As each sales call is very individual and even one small detail can convince a prospect to end the conversation, you have to foresee all potential telemarketing problems which can happen during the telemarketing campaign.
One of the most important things regarding telemarketing campaigns and the cold calling success rate is phone call opening or in other words, the way you greet and catch client’s attention. So, let’s find out the worst ways to start the sales call and find the answer to the primary question: how to cold call effectively and what is the best way to start a sales call .
Let’s begin.
How does the sales call work?
Sales call as a concept is a conversation between a potential client - lead - and telemarketer, who can be either an outbound call center agent or a sales manager. In most cases, leads for telemarketing campaigns are generated via lead generation techniques, such as buying lead bases, generating leads through direct marketing or digital media marketing, or through targeted advertising campaigns. These leads are highly unlikely to know anything about your company, products, or other aspects of your business, and they can even have no need for those products, especially if you purchase “turnkey” lead bases from random sellers. Nonetheless, telemarketing is all about trial and error methods, so you still have to call all of your prospects, at least to keep your contact list qualified and clear for further work.
By the way, some beginners who are only acknowledging the telemarketing world think that the first cold call is about launching sales, but in 99,9% of cases, telemarketers don’t even try to sell something during first contact with the prospect. The first contact is just a way to build rapport with a client, build a kind of close communication and appoint a meeting - it doesn’t mean that this meeting has to be face-to-face as such meeting relates to field sales only, but it can be a conference call with involvement of higher sales managers, presentation call or something like that, where your sales reps will represent the benefits of the offer and overcome customer objections regarding the nature of the offer - price, features set, implementation, and so on. We don’t want to even mention the fact, that to reach out to the prospect you have to do at least 8 dialing attempts on average, and in some cases, even 25 calling attempts are too few.
So, in conclusion, a sales call is part of a bridge between client and prospect on the way to a future deal, but this is its beginning. Your main goal is to convince a prospect to agree to further communication, and it is a moment when the sales funnel starts working. All that is beyond that isn’t about our today’s topic, we are going to tell you how not to lose a potential prospect during your first contact.
The worst cold call openings for telemarketers
“Fake” pleasantries
First of all, we want to state that this fact is controversial and there are many discussions regarding that, but the fact remains the same - many people don’t love those pleasantries like “How is going?” or “How is your day?”. Some telemarketers go even further and start to use communication styles that can’t be defined as anything else but familiarity. This post states that such call openings as “How are you” and so on boost cold calling success rate, but there are two many factors that influence your success rate regarding the use of pleasantries, such as the nationality of your prospect and his or her cultural background. For some nations, such call opening can be acceptable, and for others, it sounds strange and unfitting situation - for instance, for Americans, it would be OK, but for English people it is weird.
Moreover, such pleasantries just sound disingenuous. It is hard to believe that even acquaintances ask such questions with a real wish to know how your day went, and much more difficult is to believe that a random person who calls with a clear purpose to sell something will even be interested in your personal life, mood, or your hobbies. And now let’s imagine an absurd, but possible situation - a prospect starts to describe his day and pushes a conversation into an absolutely different direction than needed. What can a salesman say on this occasion? “That’s all very interesting, but let’s move directly to a part where I offer you to buy some stuff?” That’s not the way it works, so the best option is to avoid such call openings, if not only you have a clear understanding that this will work.
Nonetheless, you can try to test one campaign with such call openings and compare it with other campaigns to see the difference in conversion rates. If you see that this cold calling method works for your lead base, you can use it and fear no telemarketing issues, but this doesn't mean it will work everywhere and for everyone - trial and error is the case.
Aggressive tries to sell here and now
What can make prospects mad? Your intolerance to their primary right to choose whether to buy your stuff or not. This is one of the most popular telemarketing problems many telemarketers keep causing even though there are numerous guides that say not to do that way.
What is meant by being aggressive during telemarketing calls? First of all, never push a prospect to make an immediate decision. It doesn’t matter whether you try to convince them to give an agreement to buy something or just appoint a new call, never put any pressure on your prospects. You are calling to have a pleasant conversation with bilateral respect, not to make prospects make any decisions against their own will. Moreover, who will ever want to buy from salesmen who don’t respect basic rules of conversation etiquette? Rhetorical questions with clear answers.
Lack of wish to listen
Do you know what is the best word to describe the nature of telemarketing? It is flexibility and adaptability. If your prospect during a sales call says “We don’t have such a budget”, this doesn’t always mean they don’t have such a budget, but this always means they don’t want to allocate such a budget, and your goal is either to convince them to find a compromise way out or if it is impossible to do so, you have to adapt your offer to meet current needs and their financial capabilities. To say the truth, your goal is to get the deal closed successfully, and it doesn’t mean you can’t try to find compromises, what’s more important is to find them everywhere where it is possible.
On the other hand, what makes telemarketing retains its position as the most effective technique of direct marketing and sales? First of all, it’s the personal touch provided by telemarketing that can’t be achieved if using other sales methods. This personal touch means you can learn your prospect deeper and understand their personal needs, preferences, communication style, and other essential characteristics which can be used for further progress of the sales process. How will you use all these benefits if you don’t listen to your prospects? Even customer objections can include some vital nuances you can use to turn the situation in your favor and a lack of active listening skills destroys the nature of telemarketing.
Talking too much banal stuff
What do people hate about telemarketers? Well, most of them sound the same. So, you answer the call, and on the other side of the phone line this old-gold story begins: “Hi, my name is Jessie/Jack/Laura from ABC company. Our company is the best-of-the-best, we have X years of experience in Y industry with A successful cases implemented, and we are now offering our new product X, which is highly beneficial because we design our products with the involvement of qualified specialists and we also do professional research to make sure our offerings will have the highest efficiency ever, ….” Doesn’t this sound familiar? And here is another example that everyone will notice: “Hi! My name is …, I work in XYZ company. Our company was founded in … year by ….” First of all, who will ever care about the names of the founders of your company or its history? There are so many businesses launching each year, and ever more businesses with a long history, but people don’t want to take extra history lessons from salesmen, especially in the case of the sales call. The history of your company or a bunch of sweety epithets like “leader on the market”, “trusted by X clients”, and “growing for X years” have nothing to do with the offer itself, and if the product doesn’t match the customer needs, company’s history will not help with that fact, so focus on dialogue, not a monologue, especially when it comes to monologue about senseless things.
Robotic communication and blind use of script
Call scripts are one of the most important tools in telemarketing efforts, especially when it comes to sales calls. First of all, a few sales specialists can perform without call scripts, and such people rarely work with cold bases. Secondly, a call script is the only way to avoid a human error - what will you do if you forget what to say after greeting a customer if there are no call scripts? Finally, call scripts are meant to help newbie sales reps and those who are just starting their career in sales avoid generating stupid telemarketing problems and doing cold calling mistakes.
Nonetheless, call scripts have their other side which is their main disadvantage - if sales reps communicate following the script only, they sound like voice robots. No one wants to purchase from a robotic agent, at least because this means that the company puts no effort into customer care and customer service personalization, which means that after purchasing a product such customers will have problems with getting needed assistance as the company doesn’t care about the service. Also, this harms trust and makes a negative impression, as it seems like the telemarketer just doesn’t care.
Following the script in pair with a lack of listening skills makes an impression that the salesman doesn’t even talk to a live person - it sounds like telemarketers talks to his own.
Use of closed questions
The basic part of a telemarketing call is open-ended questions which allow you to learn more about the prospect, his or her needs, and personality. Closed questions harm the call flow, at least because after each closed question, the telemarketer has to “restart” the conversation, and let us be honest, it sounds bad. To define the terms: closed questions are questions that can be answered as “yes” or “no” (or “I don’t know” in some cases). Such questions aren’t about dialogue, nor are they about a constructive discussion about customer needs and pain points. Yes, you can ask a few such questions, such as “Do you have time now to talk?” or “Am I talking to Mr.X?”, but never ask questions like “Would like to get an instrument to improve your lead management capabilities?”, because you will get “Yes, we’d like such an instrument if it can be beneficial for our company and help us grow further”. What do you earn from such a question? Surely, nothing. Ask open-ended questions, such as “Tell me please, what aspects of your lead management you consider important, and what aspects you would like to improve and in what way?”. Even if the prospect has some issues with clear defining of needs and problems, you will get his answer as a fundament for representation of your offer, like “Fantastic! Our solution can offer even faster growth of lead generation than you are expecting, and what’s even better is that you get an all-in-one lead management solution too, without paying for it. What would like your lead management solution to include if we talk about feature set?” - and that’s the way a sales call has to work properly.
Ask about challenges
This is a vital question - “What is your most vital challenge?” - but we still think it is not a good idea to ask it in every call. Cold calling techniques that really work rarely include this open-ended question as an example of a good cold calling question for lead qualification, but still, it is widely used. First of all, it is a classic B2B question, but have you ever wondered, how your prospect, who is an expert in an exact field, feels when a sales rep asks such a question? It is absolutely clear that if the biggest challenge isn’t still beaten, the prospect needs something more than a sales pitch and a few banal phrases from a salesman during a sales call. Secondly, this can make a cold call last forever - the definition of a “biggest challenge” can become a long story about problems, tries of the resolution, further issues, and so on. All these details are discussed on the stage when there is a clear understanding of a further successful deal and when the prospect knows that your offer can help with it, but if it can’t, what is the need to ask about the biggest challenges? They are called the biggest because they are the most difficult to resolve, and there is no magic want to solve them.
Conclusion
Talking to decision makers means not only overcoming common sales objections, but also avoiding aggressive sales tactics, doing proper sales prospecting, target customers based on their needs, and processing sales conversations as regular conversations, not as you-must-buy conversations. Sales teams often try to adopt popular sales tactics, but not every cold calling technique that is explained on the Internet is suitable for your sales team to use. Telemarketing issues happen exactly when you try to handle the vast majority of your leads based on your personal belief, not on actual data. A common mistake that leads to telemarketing issues is a bad conversation starter, and it can lose your valuable time (and time of your prospect) and ruin all the work. Productive conversations start only if you can listen to your interlocutor and take a deep dive into hise needs and preferences.
