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

As a general rule, creating interest in your product is among the most surefire ways to drive an increase in traffic, and to ultimately drive an increase in sales. Being interested means showing that you care about your customers, and making every possible effort to engage them and please them.

Be Interesting

While it’s never been easier than it is today to create an interesting product, and to generated natural interest around the product, there’s also never been nearly as much competition as there is now.

YouTube is the perfect example – while the popular video-sharing site has made possible the previously unthinkable idea of creating and distributing a video advertisement with no cost associated except the time that it takes you to product it, it has also driven allowed your competitors access to the exact same set of tools.

The key to creating buzz is indirect advertising. In this age where one can access nearly everything they want, totally free of charge, nobody wants to watch an advert. Instead, create a funny or informative video or article, and just include a link to your site. If you can be interesting enough that people share the article, then you be sure to have some of the excess interest spill over onto your website.

Be Interested

However, it’s not sufficient to just be interesting. You must also be interested in your customers. Thanks to the rise of the internet, its now possible to do this better than you ever could before.

Set up a blog and a Facebook fan page where you can see what your customers are saying, and where you can respond to them directly. Modify your marketing efforts to more accurately target your customers, and change your products if your customers are looking for something different.

The rule of being interested also applies to competitors within your industry. Read their adverts, both online and off, to see what they are doing, who they are targeting, and how they are doing it. Read the blogs of industry leaders, comment on them, and share their insights via your Facebook page.

By showing interest in your industry, you’ll not only learn more valuable information, but you’ll ultimately draw more attention to your own site, and your own products. And as we all know – more attention means more sales.

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

Click on the image to download  the cheat sheet! 

All the best 

Sean 

Sean McPheat 

Sales Copy Cheat Sheet

Afterall, what is a thought? It’s a response to a question. Is it? (There you go, two more questions!)

The questions that you ask your prospective clients can make or break the deal.

But I get asked all the time about open and closed questions. Which are best etc

To me, you can ask open or closed! It doesn’t really matter as long as your questions do one of three things.

Your questions should either:

MOVE THE SALE FORWARD

or

DEVELOP TRUST

or

DEVELOP THE RELATIONSHIP

Give yourself permission to ask a closed question ok? (See, that’s a closed question!)

In terms of MOVING THE SALE FORWARD these are the fact find questions, the benefits and pain questions, finding the hotspots of the prospect and those questions that move the sale to the next stage.

In terms of DEVELOPING TRUST questions these can be questions around what’s important in selecting a supplier, anything related to what you have done in the past, what questions can you ask to make you the safe bet?

In terms of DEVELOPING THE RELATIONSHIP these questions can be on a business or personal level. These are not cheesey “Are those photos of your kids, they’re beautiful” questions – yuk! Instead, how can you help them further? How can you demonstrate that you are a partner? A trusted advisor? Instead of a commodity broker like most of the sales people out there.

Ok, so work on your questions and remember they need to establish an end goal.

Happy selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker - Internet Marketing Consultant 

This video from Amercian Psycho really makes me laugh as a team of execs try to impress one another with their business cards!

It does have a couple of hidden truths though!

Some of the sales people I come across dress to impress their fellow sales colleagues or the girl on reception rather than dressing to impress their client. If your client is quiet and reserved and you go in with a loud tie and power dressed to the hilt you may find it difficult to connect with them. It may impress the boys in the office but not this sales savvy buyer!

Same goes with your business card too! LOL

So dress to impress your client and not anyone else (and that inclues you too!)

Happy Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing and Internet Marketing Consultant

Have you taken the time to review your current book of business to determine which clients you’re going to get rid of this year?

Yup. I said it. Which ones are you going to fire?

The truth of the matter is this. At least 10%, if not more, of your book of business is not profitable. If you’re like everyone else in sales, you probably have a handful of small clients who call you every other day demanding your attention, sucking your customer service team dry. It costs you more money to service their accounts than you’re actually making. Maybe they’re slow pay accounts that can never seem to keep up with their bills but still demand your time.

But how do you fire a customer? It’s simple.

Raise their prices.

They’ll respond in one of two ways. They’ll accept the price increase (thus becoming profitable) or take their business elsewhere (in which case you won’t be upset anyway).

Make sure you draw clear customer service lines when you make those price increases, too. Clarify exactly what your clients should expect to receive and make sure they understand that additional services beyond their contract will come at additional cost.

Don’t be afraid of getting rid of unprofitable clients. Lightening your load will actually relieve a lot of pressure and will give you the time and energy you need to chase after more profitable accounts.

Good luck!

All the best

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker – Sales Expert

If you have to ask yourself that question than you have some serious work to do before you can go out and begin selling your products or services. A product without a unique selling point is – well – just another face in a sea of products.

A unique selling point, also sometimes referred to simply as a USP or unique sales proposition, is something that sets your product apart from the crowd. It makes your product special. It makes your product seem better than the ones put out by your competitors.

Here are some examples of unique selling points:

• Your product is of the same quality but has a significantly lower price tag than the ones sold by your competitors.
• You are able to produce a smaller (or larger, depending on the product) version of the product, making it easier or more advantageous.
• Your product might have extra features or functions that your competitors are not able to offer.
• You may have the ability to give your customers a wider variety of aesthetic options (color, etc).

These things may not all seem significant but when a consumer is looking for the “perfect product” to add to his collection they are all things he’ll consider. Knowing what your unique selling points are will enable you to target specific audiences and, in turn, increase the liklihood of making a sale.

Take the time to learn about your products. Otherwise, you’ll simply be grasping for straws!

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker

Which one are you going to purchase?

If I were you, I’d buy the box of widgets offering 2 for the price of 1 and an extra free storage container. That’s great for you as the consumer, but how does your choice impact the bottom line of the widget manufacturer?

No matter how you spin the tale, the reality is that it costs money to give things away. You may be branding yourself as the company willing to “give” but are you really going to make a profit or keep that customer when the “free stuff” is no longer offered? Or will they then move onto the next manufacturer offering a bigger box at a lower price?

The theory applies no matter what type of service or product you are selling. Many salesmen tend to add additional products, services, or “perks” when they see their prospects hesitate. They think that throwing additional services into the package will encourage the prospect to buy.

Well, they’re right.

But what they don’t realise is that the more they give away for free the less they’re actually earning.

Make sure you are listening to your prospects and getting a good understanding of the reasons they are hesitating. Asking the right questions may give you the power to overcome an objection without destroying your bottom line.

Think about it.

Sean

Sales Expert - Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker