer at the time you call.

Well, here’s the thing. I believe it is becoming more and more important to mix your telemarketing lead generation strategies with a bit of email, sms or mail.
Here is how the telemarketer got his appointment with me in the end which I thought was really clever. Here is a letter I received 3 days after the call.

“Dear Ms Cartwright

Sorry that I called you at a busy time on Tuesday. I do apologise. I was hoping to set up a short meeting for you with our CEO at your place so it won’t take more than 15 minutes of your time. Read the rest of this entry »

“Remember, there are two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn’t work. Second, the failure gives you an opportunity to try a new approach.” Roger von Oech