The activities of your sales team have an impact on the success of your business and many salespeople will make errors when they are prospecting over the phone which can lose you sales.
The trouble is that training and common practices are similar across many brands. Therefore, prospects are getting used to sales talk and zone out when they start hearing sales reps on the phone.
Your sales team need to take a different approach and make better sales calls. So, how can your sales team achieve this?
1. Start The Call the Right Way
First impressions count more than anything. If your sales team can’t give a good first impression, it will be their last. The typical beginning for any sales call is to ask how the prospect is. Just don’t ask.
Firstly, it is clichéd and doesn’t differentiate you from anyone else. Secondly, the prospect is unlikely to be honest with you. Thirdly, it signals that this is a sales call and the potential customer will likely consider that you don’t care about how they are – you are just looking for a sale.
Instead, get underneath the reason why the prospect is a potential client. Have they just won an award, been in the news for something amazing or perhaps they’ve recently visited a landing page? By doing your homework and starting a conversation that is more meaningful to the prospect, you can build trust more quickly.
2. Focus On The Client Needs Not the Product’s Features
If your sales team are trying to sell the product, then they have the wrong technique. No prospect is going to care about the features of your product – that is for others in your industry to be amazed by.
Instead, your sales team need to look at the challenges the prospect is experiencing and change their pitch to solve them with your product. This is how you make your product relevant to potential customers. Once they can see the value in your product, they’ll be more willing to listen to your sales rep and buy into your business’ offerings.
3. Talk Too Much
Too many inexperienced salespeople will talk during most of their calls which can bore your prospects out of a sale and place you at a disadvantage at follow-up calls.
If your sales team aren’t asking the important questions, then you will have no idea about the client, their challenges and resources.
At a very minimum you should be getting the answers to the following questions in any sales call:
- Who is the decision maker within the organisation?
- What is the key challenge to the business?
- How does this affect their daily work?
- What are they currently doing to solve it?
- What resources do they have to fix the problem?
If the potential client doesn’t have the financial resources to buy your product – your sales team is wasting their time and should move on to other prospects.
4. Not Following Through
There is a reason why there are salespeople who make large sums and others who don’t – they follow through. Times have changed in the past 20 years and no longer are prospects sold to on the first contact. Instead, 80% of sales can take between 5 and 12 interactions. However, most salespeople give up by the second call.
Put a system in place within your sales team where they keep in contact with the prospects over a longer period. You can find out the right time to get back in touch with a contact by analysing user behaviour. If the contact interacts with a piece of marketing (i.e. email, social media, website, etc.), you have a fair idea they are looking for a new solution.
Conclusion
If you want your business to grow, you must improve the performance of your sales team.
There are many behaviours and tips that can help your salespeople improve; you just need the leadership to guide them to a better way of selling to your target audience.
How do you improve the skills of your sales team? How do you introduce your business to a prospective client?
Let us know in the comments below.
