Telesales Training CAN Make You More Money

HOW YOUR COMPANY COULD BE LOSING MONEY
By: (C) Jenny Cartwright 2007
http://www.telesalestraining.com.au

The telephone is still the most powerful and effective business tool today. Yet millions of dollars and opportunities that companies have are lost every year simply because Managers, Accounts, Salespeople and Receptionists have had no training in telephone etiquette nor telephone sales.

Frontline staff are the shop window of your business. They can make or break rapport with your customers. If they do not answer the phone with a nice bright smiley voice it turns a customer off. If their telephone etiquette is poor, that will also give the customer a bad impression. You only have 15 seconds on the phone to make a first good impression. If they are not trained, they give out prices on request instead of asking questions to find out what the customer is really looking for . They miss opportunities to up-sell and they miss the possibility of being able to follow up because they never get the prospect’s phone number.

I heard of an instance the other day where a customer who had 3 million dollars to spend on a real estate site rang a well-known real estate company. The customer asked to speak to someone about home units and town house sites. The receptionist’s reply was “We don’t sell home units nor town houses, you have to phone one of our other branches. The customer was given another number but he never bothered to do that. He went to another agency.

According to surveys, 80% of employees are influenced to look for another job by the way their employers communicate with them. I hope your managers are trained how to communicate by phone with their staff and their customers. Managers can talk abruptly instead of having a welcome tone and they almost see the phone as an interruption rather than an opportunity. They seem to think the way to answer a mobile phone does not have to be the way they answer the phone in an office. This is not the case. Everyone in an office needs some form of telephone training be it for outbound calls, inbound calls or simple telephone etiquette. Harvey World Travel have seen the value in that, they are making sure I train 80 of their head office staff on telephone skills right now.

More ways you could be losing dollars:
How much business are you missing out on because your sales people either avoid cold calling for new prospects and appointments or following up quotes, sales, past and existing customers by telephone?

Telephone selling skills are essential for salespeople if they are to acquire more prospects, sales, leads and appointments. Calling prospects on the phone is quick, cost effective and can increase your market share immediately. It is estimated one face to face sales call now in the Sydney area costs $300 if you take into account car expenses and the salesperson’s salary. A phone call costs a maximum of $0.25, it’s quick and can often be just as effective but only if you know how to do it well.

Often the thing face to face salespeople like to do least (i.e. telephone selling) will win you more business and get you the results you are looking for. I know from cold-calling 100 prospects a day to promote Tom Hopkins and Anthony Robbins events over a 6 year period that I could turn a 1% response from a mail out into a 20% success rate just by following up mail-outs by phone. The problem was, 90% of my colleagues never had the guts to follow up because that was where the rejection came in and they could not handle it. Yet, that was where the gold was to be found. When working on a commission basis, which I was, I wanted to make sure I found the gold.

If salespeople are not wanting to pick up the phone, it is simply because they have a fear of rejection, no set goals or no confidence in their own telephone selling ability. This is normally the case if they have never attended a telesales training skills course. They fumble through calls, get no results and do anything to avoid having to make more calls. They could end up leaving the company disillusioned, feeling like a failure.

What if they could go to a telemarketing / telesales workshop that would give them the skills, the motivation and the confidence to be able to do cold calling with ease and start getting some substantial business?

What if they had some telesales skills that were proven and guaranteed to get them great results? They would get in front of more prospects, more decision makers, make more appointments, increase sales by at least 30%, get referrals and more importantly, they would feel like a valuable asset to your company. There would be no thoughts of leaving their job. Click here to get more information on the public workshop available “How to Use Telemarketing Skills to Triple your Sales”. For more than 6 people this can be customised to your business and conducted in-house

Here’s an example of some dumb things people do:-
When following up some information they have sent out, they start with “Did you get the information?” Where is the conversation going to go after that? You would just get “yes” or “no”. You would get much more information if you were to ask “I am calling to discuss/review the information or the quote we sent to you. What did you think about it? It would be even better if the salesperson had scheduled the follow up call with the customer for a specific time so that a) the customer knew he had to have read the information by a certain time and b) he would not throw it out.

The salesperson might follow up inactive customers and say something like “you haven’t done any business with us for a while”. That is not very good rapport building. Better to say “We have noticed in the past that you have purchased ______ from us. As part of our ongoing customer service, we wanted to let you know that we can now help you to (major benefit) by offering you (xyz product)

The salesperson may not have been trained how to do a cold call and starts off introducing himself with uninteresting statements like “Hi, my name is Stuart from ABC Finance. We do financial planning and superannuation” No-one is interested in what you do, the opener has to be the major benefit to a customer like “we can help you increase the return on your superannuation and financial investments”

I would like you to consider if any of the above apply to you or your organisation? If so,
Click here to enable your sales staff to increase their telephone sales by 30% immediately. The next public workshop by Jenny Cartwright, (regarded as Australia’s Telemarketing Guru) is called "How to Use Telemarketing Skills to Triple your Sales" on Sept 12th. Hear what others have said about their experience from attending. Never let an untrained salesperson loose on your phone. It will cost you money instead of make you money as it should.

If your salespeople are not getting the results in telesales and telemarketing they can do their own self assessment to find out why. Click here for self assessment.

The 3 BIG Mistakes Companies Make in an Attempt to Cut Costs
It is estimated that 50,000 call centre operators in Australia will lose their jobs this year because the jobs will be given to Indian call centres who operate on one fifth of the Australian wage. Are the decision makers on this matter totally mad? Do you really think your customer service is going to improve by customers barely being understood by people who do not have English as a first language? Do you think your sales are going to improve by putting someone on the phone to you who can barely speak your language or build rapport with you because of their Indian accent. I would go so far as to say your customers are not important to you if you are going to do this and without customers , you won’t have a business.

Whoever invented the system of “Dial 1 for finance, dial 2 for sales, dial 3 for accounts, dial 4 for management did companies a total disservice. If I am shopping around for prices, I will not even tolerate listening to all that, I will put the phone down and dial another number. It is saving the company time and resources but hey, what about the customer who is keeping you in business? His time is important too. A recent survey in Australia has shown that more companies are now disabling this service than taking it up because they realise how much damage it has done to their business.

Then there is the ridiculous idea of installing instant dialling in call centres so call centre operators do not waste any time between calls. The next call is automatically dialled almost before the call centre operator has time to know who they are calling. There is always a gap between the receiver of the call picking up the phone and the call centre operator beginning to talk so the receiver of the call knows immediately it is going to be a telemarketer and they are on the back foot wanting to end the call. I have not heard of one call centre yet who has improved sales since installing this system. Sure they have improved the volume of calls made but not the number of sales or the bottom line.

My final advice – before you take on anything new that is going to cut costs, make sure you know how it is going to affect customers and sales. If you lose a customer, it costs you a fortune.

New Trends to Expect:
The Do Not Call Register will be introduced in July next year. It will only apply to people who register with a wish not to be called at home. The USA has had this in place for a while now and claim it has not had a dramatic effect on business.

Charities will be still be able to call everyone at home and voice broadcasting will be exempt from the do not call legislation. Voice broadcasting was practised by the Prime Minister for his last electoral campaign. You record your message and it is left on every home’s answer phone or voicemail. It can be directed to certain areas, suburbs and is very successful for local campaigns advertising specials. When used to contact businesses, the message is left after hours.

SMS Broadcasting is the new up and coming trend – the only way to reach the Y generation. These people are always on the move, not handy to email all the time but always close to their mobile phone. SMS broadcasting works the same way as voice broadcasting except that the advertising message is left on the customer’s mobile phone. Watch out, it is really going to take off.

Jenny Cartwright is head trainer and owner of Sales and Telesales Solutions. For 16 years she has specialised in training salespeople and business executives how to increase sales by phone. She can speak at your conference , coach you one on one or write your telemarketing script.

Her training products – books, CDs and DVD are available at http://www.telesalestraining.com.au 
Tel. (+ 61) 02 9427 3479 Email info@telesalestraining.com.au

You can sign up for her FREE monthly telesales tips to discover how to increase your sales immediately. Click here


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