Work on your Telephone Call Handling Skills - and start with the BEGINNING of the Call. First impressions count, and it takes just 10 seconds on a telephone to for that caller to decide 'I like this person, and I want to work with them' or 'I am out of here! Ensure your caller gets a warm, professional greeting, like you really are pleased he or she has called. Use positive listening responses, verbal nods to encourage your caller. Get and use the caller's name, being carefully to use it appropriately for your culture. Focusing on the beginning of your call for one week will be guaranteed to improve your conversion rate that week.
Work on your product knowledge. Ensure you really know your products and what edge your products have over the opposition. Have regular blitzes on your product knowledge e.g. working on one product area per week for 4 weeks. Improve not only your knowledge of the product itself, but what VALUE it is to different Customer types. Think through the Customer's eyes to get a sound understanding of the benefits of your products and how to explain these positively to your Customers.
Profile your Customer types - every line of work has different Customer Types. A poor Sales person will usually be able to build rapport and sell effectively to just one Customer type - and they will be incapable of working with the more 'difficult' types. The good Sales person will work at improving their sales skills with each Customer type in turn - perfecting their ability with each one. Work on your approach, the language style, the benefits you offer and how you explain these to each different Customer Type. This will lead to more closed sales with each group.
Believe that Callers DO buy! Work at building this positive belief. Remember, it is POSSIBLE to sell to any qualified prospect - someone is going to do it! The real difference between your Company and your major competitors is the quality of your Sale people. In one of these Companies is a Telephone Sales person who will close the sale with this Customer. The competition is between you and 'John Doe' or 'Jane Doe' - make sure you are better!
method I use in Telephone Sales Training is the 2% rule. Why just 2%? Well, according to an old Telephone Sales Trainer I once had, 2% is the perfect target to achieve real difference. Think of the Titanic, the ship that went down taking all those poor souls with it. How much would it have to move to have AVOIDED that ice berg? According to my old mentor, just 2 degrees of movement would have saved all those lives. 2 degrees is a small amount, but it can have a huge impact on our lives.
What is effective for generating long-term sales increase and loyal customers is to invest in the selling skills of your salespeople. The potential for record breaking sales exists but quite often never unlocked.
ReplyDeleteFor sales training to unlock the true potential of a sales force and optimize benefits to a company's bottom line, three things are required. They should always be present in any sales-training situation, but rarely are.
1. Teach a sales system that is genuinely more effective than what your salespeople are doing now. This should be obvious, but it isn't. Many courses teach selling as a collection of tips, tricks and techniques that might be helpful in various circumstances. Maybe they'll work for a short period of time - maybe not.
To achieve dramatic gains in performance, salespeople need to master a systematic and superior approach to selling that has proven to work consistently in virtually any circumstances. Tricks and gimmicks won't cut it. Salespeople need a better way to sell.
The system must be based on the way buyers actually behave and make decisions. And salespeople need to know not just what the system is but how to master and execute it - every step of the way.
2. Teach skills that can be taught. A thousand traits and characteristics may contribute in some way to sales success: an outgoing personality, the gift of gab, etc. The trouble is, those traits can be talked about (and often are in training courses) but they can't really be taught.
Research proves that improvements in only five critical selling skills translate directly into greater sales performance. These skills can be taught and improvements in them can be measured. They are:
* Managing the Buyer/Seller Relationship
* Sales Call Planning
* Questioning Skills
* Presentation Skills
* Gaining Commitment
Google "Action Selling" if you want (http://www.actionselling.com) to know more about those five sales skills, how and when to use them, and why they are so critical to unlocking actual potential to achieve measurable gains in sales performance. They also have a free sales skills assessment that determines sales strengths, gives recommendations on how to improve in using these skills as well as a number of great quick-read sales books describing the process. (http://bit.ly/vf7qE)
3. Train according to the realities of adult learning and behavioral reinforcement. Educational research has established a great deal about how adults actually learn and master new skills. Salespeople learn far more effectively when sales training adheres to proven adult learning principles.
But teaching new skills is only half the battle. Sales performance can't improve unless salespeople actually use their new skills consistently on the job. Old habits die hard.
What to teach and how to teach it are important issues. But, "How will we reinforce the new behavior on the job?" is critical. Reinforcement must be an integral part of the training plan, right from the beginning.
Select the right system, based on the right skills, then get the teaching and reinforcement right. You'll have taken a huge step toward making sales training pay.
To Your Success