Sales & Marketing Authority, Bestselling Author & Business Motivational Speaker

In today’s marketing world of high-powered ad campaigns and high-tech internet marketing, its easy to overlook to lowly telephone. However, this simple device is still the lifeline of most business, and its often the best way to communicate with current and future clients.

People respond much better to a phone call than they do to a lot of other sales devices. Not only is a phone call much more personalised than, say, an email or a Facebook wall post, but it gives you an opportunity to tailor your speech to what the customer wants to hear, and gives you an opportunity to overcome their objections.

However, as powerful a technique as the phone call is, it also provides you with considerably more opportunity to alienate your clients that you get with most other sales techniques. Follow these three techniques to optimise your results when calling clients over the phone.

Bypass the Guards

As they say in sales, timing is everything. This is true in the most literal sense when you’re dealing with telephone marketing. The time of the day that you call can make or break you chances of success.

If you are calling a new client while they’re at work, you run the risk of getting stopped by gatekeepers, particularly if they’re a busy professional or manager. Gatekeepers are the secretaries and administrative personnel who surround your potential client or partner, and insist on taking a message. Bypass them by calling after before 9 am or after 5 pm. They’ll have gone home, leaving your client to take calls for themself.

Avoid Calling Your Clients at Home

Lastly, you run a risky gambit by calling people at home after work. People’s schedules vary widely, and you can never be sure that you’re calling at an appropriate time when you reach someone at home during the week. Calling a client during dinner or while they’re unwinding later is one sure fire to ruin the relationship. Unless it’s an emergency, save it for the daytime or the weekend.

Always Smile

Its sounds silly, but make sure that you’re happy while you’re talking to your clients. You can project confidence and enthusiasm through the telephone, and a lot of this is controlled by whether you’re smiling and thinking enthusiastically about building the relationship or selling your product.

On this same note, make sure to sound professional. Even more so than in face-to-face conversation, you can’t rely on pauses like “um” and “uh” to break up your sentences in a telephone call, and you must remember to be polite, and fill your speech with “thank you” and other words of consideration.

By following these few simple tips, you can improve your existing client relationships, and build new ones, over the telephone.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

Last week I talked about face-to-face sales techniques. The elevator pitch is a perfect example of how you can benefit from powerful face-to-face sales techniques no matter what industry you’re in.

While the elevator pitch isn’t actually used in elevators (although it could be), the name alludes to the fact that it should ideally take about the same amount of time as a typical elevator ride.

The basic idea of the elevator pitch is to give potential customers an idea of what your business does, why it does it better than your competitors, and how you can translate your past successes into future benefits for them.

Keep it Updated

It’s essential to keep your elevator pitch updated as your business changes, and as your role within your business changes. You wouldn’t air the same commercials year in and year out, would you? Neither should you use the same sales pitch to clients from year to year.

Related to this is the importance of tailoring your speech to different groups of customers. While one subset of customers may care more about the potential cost savings afforded by your product or service, another group may be much more concerned with effectiveness, quick delivery, or any other aspect of your business. Stress the parts of your business that are most likely to appeal to the customer you are currently pitching to.

Nail the Delivery

Like with any kind of face-to-face sales, the key to your elevator pitch is in the delivery. You only really have one chance to delivery your pitch perfectly, which means that you have to understand your customer and understand what they are looking for.

Even more importantly, you have to make your pitch relevant and exciting. Open with an appeal to emotion, with a surprising statistic, or with anything that will catch your potential client’s attention and get him engaged. Once you’ve done this, you  can move into statistics, or the nuts and bolts of what benefits they stand to gain by using your product or service.

Above all, be confident. If you aren’t 110% sure of your product, then nobody else will be either.

Keep your elevator pitch relevant and updated, and when you get a chance to use, make sure that your delivery is perfect. In this way, you can make sure that when you get a chance to speak with a potential customer, you can bring them in every time.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

How many times have you walked into a store to look for help only to be met by some gum-smacking teenager with a sourpuss look on his face. It’s almost as if you’re interrupting his day by asking him to do his job. He’s unenthusiastic, sullen, and simply doesn’t care.

Are you the same way about your job? Considering the economy I can’t say that I’d blame you if you felt this way every once in a blue moon but even if you do you can’t let the way you really feel shine through. You need to dig deep and find the enthusiasm you once felt towards your job and the products you sell.

Why?

Because you’re not a very good liar. None of us are. Our disdain – our lack of belief, our lack of commitment – shows on our faces and can be heard in our voices. You might try to appear enthusiastic on a bad day but your facial expressions and overall body language will give it away. You just don’t care about what you’re doing so why should your prospects?

Take a step back and consider what you look like when you speak to others. Practice speaking to yourself in the mirror (especially when you don’t feel like it) so that you can learn how to alter your outward appearance. Practice makes perfect and if you keep practicing it won’t matter if you’re upset, tired, or even sick on the day of your next presentation – you’ll still appear as if you really, truly care.

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker

Today we’re going to explore the last major part of the body involved in reading body language – the legs.

Reading body language based soley on the activity of the legs is difficult – often impossible. In most cases you have to consider the activity in the legs along with other signals such as the arms and torso or the face.

Start by looking at the legs alone, though. If the person you are speaking to is bouncing or fidgeting with his legs he is conveying some sort of negative emotion. Leg fidgeting usually signals that an individual is feeling some type of anxiety or sense of uncertainty.

A person who fidgets his legs and crosses his arms is sending a very distinct message. He has closed himself off from you. He’s uncomfortable, uninterested, or angry.

If you notice a person fidgeting or closing himself of you’ll need to take a moment to figure out what went wrong. Does your prospect or client have an unanswered question? Did something about your presentation make him uncomfortable?

Take the time to STOP and ask them what they think. Most people are more likely to tell you how they feel after being asked than they are to stop and tell you on their own.

Being able to effectively observe a person’s body language isn’t something you’re going to be able to do overnight. It’ll take practice but, in the end, the results will be well worth the studying effort. Keep working at it and you’ll be suprised at how much you can read into people as you make your future presentations.

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker