Kickstarting a new business is tough and having to market and sell your products and services can be even tougher without the right tools. Based on experience and serving over thousands of small and medium enterprises, we found that many businesses rely on solely making sales phone calls in order to engage customers and making effective and convincing phone calls can be highly challenging.
Nailing down the best methods to engage your prospects over the phone, when not being able to meet face-to-face, is crucial. It is a skill on its own and requires a reasonable amount of time and patience to develop.
Have you ever wondered how to sell your products/services through phone calls more efficiently? If so, here are some suggestions and tips that would surely be of help to you in improving your sales phone calls!
1. Be Confident
Confidence is a vital tool when it comes to selling through phone calls. Whether it is an inbound call or outbound call, it is crucial that you are confident when speaking to your customers.
For any of your prospect to take your desired action, you have to appear to them as someone has deep product knowledge and business acumen.
In order to build true confidence in yourself, you need to be have a great understanding of the basics of the product or service you are selling, as well as the company you are representing.
Whenever you want to initiate a phone call to your prospective customers, you need to be well-composed enough to deliver your script with an audible voice tone. One of the biggest mistakes made by people when selling products or services through phone calls is that they sound unsure, weak and wimpy. Prospects will lose their confidence in your products or services and you may potentially lose a highly interested customer.
Therefore, you need to build a reasonable amount of confidence in yourself before you initiate a phone call.
2. Be Natural
During a sales call, you are generally providing more information about your product or service, that your prospects are hearing about for the first time. For some, it may be simply reading the sales script given to them while on the call, but the downfall is when these people do not take their time to learn and rehearse what was written in the text. Therefore, sounding unnatural while on phone calls with prospects.
If you are working on a new product or service or a new company in an entirely new area, you should take time to learn and rehearse what you’ll say while on the phone. Many people do not bother to do this well and this may potentially cause you your sales dollars!
If you have taken enough time to learn the script of the product or service you are selling, you would have mastered the text, and you would sound more natural to the ears of your prospects.
Once you have mastered the content of the script, you can naturally begin to add your own voice and tone inflections and sound more like a professional. Customers often love those who sound natural and able to smoothly converse with them about their needs.
3. Listen More
Be it in our daily lives or in our professional lives, it is always important to listen, and not just hear. A large majority of people fail listen to their prospects.
When you are listening to others, you tend to paraphrase what they have just said to you, and you continue the conversation asking more questions especially about a piece of information you have just received from a customer.
In order to learn the skill of listening more in your telephone sales calls, you have to effectively hold an interest in the customer you’re communicating with.
4. Don’t Assume
Yes, it’s true! You may have heard this advice countless of times in other situations, but it applies to making sales calls too. Many businesses assume that they already know the pain points of their prospects and switch off, even before understanding the problem that their prospects are facing.
One of a common example of assuming includes finishing your customer's sentences for them. In most cases, this would end up irritating the customer and we can all agree that annoyed customers do not typically turn into successful sales.
5. Make it more interesting
If you have made any business-related phone calls, you will know that it is difficult to engage with your customer. Especially for those who make sales calls as a living, the act of having to repeating the same thing to every single customer can lead to you being bored, and subsequently translating those emotions into your conversation.
We understand the rehearing your sales script for the 100th time this week will start making you sound monotonous, however, for every single customer, it is the first time they are listening to your script and about your product, and every minute the customer spends listening to you should be optimised for your sales.
This comes back to the point above on listening more to your customers. Every customer is unique and have their own pain points to solve. Listening to them describe their problems will give you immediate insights in catering certain features in your product or service to fit their needs.
For a customer, it is also significantly more interesting for them when you are able to package the product or service from their perspective, and offer the solutions to the problems faced by them. Speaking of which, don't forget to customise and strategise specific ways to provide excellent customer service.
On top of all these behavioural tips to make your sales calls more efficient and effective, using the right communication tool is also extremely important. Through a virtual business phone system such as Omni, you can look more legitimate by contacting your customers through a business landline number, be able to attend to them professionally by using our interactive virtual receptionist and record phone calls to review later.
Omni is a cloud phone system that gets a landline number routed directly to your mobile phones through a virtual receptionist and extensions. It functions completely through an app with no hardware installations needed and no contract attached, from only RM 60 per month.
Learn more about Omni and sign up here.
