A sales career can be challenging, but even more so if all of your sales activity is accomplished over the telephone! Here are a few tips to ensure your phone sales presence is strong and effective so that you can stay ahead of your revenue objective every month: - Use a good CRM tool. Make sure your company or your management team provides you with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that enables you to schedule your calls, follow up on scheduled calls, has a good calendar, a task and list manager, an “alarm” system for important calls, etc. This will be critical to your ability to keep up with your top customers, as well as your newer customers while building your pipeline. Make sure you take excellent notes so that with follow up calls or return calls, you have a reminder of your last conversation.
- Schedule your calls one week out. Effective planning is critical to having quality phone time. Scheduling your calls one week out will ensure you constantly have a pipeline of calls to make, and if you sort them by prospect, cold call, follow up, close, etc, you will also be reminded of the nature of the call as you pull up the next company in your list to call.
- Develop Great Rapport in 3 seconds. Over the phone, you have only 3 seconds to establish great rapport. The reason for this is simply that you will not have the ability to use body language to convey your message, so you need to have a bright, cheery personality when you call and talk to someone on the phone. It’s critical that you don’t come across too salesy or as if you are reading from a script—it’s much more important that you use your personality to your biggest advantage so you can sell your products and services. Getting past the 3 second hurdle is critical to effective and productive phone selling.
- Be cognizant of your client’s time. When you call someone, you are interrupting their day. Make sure that you let your client ( or prospective client) know that you are aware of that, and ask if this is a good time to talk for a few minutes. If they say no, take that opportunity to schedule time with that client at a later time. This will ensure you have more undivided attention from your client. Also, if you say your phone appointment will only take 15 minutes, do not go over the 15 minutes allotted for the call. This will help you gain respect from your client, and will enable you to develop stronger relationships than you will if you go over the time allotted. Tip: If you get to the 15 minute point and you still have information to share, let the client know you’ve reached the time limit, and ask them if they would like you to continue, or if they would like to reschedule for another time. If you are doing a great job, the client will allow you to continue right then, and you might even find yourself with a sale that day!
- Follow up, follow up, follow up. If you say you will follow up, do it. Make sure you follow up on the day and time you say you will. Otherwise, you will lose credibility in the eyes of your client, and will be unable to regain that, especially over the phone.
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