"Sometimes prospects do have legitimate reasons for asking you to call back at a later date. And that's okay. If a prospect has a legitimate reason, then by all means call them back when they have asked you to call back."
— Wendy Weiss, Cold Calling Results
Hire the top-notch individuals
The first and foremost thing you need to consider before using any closing sales technique. The first issue must establish your hiring policy, and it’s better to hire the best person for the job. There are always two outcomes when you're hiring new agents. Your budget is either limited or allowed to cover expenses on an experienced agent.
With a limited budget, you have a small room to hire top-notch individuals. However, try to find the most motivated person that is eager to work in a call center for a long period.
In the case you have a budget devoted to costly agents, never start guessing about the fee you need to pay. Instead of this, forecast the impact of employing and maintaining a highly proficient staff in the future. The more proficiency your agents demonstrate, the more revenue you will generate, despite the high salaries.
As an executive, you can discuss this issue with your accountants for the rule confirmation: the more proficient the agent – the higher the ROI. Always think about the retention of agents, because retention of staff is money and time economical.
High-leveled individuals rarely quit their job if they are satisfied. And it is better to have a small group of professionals working with you constantly than a big number of individuals ready to quick at the first opportunity. The ultimate tactic for money generating is to use both experienced agents and telemarketing closing tips. Let’s find out the ways.
Where is a starving crowd?
You know, whatever you sell, there are always customers for your product or service. Customers with a genuine interest will always purchase something from you. The only requirement is you need to call the right people that are interested in your offer. These days, there are two proven ways to achieve these valuable customers.
The first way is to buy a list of customers from a list broker. The only flaw of the method is that the relevant lists of customers are expensive and rare. Most brokers cheat their customers by selling irrelevant or obsolete lists without any shadow of a doubt.
However, if you find a really great list broker that constantly furnishes you with relevant lists, try to make this person your best friend. The impact will be so great you will owe a dinner to the person for the rest of your life.
On the other hand, there is no better list than your own list of customers. These are customers, which left their names and addresses to your company.
The ultimate strategy is to call, both to brokers and your lists of customers.
Intelligence
Your agents are more effective when armed with the full pack of information about prospects and customers. The more information they have about a prospective customer, the more sales they’ll close.
Nowadays, there is no necessity to keep information about each customer on paper. The modern call center’s software has a CRM system that is constantly updated and gives historical data about each customer, their purchasing activity, comments, etc.
Sometimes, even small details about their personal or purchasing activity give vital ideas for a sales pitch. For instance, these are the most relevant customer’s activities you should notice:
- The overall amount of money they have spent with a company;
- Type of a product and service they have ordered;
- The frequency of purchasing of a particular product or service;
- Amount of money customer spent per sale;
- The recently purchased product or service.
With this data, you will forecast their potential business relationships with your company.
Use your chance
Asking for the order of a product or service is a personal act. Show your best in presenting, describing, and persuading. Every prospect and customer will give you one opportunity to sell them something during a call. Never lose the opportunity to ask for action every time you interact with a customer.
Make a call personal and close a sale
Based on the customer's data, you need to make every call personal. And there are plenty of options at your fingertips to do it. Every time you speak with a customer, use their first or second name. Thus customers will think: “I have value for this company, and I’m not just another customer”.
Nail the first seconds
The first four seconds of a conversation have supreme importance. The introduction and greeting are critical parts of a conversation that lets you either build the mood of trust or lose the opportunity.
Make calls in a logical sequence
Greetings, persuading, and closing must flow in a logical sequence. Agents make the frequent mistake of jumping to a sales pitch before any warming-up, delivering value, or sequence whatsoever.
Another type of agents nail the first seconds but has a lack of persuading efforts towards a sale. As a result, customers feel that the mood of trust is not established and deny an offer.
What the product is instead of what it does
Your product or service has a perceived value towards the improvement of the lives of customers. Most customers are familiar with the features of your product or service. Now, customers don't trust establishments, and they are interested in facts.
Use scripts
Nowadays, agents are pressed with a high calling volume to potential customers and vice versa. Moreover, each call is unique and requires creativity from agents.
When creativity is about to end, use a practical and effective tool to keep your agents in touch with a subject. Top-notch practical call scripts are written for both challenging and obvious calling assignments.
Work on your sales pitch
Your sales pitch isn’t a blueprint for closing all imaginable sales in the world. Frankly, the reason it works is that it hits customers in a particular market. Try to figure out new ideas when you sell different types of products and services to different audiences.
For instance, your audience is highly educated people that probably have a bachelor's degree or so. Always use the terminology that is common and appreciated by them. Excess creativity in interaction with a particular audience in your sales pitch may trigger a turn-off effect.
Remember that sales pitches for customers with a degree are always different than in conversations with farmers. The main purpose of agents is to make more sales and not to impress.
And the only proven way to find the winning words for customers is to keep in touch with them.
Read the magazines, which are popular among these customers. Arrange meetings, events, and interviews to understand how to influence them. Thus you’ll build a ground for ideas and sales pitches in future conversations. And your pitches will stand out from the crowd by generating a tremendous bundle of money.
Wise calling strategy
There are generally two ways to call customers. One of them is to reach the maximum number of customers in a minimum time, and the second is to achieve the best results during a conversation.
Rapid calling is used to cold base when the chances for picking up the phone are low. It's also useful when you have the goal to generate leads or build an image.
On the other hand, pressing time for a conversation with a customer you need to persuade to make a purchase is an unthinkable handcuff. Imagine you’re a door-to-door salesperson, and you have a limited time to talk with a potential customer.
There is even a single doubt about failure in this case because different people require a different time for persuasion. During hard sales conversations, agents must have enough time for a conversation with a customer.
Asking for an order
The precise close techniques work when you’re nearly at a close of a sale. Sometimes agents shy away from asking for an order in this situation, but they shouldn’t feel that way. If you've done all the job as a salesperson, you just have to ask for an order to close a sale.
Opinion counts
The phrase “in your opinion” has a magnitude of power for building a rapport with a customer. This phrase shows your intention to the life of a customer, not just a sale. At the end of a conversation, ask questions such as “In your opinion, will my products solve your issues?”.
A prospective customer will immediately reveal their intentions about your offer.
Good and bad rapport with a customer
It’s common to think that the more agents talk - the better. At some point, the more you tell – the more you sell. However, the reaction of customers is critical to success. A good sign of rapport is when customers talk a lot. It indicates that the mood of trust is established, and now is the time for asking for an order.
The bad sign is when silence prevails in conversation. That means a customer has no intention of listening and purchasing. He or she has a mound of objections to you as an agent first because you aren’t nailing the first seconds to build the rapport.
The solution is to ask open-ended questions to understand the actual state of mind of customers.
Sharp angle close
The interesting fact is that the more your product costs, the more benefits and proves customers wish to see. Let’s say your product costs 50$, and this is a sum of money that most customers can afford to spend without any deep research whatsoever.
But, if you request 500$ or more per purchase, you need real proof of benefits and ways to overcome objections. Here are the main objections all customers have:
- Why is this product superior to others?
- Why should I believe you?
- Why should I buy it now?
- Is the price fair?
- Is there real value for my life?
- Does this particular product or service make me reach in a sense of emotional or practical reason?
- Is there a discount?
- Is there free delivery or shipping?
If you answer with confidence on the objections listed above, you’ll nail 95% of sales. Keep reading.
Time to close the sale
This is the moment when a prospect or customer makes a decision about a purchase. When you compel your customer with facts, it’s up to them to make the next move or not. It’s better to make an order during a call. Because when a customer hangs up, there is no further control over the situation.
Moreover, if you don’t ask to make an order during a call, you bring a factor of delay. And the delay almost always means the death of a sale. The attention of prospective customers is spanning these days, and there are always chances your competitors take advantage unless you urge them to buy.
Thank you note calls
That's the technique that almost no company in the world uses to this day, and this is a huge tactical mistake. Customers feel abandoned once they make a purchase from a company and give their money. From the moment of purchase, no one calls or thanks them.
For instance, you've ordered a service from a carpet cleaner company and achieved great service. If afterward, you catch a thank you call from this company that will positively astonish you. The same with customers buying something from you. All customers want something more than a product or service, and that's ongoing relationships.
Customers value this kind of treatment and will reward you accordingly. Especially keep an eye on VIP customers that spend large sums of money with your company.
Thank you note calls are not only about present business relationships, yet for retention of customers. You know that keeping customers is much more profitable than achieving new ones. And this kind of call is a fair way to this goal.
Follow-up calls
You will be surprised, but sometimes customers don't buy anything from you, just because you aren't asking for it. With thank-you calls, it’s much easier to close sales through follow-up calls. Once a customer made a purchase, never forget about them. Make follow-up calls, with a frequency of one time a month.
Keeping strong business relationships and following up with customers could be even more profitable. Don’t you think that way?
Creating a healthy competition
Healthy competition inside a company is a great way to improve sales. The best agents achieve financial benefits and thus make others rethink their working strategy. During a healthy competition, it's easy to define the most productive agents and delegate them more responsibilities.
Monitor calls
Monitoring of calls is critical even if you have trained and experienced staff. If you have newbies in a company, it’s crucial to monitor their calls to give aid in a critical moment. And when you need to define the roots of success or failure in your call center, the tracking and monitoring activity must be on your agenda.
Reasonable working shift
The crucial thing with working time is that every agent can work a productively certain amount of hours per day. Experienced agents already know how many hours of work they can devote to their work.
And newbies are almost always mistaken about the hours they can take regularly and productively. However, both newbies and experienced agents must work a certain amount of hours to prevent burning out. The golden standard is a 9 working shift. It's both a healthy and productive workload for a call center.
Call from a local number
The local number has a really great advantage among all others. The first advantage is that a local number is familiar for an audience and builds the mood of curiosity from the beginning. The other advantage is that the higher the pick-up phone rate, the higher percentage of potential sales conversations and closing sales.
Ease the work of agents with technology
One of the most challenging activities in the world is to persuade people. And there has to be a way to eliminate all useless chores. The good news is that the software for a call center has the capacity to improve the productivity of agents and keep them energized.
The main idea of such software is to let agents talk and do everything else for them.
Use agentless features as well as real phone calls
It’s hard to satisfy all prospects and customers at a time with highly proficient phone calls. But here’s the solution. Use agentless solutions for those prospects and customers you can’t reach with your phone call. With the call center software, at your fingertips option using SMS, email, chatbot, messages, etc.
These agentless methods are proven ways for generating money without involving any agent whatsoever.
Homework
Make sure your agents have enough knowledge to carry conversations. The more intelligent your agents are, the more sales they will close. On this point, there are no excuses when agents are unaware of crucial information about the product or service.
Experts say that customers define the lack of knowledge and rapidly find mounds of objections. As a result, without homework, agents lose the edge to sell services profitably.
Improving performance and working on mistakes
Constant improvement of agents is a valuable part of money generation. All agents in a call center have to constantly improve their speech, sales pitches, avoiding objections, finding solutions, etc. Thus keep them more profitable and generate more money for the company.
Of course, mentorship over newbies is an inevitable routine for heads of call centers yet creates a lasting revenue velocity in the future.
An essential part of training is working on mistakes. Remember that the difference between successful companies and losers is the speed of solving mistakes.
However, one-by-one you need to define those mistakes and eliminate them from the work. Track and monitor calls of each agent to define mistakes they are frequently committing. Discuss this particular mistake with an agent and insist on training towards better performance.
All these techniques listed above are proven ways to close sales via phone. But remember that markets are changing, and your overall selling strategies should change accordingly.
Monitor your competitors
The most famous companies in the world always track their competitors. Frankly, they did it over the decades, and you should follow the same way.
You must know that sometimes your competitors have better ideas than you. They use new strategies, sales, revenue, agents, and so on and so forth. If your competitor achieves an advantage that skyrockets their sales, research them.
Valuable information for you
Dear owner of a small or mid-sized business, actually, we have not yet mentioned something that you need to know. And here is what it is. Call center software from Voiptime Cloud is not only for our successful partners such as Idea Bank, Dunapack Packaging, Before Hello, Thebigword Group, and others.
If it could work on the businesses that operated in a highly competitive market with high calling volumes, don’t you think it could help you too? Would you like to try this remarkable software? Would you like to make calls as well as you feel?
If so, here’s how you can use this amazing software without any risk at all. Simply go ahead and order Voiptime Cloud’s software. Then, as soon as we contact you and discuss the details, you’ll start your call center within 24 hours.
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Important – Guarantee: During the adaptation period that takes one month, when you start to work with us, the Voiptime Cloud team will provide a 100% money-free guide on how to use our software.
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