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

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

Make or Break

Never forget that, more than any other type of sales, face to face selling is a make or break opportunity. People are busy, they have short attention spans, and typically they aren’t very interested in what you’re selling, at least initially. Which is all the more reason that it is absolutely essential to open strong and close quickly.

Capture Their Attention

Once you get the first few seconds of someone’s attention, you can easily build from there. But getting the first few seconds is the tough part – how do you get someone to take a break from their busy life and listen to what you have to say? By making a creating appeal to their emotions, or by offering them a deal! Even the busiest among us are always looking for a way to save a couple of quid, so give them a chance to do just that.

Create Urgency

Along with being make-or-break, face to face selling needs to move along quickly. As opposed to internet-based sales, where you bring in your customer slowly with free information before offering them an opportunity to buy, face-to-face sales need to close quickly.

If your customer walks away without making a purchase, you will likely never hear from them again. So build urgency in whatever manner you can. Stress that there is only a limited amount of your product left, or that the offer you’re giving them will not be good forever.

However, here you must be careful to steer away from hackneyed phrases like “limited time offer,” and “only available for a short time.” People are so accustomed to these phrases being thrown around that they won’t believe you even if you’re telling the truth, and you’ll damage your credibility by looking like a pushy, amateur, salesman.

In today’s age of faceless promotion and internet marketing, face-to-face sales are more effective than ever. However, the key to effective in-person selling is understanding that your customers are busy, making a powerful appeal, giving them an offer, creating urgency, and closing deal without coming off as pushy or annoying. Sounds like a tall order, but the only way to get better at it is by practising.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

Realistically speaking, people want to believe they are helping themselves. Throughout the course of your meetings and phone calls you should have been gaining a better understanding of the troubles your potential client is having in his business. When he attempts to negotiate price, you should be prepared with a better response – one that does not damage your bottom line but does increase the value of your product to your client.

What does this mean to you in the long run? It means you’ll have a happier client, a happier wallet, and you’ll be able to remain consistent when it comes to the way you price your products and services – the latter being the most important. Always remember that your products are priced properly at the start for a reason. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise. Instead, help them to find added benefit.

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker

When you go on a sales call you should NOT walk in prepared to negotiate on your price. Don’t even consider it before the meeting.

It is, of course, ok to consider it later on if it becomes absolutely necessary to making the sale but here’s the problem. The average salesman, upon deciding in advance to lower his price, will actually do so at some point during the meeting whether he is really pressed to do so or not. He already has the lower price in mind and he thinks it’ll drive the sale. Wrong.

The product you are offering is solid and valuable. Why do you need to discount it? No reason? I didn’t think so.

Besides, if you discount your products every time you make a sale you will end up taking away from your own commissions. Surprised by that? Don’t be. Did you really think your employer would want to give the discount out of his portion of the profit?

Negotiation is a great tool – when it’s appropriate. Be prepared to negotiate on other points (services, accomodations, etc) but don’t make a decreased price part of your thought process. Doing so will only hurt your bottom line.

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker

Follow these 9 rules and you’re guaranteed to make a more profitable sale:

1. Always aim to get more from your customer than you expect me might agree to. You’ll be surprised at what people will agree to if they’re presented with the opportunity. Not presenting additional options will only limit your sales;
2. Avoid price crumbling. Don’t just lower your price because your prospect complains that it is too high. You need to believe in the value of your product and if you’re too quick to lower your price your customer will wonder if your product is even worth paying for;
3. Don’t give away your concessions; and
4. Don’t minimize the value of the concessions held by your prospect;
5. Be willing to negotiate the variables (which, if you followed yesterday’s plan, you have identified in advance);
6. Be a bit miserly. Don’t give away huge discounts right off the top. As mentioned before, you need to believe in the value of your product. Avoid making price cuts as much as possible. If you do make a major price cut you should be cutting services and benefits as well.
7. Be conscious of timelines and make sure you set deadlines. Don’t let a prospect drag the decision making process out forever. Set a deadline and let him know that discounted prices won’t be available if he doesn’t make a decision by that time.
8. Visualise the big picture in advance. Can you see the sale successfully closing? Use that visualisation to encourage yourself as you negotiate your final agreement.
9. Be conscious of your own weaknesses. Is there a part of the sales process you aren’t very skilled at? Seek out the additional training you need OR partner with someone who can help you out in the areas in which you need it.

Let’s face it. If you’re in sales your ultimate goal is to make a profit so that you can stay in business, pay your bills, and support your family. You can’t negotiate away every penny of commission you might have earned just to make a prospect happy. If he’s not willing to pay for your products or services in the beginning, he’s not likely to be a very reliable client later on down the line.

Don’t despair if the negotiation process doesn’t go as well as you think it should have. In some cases, you’re better off moving on to someone who cares enough about his business to pay for the services he needs!

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker

Before you head out to your meeting, take the time to consider the following strategies and tips:

• Prepare for and assess the objectives – your objectives in presenting and the objectives the decisio maker wishes to achieve by listening to you. Do you both have similar goals?
• Decide for yourself in which areas you are willing to be a bit flexible when it comes to the development of a contract or long-term business plan.
• Plan your approach in advance and be prepared to follow a relatively set sequence of events.
• Take the time to discuss your position with your prospect. You may both have different positions or issues but if you take the time to work through them you may find yourselves on common ground.
• Create a positive work environment. Don’t lock yourselves up in a small office for hours on end. Make it a lunch or dinner meeting or find some other welcoming yet neutral ground from which to work.
• Listen very carefully to everything your prospect says and be prepared to question anything and everything you don’t understand.
• Make your proposal and specify what you want or expect.
• Compromise, if necessary. Make sure that any compromise results in a win/win situation for both parties.
• You may need to bargain in order to come to a compromise. Ask for the things you want and be prepared to modify your expectations if need be.
• Never concede without a fair trade.

These negotiation tips will apply whether you’re the salesmen or the prospect. Learn to apply them in all areas of your life and you’ll be even better prepared when faced with any type of negotiation – whether in sales or not.

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker

Simply put, the more assertive you are the better your chances of making a sale.

You have two options. You can:

• Ask for a sale.
• Not ask for the sale.

Which do you think would be more effective? (This is not a trick question).

According to Andrew Gibbons there are two main principles to assertion. The first says that you won’t get things that you don’t ask for. The second says that people who ask for things tend to get alot.

These principles definitely apply to your sales tactics.

I don’t care how flashy your presentation is, how well prepared you are before you step into a meeting, or how great your product is. Your meeting is nothing but a waste of time if you don’t come right out in the end and ask for the sale.

So take a few moments today and think about your most recent sales presentations? Do you leave your card and hope your prospect will follow up with you? Or do you ask for the sale – either in the meeting or in your follow-up call?

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker

First, begin your presentation with your vision of the end in mind. You’d like your prospect to welcome you warmly, be impressed by what you have to offer, ask valid questions, and make a purchase. Keep this positive image in mind as you proceed.

Second, make sure your prospect is as prepared for your meeting as you are. Don’t spring surprising questions that leave him scrambling for information. Ask questions in advance if you need to know a bit more about the company you’re dealing with. Let your client know you want to tailor your presentation and proposal to their specific needs.

Next, find a way to align yourself with the company’s decision makers. Let them know you understand exactly what they need and that you’re there to serve their best interests. Show them how your product aims to achieve that goal.

Finally, send a positive message with your presentation. Make sure you’re as organised as possible so that your clients aren’t confused about the differences between what you’re saying and how you act. No one wants to make a purchase from an unprofessional salesperson.

Keeping these four tips in mind will put you in a position of strength when it comes time to negotiate prices, quantities, and need. Maintain control and you’ll look like a hero in the end!

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker