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

Do you feel like you’re hitting your head against a brick wall when you make hundreds of cold calls each day?

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Best

Sean

Sean McPheat
Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

Yup – we’re back to cold calling. I know exactly why you hate it so much. It’s the introduction – breaking the ice – that makes things rough. You don’t really want to make the call and the person on the other end really doesn’t want to listen to you.

So what do you need to do in order to a) make your life easier and b) keep your potential prospect on the phone? Try doing the following right at the beginning of each call:

1. Let your prospect know exactly how much time you need – 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes. Whatever it is – be true to your word.
2. Make sure your prospect knows why you’re calling – to set up an appointment review something, provide information, or to make a sale.
3. Tell your prospect why he should stay on the phone. Relate your call to something he is familiar with – a previous phone conversation you’ve had or an informational package you mailed the week before.

Getting your clients to relate to your call is paramount. The sooner you can do so the more likely it is they’ll be willing to stay on the phone and hear what you have to say. Are they too busy to talk? Set up a better time to call back. Keep your phone calls quick and to the point. Doing so will ensure you don’t waste the valuable time of your prospects – or your own!

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker

Trust me when I say I know how difficult it is to sit down at your desk on a Monday morning, pick up the phone, and start making phone calls. I’d like to help you get started this week by giving you an idea you can use to motivate yourself.

I want you to go to your filing cabinet (or drawer, or crate under your desk – whatever you use) and pull out the files of your biggest and best clients. Place them on your desk in a spot where they’ll be out of your way while still remaining in your line of sight as you make phone calls.

Seeing the files of your best clients as you make calls will actually motivate you subconsciously. Seeing those files will give you the drive to continue dialing that phone until you reach a prospect that has the potential to be your next big client.

Maintain that focus and you won’t lose your momentum after the first few unsuccessful calls.

PS – The only drawback to this technique is that you might think of something you want to do for the client you’ve been looking at throughout your calls. Resist the urge to stop your calling in order to do something. Make a note and put it to the side for later on!

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker