Telesales is still a highly effective and highly profitable means for selling to customers. However, not everyone will be successful in using this method. You could be one of the few who thrives at telesales by using these four telesales tips that will always put you ahead!
What Is Telesales?
Telesales is the act of selling a product or service over the phone to existing and potential customers. It can be inbound and outbound, or a mixture of both. The overall goal of telesales is to produce a sale from potential customers and bring repeat sales from existing customers.
Why Is Telesales Key?
Telesales is to business as the heart is to the body. It keeps the business alive. It is crucial for generating potential customers, moving leads further down the sales pipeline, and creating sales. By calling existing and potential customers, agents can inform, advertise, and advocate for the company. In return, the company is able to make better decisions on who to contact, what methods/campaigns work, when to contact, etc.
In telesales, agents make many cold calls, meaning they make calls to contacts who have not inquired about the product/service or have not purchased from the company before. Cold calls are the most challenging way to produce a sale because the agent does not have information or knowledge about the customer's interest level.
The cold call, which is the first call, is going to be that contact's first experience with the company, so it must be a positive one. When telesales agents learn how to warm up a cold call, it is a game changer!
The Difference Between Telemarketing and Telesales
Telemarketing uses telesales and a direct marketing campaign to accomplish the goal. The goal of the telemarketing campaign could be to collect data, gather market research, generate leads, arrange appointments, advertise, or anything else the company deems necessary.
Telesales is the activity of communicating with existing customers or potential customers via telephone. The process of telesales also includes qualifying/vetting prospects, selling products, and advocating for the company.
The 4 Golden Telesales Tips
There are four tried and true telesales tips that will make a noticeable difference in your sales. All of which can be easily implemented into your office operations with the use of a power dialer. Utilizing a power dialer will multiply the effectiveness of these tips. So, without further ado, here are the 4 golden telesales tips!
#1 Research Your Audience
Every business has a target audience. Now, some businesses might have larger target audiences than others, but there are defined audiences for each company. Knowing who buys your product, why they buy, how they buy, and when they buy, will help the company understand how to market and who to market to.
Fast Fact:
- Only 37% of prospects feel that sales reps who had made calls to them delivered information relevant to their needs.
Understanding who your audience isn't is just as important as understanding who your audience is. Your sales team doesn’t want to waste time on prospects who aren’t interested or aren't ready to buy.
Investing time and money into getting to know your buyer better will bring more profit in the long run. Here are a few tips on how to research your telemarketing database:
- Analyze the current customer base and the competitors’ customer base.
- Identify age, gender, geographical location, household income, marital status, occupation, ethnic background, education level, and any other relevant information to narrow down the audience.
The more precise the data, the better the marketing and methods can be.
#2 Analyze Data Constantly
You might have a plan or a goal in mind of what you want to achieve. However, what does the data say? Is it achievable and if so, how? These are questions that can only be answered by looking at the data.
Data can say a lot about what tactics work and don’t work, what the industry is doing, when the time is right, and much more. Data does not lie. Therefore, knowing what the data says will help you make educated decisions and help you determine the outcome.
Examples of data that need to be analyzed:
- Calls made until the sale
- Duration of calls
- Calls made per day
- Returned calls from voicemails
- Response from marketing campaigns (each campaign)
- Social media activity for each platform
- Average customer spending within a time period
- Percentage of repeat customers and new customers
This list can be changed to suit your company's needs and can include other data necessary to your business, but it is suggested to keep the amount of data limited to a manageable amount.
It can be easy to overwhelm your staff with unnecessary data analysis, especially if your company doesn’t have the resources to do so. We recommend you apply no more than 10 criteria, but you will be able to determine what number works best for your team and resources.
#3 Know Your Goals
For every telemarketing campaign, there should be a goal. You have to aim at something, otherwise, your attention will be divided between everything, and nothing will get done or at least not done well.
The goal always includes finding an area where you or your team are weak in and developing it. Whether that be setting more appointments or running more effective campaigns, having these goals in place will give your business a competitive advantage.
Pro Tip: Use a strength, weakness, opportunity, and threats (SWOT) analysis to help you determine goals that you didn’t realize you needed to meet.
#4 Follow a Sales Script & Engage Your Prospect
Develop a sales script that will grab your targeted audience's attention and hold it. With each campaign your agents do, there needs to be a sales script to guide the conversation. The script needs to provide relevant information and enticing information, so the caller will want to buy or at the very least set a date for a follow-up call.
When creating the sales script for each campaign, think ‘what is in it for the customer?’ Will they get a discount if they buy now? Is there a limited-time sale?
Once you give that ‘hook’ to keep them interested, the agent can go into the sales pitch. The sales script should have information like:
- Who is calling (agent name)
- What the purpose of the call is
- How to call the agent/company back
- And, of course, the incentive to call back.
It's highly encouraged to say the incentive more than once, it reminds the caller that they either want to act fast or call back to claim the incentive.
Now that you know the basics, learn how you can transform a cold calling list into a sale.
Works Cited:
Porta, Mandy. "How To Define Your Target Market". Inc.Com, 2021, https://www.inc.com/guides/2010/06/defining-your-target-market.html.
Kenton, Will. "How SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, And Threat) Analysis Works". Investopedia, 2021, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/swot.asp.
McGovern, Michele. "43 Hard Cold Calling Statistics That Will Rock Your Sales World". Resourcefulselling, 2021, https://www.resourcefulselling.com/cold-calling-statistics/.
Jovic, Danica. "33 Cold Calling Statistics — Do Cold Calls Still Work?". Smallbizgenius, 2021, https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/cold-calling-statistics/#gref.
