Well, you have come to the right place. We've spent years honing our skills so that we can help people just like you become more successful.

     Whether you're considering applying for your first job on the phones, or you've owned your own call center for several years, we can help. One area we've concentrated on at length happens to be breaking up the sales cycle into easy to manage pieces.  In our experience, many people new to tele-sales find the prospect of selling something new very intimidating. We've seen extremes from panic attacks to picking up the phone, first call close.

     We've found that breaking the entire sales process up into smaller "chunks", we can focus on specific skills to improve upon or praise. With so many different products and services being marketed over the phone you have to know several things before launching a successful coaching plan.

There are many selling styles. There isn't any one style that will work for every good or service. To make matters even more frustrating, is that what works for one person may not work for you! To relate to the Kiss principle (Keep it simple sweetie), we can break it up into two fundamental sales theories and will walk you through some best practices to help guide you through.

We'll start with transactional sales as they are the simplest to learn and to obtain work. We will be writing another article on more sophisticated sales processes and best practices on higher value sales in the future. Read up on consultative sales processes and Spin Selling, by Neil Rackham if this is an urgent need.

The first question to ask yourself is: How valuable is my product or service?

     Every good sales person believes whole heartedly (or can convince anyone thereof) that their product is of genuine value. The importance of this is tremendous. We've found that when selling a product or service less than $500-$1,000 people are more likely to respond to basic sales strategies. They don't have to like you (but you'd still better make a good impression).  On higher value sales the prospect will need to feel that there will be a comfortable working relationship with you in the future (read more on business relationship building skills).

     Assuming that what you're selling is less than $500-$1,000 and there is no future servicing the prospect needs the average person is more likely to part with their money by presenting features and benefits and using some basic strong closing techniques.

The next question to ask yourself is: Who qualifies as a prospect or decision maker?

     It can be heartbreaking to spend too much time with someone who doesn't qualify or has to talk to someone else to obtain final approval to accept your offer. Every great sales person can tell you that at one point in their career they wanted to reach through their phone after spending half an hour or more trying to get a checking account number from someone who doesn't even have a checkbook. One person actually kept me on the phone asking nothing but real buying signal questions only to tell me "I gotta run, my dates here. I don't even have a check book, I was just bored!"

     The bottom line is that failure to qualify a prospect not only wastes your time, your company's time and also your prospects. It usually takes a question or two and this can save you a tremendous amount of time and frustrations.

Moving on to the next question: What makes sense to a qualified prospect, or what is important?

     With most sales calls prospects have similar needs. Once you understand what they need or want you can focus your conversation on what's important to them. If they have no interest in gardening, don't offer gardening services or products. The best way to do this and build rapport is to simply ask! Sounds basic, but many sales professionals find themselves just data dumping or reading everything they have to offer with out knowing what your prospect likes or values, you can get in to quality dialog with your prospect, present value and close the deal getting on to the next prospect as quickly as possible.

     By understanding what your prospect needs or what motivates them you can focus on their needs and save your time by not wasting theirs.

 

(To be continued...)