Don’t let your telesales reps give up, keep dialing the C-Level prospects until…

In a survey of 205 b2b marketers and a review of the results of thousands of telemarketing campaign records, TeleNet Marketing found that it took an average of 7 calls to connect with C-Level prospects and that it took up to 12 calls to C-Level contacts before daily call returns started to drop off.  The full survey results are presented on Marketing Sherpa, reference article 30060.

Recommendation:  Tell your reps the results are in the numbers.  And be sure that they are armed with targeted voicemail scripts which give the prospect a compelling reason to return the call.

When creating incentive plans, ask your sales people to identify what really motivates them

As a Sales Manager, are you spending a lot of cycles trying to identify the best compensation plan, the right incentives, the most motivating sales contests?  In his article, ‘Stimulate Your Staff With Questions’, Keith Rosen, The Executive Sales Coach TM, recommends that sales managers ask their sales reps to identify what motivates them.

Here are his suggested questions:

• What do you want in your career that you don’t currently have?
• What do you want to be doing that you aren’t currently doing?
• What are you doing now that you don’t want to be doing?
• What areas do you want to strengthen, improve, or develop?
• What is most important to you in your life/career? What does a successful career/life look like?
• What is the legacy you want to leave behind when you are gone?
• What are the three most important things you would like to accomplish right now?
• What is your plan of action to achieve those goals?
• What do you need that is missing and which prevents you from reaching these goals?
• How can I best support you to achieve these goals? (Uncover how each employee wants to be managed and supported.)

Outside motivators are good, internal motivation is better.

3 Questions to ask before you select a Tele Training Partner

Effective training is a key component to successfully teleselling and teleservicing and there are many companies who offer sales and service training.

Here are 3 questions to ask before you select a Tele Training partner:

1) Is this training company the right match for my business?
Is this company expert in delivering Telephone skills training?
and
Does this company have customers that:
a) sell to the same sized companies
b) and target the same level of decision makers

2) Is this company’s training offering repeatable?
The best telephone skills training programs are those that deliver training in modules.  Once you complete the training, you can follow up with training in key focus areas. Be sure to select a program that is easy to deliver frequently, either by engaging an outside trainer or by purchasing access to modules that you can use as needed.

3) What do I need to do now to prepare for reinforcing the skills and techniques my team learns?
Plan ahead for what follows the training.  Commit to reinforcing the telesales skills and techniques. Review this requirement with the trainer you select and establish reinforcement and retraining plan before the training starts.  Build this into your plan and your training budget.

Are your Telesales Representatives using out-of-date questions?

An updated approach to sales questions provides updated sales results

Check in with your Telesales team, make sure they have eliminated ‘old style’ sales questions from their sales conversations with prospects as well as customers.

In his article Sales Training: The Power of Questions, Kelley Robertson points out that the old style line of questioning many sales representatives are trained to use do not advance the sales conversation and often work against the sales representative.  Can’t you see the prospect rolling his/her eyes when asked the question ‘If I could save you money, would you be interested...?’

His advice?

1. Determine your key objective.
2. Consider the person you will be speaking with.
3. Use “what” questions.

Managing the sales calls with well tuned questioning techniques and open ended questions, will result in a deeper knowledge of your company’s customers and prospects.  And a deeper knowledge will enable your Telesales people to present solutions that appeal to the customer’s needs.

Using Management Checklists Points Out Important Focus Areas

There are so many moving parts to Customer Service and Telesales organizations that it is good to work with some standard checklists.  www.justsell.com has a number of good ones that can be used as is or customized to an organization.  Check out the Sales Evaluation.  It is designed as a self-evaluation tool for sales reps but could easily be used by managers.  The Customer Service Checklist is a good, basic start for a new Customer Care department.