Teleselling and Static On the Phone Lines

If you do a lot of telephone sales then you know that about the worst thing that can happen is a bad phone line. Any sales person is on the phone constantly setting up meetings, scheduling appointments and perhaps even taking orders and closing deals, but when the phone is full of static the sales person looks foolish and miss communications can lead to catastrophes down the road.

Most sales people do not do this by practice, but sometimes the best thing to do is simply say this phone line has too much static and therefore I will have to call you back later. When a sales person is frustrated or angry due to the phone lines they worsen the situation by talking louder, more abruptly and repeating themselves. This is generally met by a reciprocal response by the other party and sometimes what should be viewed, as a normal conversation sounds more like a shouting match to the NSA who is probably listening?

What can you do to stop this? Nothing the NSA will continue to listen to the calls. But if you are smart you will simply ask the other party if you can call them back when you are within range of a better cell site and ask them what time would be good for them and re-schedule and you will save yourself a lot of problems in advance, so consider all this in 2006.

Magic Methods to Motivating Millennials to Manage Teleselling Mandates

If you are a sales manager, business owner or long-time sales person there is no doubt that you have been witness to the Millennials’ methods in marketing and sales. They attempt to do everything on the Internet, including relationship building, link building and making friends and associates.

But as we all know these are not real friends that will be there for you when push comes to shove; oh, sure they’ll back you up if someone tries to flame you on the Internet, but they are not real friends, associates of guaranteed buyers of any of your products or services, well unless maybe you are selling some eBook or webinar something or rather.

Then, these same millennials call themselves relationship builders and enter the job market as sales people. But good luck trying to get them to cold-call or go hammer out a territory. No, they have their own methods like; doing a batch sort and emailing everyone with a form letter telling them about the great products and services and benefits and telling people to buy? Well, we all know that does not work, in fact, most people just delete those emails.

The other day, I was sitting in on a sales meeting as a consultant type of a very strong company. Many of the salespeople were millennials and as the sales manager went through the sales meeting identifying all the key prospects and the data associated with them that he gathered on the Internet. It was a waste of time. All the millennials had already done all that. Indeed, when they were discussing each high-value prospect and company. Each one would say, I already contacted them, I sent them information, I know them.

What they meant were that they emailed these prospects and prospective companies. In only two cases did any of the millennials pick up the phone and call any of the prospects they had carefully put into their data bases. That’s not sales and that is not a sales person’s job. The sales department should be doing that and the salesmen need to cold call, set up appointments, get face time, develop ‘real relationships’ and close deals.

What Works?
The secrets to getting millennials to jump is to offer them bonuses for each specific project based on the value of business that the sales department perceives that prospect to be. For instance, in the event of a high-value customer that the company really wants; the sales manager should say;

I’ll give a bonus of $500 for whoever brings this client in after physically meeting them.”
Changing the way the millennials do sales is essential to your sales dep

Fundemental Success In Teleselling

Outbound and inbound teleselling has to be the most difficult form of sales there is. Everything that can make a sales person great in person, rarely works on the phone. For example, a “normal” sales presentation involves visual contact, which encompasses body language, facial expressions and other non verbal cues. There is also no time limit to a normal sales presentation allow the customer and sales person to work free of heavy time pressure whereas many telesales roles have an ACD (Average call duration) between 3 and 10 minutes on average.

So how can you succeed in telesales without going crazy? Firstly there are a few factors that many telesales people don’t think about. Time management, we’ve already stated that telesales is quite tightly timebounded, but because call centre mangement quite often tell staff when to take their breaks. Staff themselves don’t really think about managing their own time. For example

Lets say you worked two hour bursts 09:00 – 11:00 with a 15 min break, 11:15 – 13:00 with an hour for lunch 14:00 – 16:00 with a 15 min break and 16:15 – 17:30. Rather than plodding through the day as it comes, look at the day as a whole, think about how many calls you want to do per “burst” this can sort your productivity for the day. Work out how long on average it takes to ask your qualifying questions and sell the revelent benefits

Next think about call quality, now, to be great in telesales, you need to consider three attitudes. Firstly, you need to be proactive. This means that you don’t get upset by the unpleasant customer you spoke to earlier, you forget the last call and the next call and concentrate on the call at hand. Its maybe your 50th call of the day but its your customers first.

Next, we need to think about being objective focused. Why are we making a telephone sales call? Quite simply, to make a sale! Never forget this, however the call goes. Ask for the business wherever you can (ethically of course) because telesales is usually more transactional as opposed to consultative, we can present our products after we have asked our qualifying questions to find out what the customer needs, and, after testing the waters, ask the customer if they would like to go ahead with it. I’f you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Finally, we need to be target driven…all the time! Not just when the Team leader says so, don’t do it for the team leader, do it for yourself. Break your yearly target down into monthly ones, your monthly ones down into weekly ones and your weekly ones into daily ones. Once you have that daily target, you now have a benchmark to hit everyday and something to work towards everyday. Plus, aiming to hit £500 every day in immediate sales is a lot easier psychologically than trying to hit £10,000 a month.

Voice Exercises For Telesellers – Get More Business Over the Phone Using Your Voice Effectively

When you use your telephone, your voice is the singular medium to transport your message. Since your respondents can’t hear you they will inevitably concentrate on your voice. It is only human nature that they will concentrate initially more on your voice then on the content of your message.

How you say the things you say will be more important at this early stage then what you have to say.

People will pick up quickly any insecurity or even fear that is transmitted and in that case would try to end the conversation as fast as possible. Nobody likes to listen to someone who’s voice is trembling, or who is losing the thread and in addition to that uses to many “umms” and “ahhs”.

These are all signs of insecurity, all too well amplified by the medium telephone. The underlying message is if we feel insecure about ourselves, we feel insecure about our product too. How can we expect our prospects to feel good about our product and to buy from us if we can’t do that in the first place?

In order to build a good rapport we have to instill confidence right from the start.

Here are some easy but very effective tips to use your most important tool, your transmitter of your messages, your voice, to the best effect:

Combat fatigue – if you are tired you most likely sound tired. Take care of yourself and try to get enough sleep at all times.
During your working ours try to sit in your chair as straight as you possibly can, stretch your arms over your head at the same time and stay in this position for up to a minute. Repeat this exercise as often as you like. Never slump on your chair whilst on the phone. It suppresses your voice to a degree and makes it sound hollow.
Whilst speaking on the phone always remind yourself of sitting straight, or better still, stand up. I personally like to stand up and even pace up and down the office, because I feel that it gives my voice a certain cutting edge and assertiveness that sometimes is needed to convince.
Speak loud and clear but do not shout.
Intonate your voice, it helps to keep your respondent interested. By “intonating” I mean to higher and lower your voice.
Smile occasionally whilst speaking. Of course nobody will see you smile but there will be a discernible difference in your voice, a bit of merriment and good spirit, and people will pick up on this. You simply sound different over the phone when you do that rather then keeping your mouth half shut whilst speaking.
Control the speech or tempo of your voice. In the early stages of a pitch I always copy my counterpart- if he or she is a slow speaker so am I. And if my prospect is a very quick talker I am going to copy that as well initially. After the first minute or so however, I will adapt to a speed that I feel comfortable with. Interestingly most prospects will adapt to my style. The slow speakers tend to pick up pace and the nervous and quick ones will slow down. Soon they will be in tune with you.
Last but not least: – Use good quality telephone equipment.
I find this tactic very helpful and empowering. Not only does it help you to control the conversation, but also to build better rapport. You will leave a positive impression and people can remember you better.
Many telesales people speak far too quick and tend to rattle on and on. These individuals tend to oversell and don’t take enough time to listen what their customer might have to say – often missing vital clues and information. I am fully aware that this is a mistake too easy to do, borne out of nervousness and sometimes boredom. At the beginning of your career you might feel more nervous during these first few months, but if your pitch is a very rigid one, you soon know every word you are going to say by heart and a natural reaction is to get through it as quickly as possible. Time to go over your pitch and tweak it a bit to give it more punch and to keep you on the toes.

I try to remind myself that my pitch might be second nature to me and I might know it by heart. As for my prospects, for each one of them it is always new and interesting information.

Let’s make it easy for them to relax a little and to enable them to concentrate on what we got to say by being relaxed but professional ourselves.

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