Lead Generation Sales Process

In addition to being able to sell a product or service, you need to be able to;

1. Communicate effectively using your voice
2. Interact extremely well with total strangers, foster relationships and trust quickly
3. Overcome objections; have the ability to negotiate and/or resolve conflict
4. Be highly organized and he able to manage your time
5. Stay motivated and be able to motivate your prospects
6. Understand and utilize knowledge about your prospects in terms of their needs and desires
7. Follow the guidelines or procedures dictated by your employer

To achieve success as a telemarketer, you will need to invest the necessary time and effort to learn and master a variety of different skills. Only then will you be able to tap in to your potential for generating the sales results you want.

Although nothing can replace the need for you to build up firsth and experience, if you begin, your telemarketing efforts equipped with the right knowledge and strategies, your chances for success increase exponentially. Telemarketing can be emotionally challenging and monotonous but with practice; you will learn to enjoy acquiring the skills and experience you need to close appointment after appointment using the telephone!

Most CEO’s and successful business owners suggest you become a fluent Sales Person prior to tackling business, as Sales will prepare you for the vast personalities and relationships you will experience as a business owner or CEO.

Before going throught the components of the Sales Process it is important to understand the following;

Telemarketing can be as powerful as an in-person sales presentation. When you are utilizing the telephone as a sales tool, you have no visuals at your disposal. The prospect cannot see or touch whatever you are attempting to sell. What you say, how you say it, and the emotion or intensity conveyed with your voice become all the more important.

To be an effective telemarketer, you need to be able to communicate well verbally but also master the art of listening. The ideal sales call should involve the following phases:

1. Make opening statements


2. Ask questions


3. Use their name many times


4. Develop an understanding of your prospect: Where is he or she now? What is his or her vision for the future?


5. Listen to what the prospect has to say, and observe his or her behavior


6. Take notes but remain attentive. You will want to remember exactly what the prospect had to say during each call


7. Qualify the prospects needs and wants


8. Repeat or paraphrase some of what the prospect tells you to demonstrate your understanding, interest and active listening


9. Resolve the prospects objections and concerns, never simply roll them off the table


10. Offer your solutions to the prospects needs and problems


11. Create a win the win situation


12. Gain Agreement to benefits


13. Offer value added services as the salesperson


14. Ask for the business

Contents

1. Pre Call Planning
2. Gatekeeper Handling
3. Decision Maker Introduction
4. Rapport Building
5. The Reason For the Call
6. Trial Close
7. Objection Handling
8. Close
9. Call Wrap Up

Defining Your Needs and Goals

Before continuing on, it is important to define your needs and goals. For an individual looking to get into the telemarketing field or enhance your skills, your goals might be:

1. To learn the skills required to become a successful telemarketing or telesales professional
2. To perfect your skills and discover telephone strategies to reach more prospects, make more sales and improve your relationships with existing customers
3. To discover and implement new strategies for improving your closing ratio
4. To determine how to deal with all of your prospects objections and convert more objections into sales

It is critical that any company, no matter what its size, first clearly understands their value proposition in the marketplace.

1. Who are you selling to?
2. What problems are you solving and how?

With these answers in mind, you need to clearly understand the clients buying behaviour. Once you understand their buying behaviour, you can comfortably determine whether or not you should be using inside sales, outside sales, or some form of channel model. The companies that have been most successful determine when and how to properly allocate their telemarketing and telesales resources into the customers buying cycle.

The first step is to insure that in addition to having the skills necessary to be a successful telemarketer, you also have the personality, internal drive and mindset needed. As long as you believe in the product or service you are selling, you will be able to succeed in selling over the telephone.

It is important to understand that not everyone is cut out to be a telemarketer or even a salesperson. If you wind up in a job that you are not suited for within a year you could get burned out and see a drastic reduction in your productivity because you are unhappy. Every business can benefit from telemarketing, this opens up a wide range of opportunities for telesales professionals.

As an on the road or mobile salesperson, you would visit prospects one at a time, you would engage in an in-person meeting with each prospect at the prospects place of business. Although this sales method has an effective Closed Won ratio, it is also time consuming and ineffective for generating Sales Volume. It is even less effective expecting prospects to walk into your place of business asking to buy something.

In less time than just one in-person sales meeting, telemarketers reach dozens of potential prospects, using basic outbound telemarketing efforts. By making call-after-call you can speak with more than one hundred decision makers in an eight (8) hour period. This gives you unlimited potential and the ability to generate more than 30 appointments per day and depending on the ticket item (the purchase price) you are selling, potentially close dozens of actual sales. As a telemarketer it is vital that you do not get distracted in the Contact Centre environment as the numbers game is your main advantage over all other marketing activities and sales companies.

Skilled telemarketers prefer the term warm calling because before they even pick up the telephone, they make every effort to investigate the people or companies (COMPANY NAME/INDUSTRY TYPE) they are about to call.

Without thinking for more than a second or two, you should be able to state that the primary objective of your telemarketing efforts is to increase sales and ultimately boost profits. What are some of your other objectives as a telemarketer? As you answer this question, remember to think beyond your own needs and to once again consider the needs of your prospects.

Before you begin your telemarketing efforts, it is important to understand exactly what you are trying to accomplish and how you plan to achieve those objectives.

1. Who are you calling?
2. What are you going to say?
3. How will you say it?
4. What do you want the immediate outcome of each phone call to be?
5. What do you want the long-term benefits of your telemarketing efforts to be?

Part of your preparation should include creating a criteria and checklist for every call. List your primary and unique selling points, important notes and generate a script of what you plan to say.

As the telemarketer, you should always be excited to be making each call, because you are potentially doing the prospect a favour and/or solving a problem he or she has. You have a product/service that you know will somehow benefit each person you are calling. Every call you make could have a positive impact on the prospect because you are filling a need or want you know already exists This is the mindset you will want to adopt.

As you prepare the general sales message you want to convey through your telemarketing efforts make sure you understand one thing: Your prospect is looking for a benefit! Whether you are telemarketing to an individual or to a company, you must understand that the person on the other end of the phone is always looking to:

1. Save money
2. Increase profits
3. Lower costs
4. Address some other concern or issue

If you accept this as a universal fact, you can begin to develop a sales message so that it addresses the primary goals of your prospects. Before you begin to discuss what your company can offer to the prospects you are calling, or even make intelligent recommendations, you must understand at least the basics of who your potential client is and what business he or she is in.

Before picking up the phone know the answers to the following questions;

1. What business is your prospect in?
2. Who are your prospects competitors?
3. How does your prospect make money?
4. What are the challenges your prospect faces?
5. What is your prospect concerned about day after day?

1. Be knowledgeable about your company, your competition and your customer
2. Develop a customer-focused call strategy which includes a specific goal or purpose for the call
3. Be ready to project an enthusiastic, motivated and professional attitude
4. Pre-call planning provides you with an immediate advantage in the sales process. It enhances your credibility with the customer and promotes immediate rapport.
5. Planning is a “must do” in today’s competitive sales environment.

A successful telemarketer can quickly capture the attention of the person he or she is calling and prove to that person that what you are offering could be beneficial. With the right knowledge and skills, as a telesales professional, you can quickly break down the psychological barriers many people have developed against telemarketers and close sales. Using the telephone, not only will you save a tremendous amount of time, but your cost of sale will drop dramatically as you vastly improve your sales ratio (The number of Calls or Appointments made divided by the number of Sales closed).

From the sellers standpoint, telemarketing certainly makes sense in many sales situations, in addition from the customers perspective, it is also a time saver. After all, it is a lot easier for a busy person to allocate a few minutes for a telephone call than it is to block out time in his or her schedule for a time-consuming in-person meeting or sales presentation, unless this is what your call is to organise.

There are two Sales Processes when cold calling. The first relates to the Gatekeeper (secretary) and the second relates to the decision maker. Too often Lead Generators or Telemarketers assume that because a certain step, generally Rapport Building has been completed with the Gatekeeper that it mystically transfers from the Gatekeeper to the Decision Maker. This is completely illogical however a common practice.

You must always without fail use your full name when approaching a Gatekeeper. They are trained to ask questions and probe you to identify whether their employer would want to speak with you. Generally if a product can be tele-marketed it generally already is and quite frequently which causes several calls per day to the same company from multiple suppliers. There a few reasons why you need to use a full name.

I have found through 14 years of Telemarketing that when you use a full name it deflates the first question secretaries ask which interrupts the general pattern they are used to. Gatekeepers also follow a specific process and it is important to break it before they start with their standard questioning. In many cases the secretary will not probe any further as they do not like leaving their comfort zone or regular pattern. Once they are in question mode they don’t stop until they know everything. This does not mean that they will not ask further questions however it is a good start.

When you only use your first name a number of issues arise. How many John’s, Michael’s and Jenny’s are in the world. The history of Telemarketing as not been a good one, prospects/customers have been mislead and lied to and potentially lost money on information provided by telemaketers. There is zero credibility when only using your first name and zero chance of a prospect/customer tracking you down in a medium to large size business. There is an immediate defense mechanism in people when there is no reason to trust what a stranger is telling you.

You must never reveal where you are calling from in your opening statement and preferably not at all through the Gatekeeper Sales Process however if asked it is important not to alienate them so you should answer. Gatekeepers don’t always know the real objection of why their employer doesn’t wish to speak with you so you cannot overcome the secretary’s reason for not putting you through. The employer has commonly instructed no calls of your nature should be put through. No secretary will risk their job simply based on your objection handlers. The best method of getting through is avoiding the objection in the first place.

You must also capture the secretary’s name and use it. Even though the secretary has given you their name it supports the familiarity you are portraying as they don’t know if you already had their name prior to them mentioning it.

When dealing with the Gatekeeper so many telemarketers and managers feel that the utmost professional approach is the way to go. My experience has taught me that this is rarely the case. You must mirror the customer and breakdown the professional side as if you come across as the professional the gatekeeper will mirror you and focus on their professionalism. This promotes the asking of questions and their process being followed to a tea which as demonstrated earlier in this document raises a number of issues i.e. finding out what your call is regarding.

When you are passionate about your service or product or the person who owns the service is listening to your call we generally go into professional mode and fail. The product or service has nothing to do with your conversation with the gatekeeper, getting past them determines if you are successful. You must always be polite and not unprofessional eg. Don’t use profanity or offensive tones and language.