Selling is not an easy job. Your call center employees don’t only need to say the right things; they also need to be persuasive to close as many sales opportunities as possible.
As a business owner, do you wish you could do more to build up their confidence in selling? Here are four training techniques to help your call center employees be better salespeople.
Improving their knowledge of your company’s offerings
One of the biggest mistakes in sales training is how product knowledge seems to be underestimated. The truth is, your call center employees need to be the experts in your company’s offerings so they can answer any possible questions your customers will ask.
Thus, your training techniques must include ample time for them to learn the ins and outs of your products and services. In turn, they will gain more confidence in carrying a sales conversation.
Sell the benefits rather than the features
Product knowledge is just half of the story. To become better salespeople, your call center employees must learn how to position features of your products or services in a way that encourages purchasing interest. In short, they need to know how to sell the benefits of what you offer. That’s what is called features versus benefits.
While a feature describes what your offering can do, a benefit is about connecting with the needs of your buyers. For example, instead of saying that a camera has X amount of gigabytes of memory, sell that it can store over a thousand pictures of their most important memories. In your training, encourage them to come up with a benefit for each of the features of your offerings.
Handling objections
Many call center employees, especially those without any sales experience, would not like selling because of rejection. However, rejection is part of the game. Not every pitch can convert into a sale. Therefore, train them to have a positive, winning mindset. Additionally, teach them how to deal with people turning down their offer by learning how to handle objections.
You can do this by listing down all possible scenarios in which customers will decline the offer and write down good rebuttals to persuade them to change their minds.
Assumptively close the sale
Another effective training technique in helping your call center employees to be better salespeople is learning how to assumptively close. Assumptive close means that you assume your buyer is about to make a purchase.
Instead of asking, “Are you interested in our products?”, inquire, “How many units would you want us to ship to your address?” The assumptive close encourages buying signals and creates a sense of urgency in the sales pitch.