If your call centre does outbound calls, getting customers to listen to your sales pitch is probably one of your greatest challenges. If a customer refuses to listen to a pitch, your agents won’t be able to achieve performance targets or make enough sales to sustain your company’s profits. Follow these tips to get customers to pay attention when your agents pitch products or services.
1. Tailor Your Offer
Pitching the same offer to everyone is not a good way to make sales. Instead, you must tailor your offers to specific audiences. A pitch that works for single women under the age of 30 probably won’t work for mothers in their mid-thirties. Create several pitches for different demographics so your agents always have the right pitch available during their calls.
2. Follow the Rules of Phone Etiquette
If agents don’t follow the rules of basic phone etiquette, there’s a good chance customers will hang up on them or refuse to listen to their pitches. When you hire new employees, make sure they go through telephone training before you let them make outbound calls. The training should address proper greetings, tone of voice, and other relevant issues.
3. Tweak Your Sales Script
If multiple agents report having trouble getting customers to listen to their pitches, your script might need some tweaking. Use focus groups or role playing to identify problems with the script. Then have your sales and marketing teams work together to make the necessary edits. The right script will make it easier for your agents to connect with customers.
4. Refer to Previous Call Notes
Your agents should be using call notes to document any problems they have with customer calls. Reviewing these notes can help you identify problems with your call scripts or the approach your agents are using to make sales. Have several people review the call notes so you get the benefit of multiple perspectives.
5. Personalize Your Greeting
Using a generic greeting is not the best way to build relationships or make sales. Agents should greet potential customers by name and personalize each call in some way. Avoid controversial topics such as politics, or you run the risk of offending customers and losing valuable sales.
6. Identify the Customer’s Problem
Agents should offer products or services that solve a specific problem. They can’t do this unless they talk with customers and identify the problems people in your target market are facing. Once you identify a customer’s problem, offer a product or service that solves the problem in an efficient or cost-effective manner.
7. Adhere to Best Practices
Don’t reinvent the wheel when you are developing policies for your call centre. Best practices tend to yield the best results when approaching customers and pitching products and services. Give agents access to training documents and other resources so they don’t have to commit these best practices to memory.
8. Demonstrate Value
If you can demonstrate the value of your product to customers, they are much more likely to stay on the phone while you deliver your pitch. Instead of focusing on features, tell customers about the benefits of using your products. Cost savings, increased productivity, improved efficiency, and time savings are some of the benefits you should mention.
9. Respect the Customer’s Time
Save the long sales pitches for on-site meetings with customers. When you talk to people on the phone, you need to get to the point right away. If many of your agents have been struggling to make sales, you might need to shorten your sales script. Shorter scripts make it easier for agents to respect your customers’ time.
10. Maintain a Positive Attitude
Most customers don’t want to talk to people with negative attitudes, so advise your agents to stay positive during their calls. Maintaining the right tone of voice and using positive language can help agents keep customers on the phone longer, improving their chances of making more sales.
11. Build Relationships
If you want to sell one product and move on to the next customer, then you don’t need to worry about building strong relationships. If you want life-long customers who buy from you again and again, however, your agents need to connect with customers and build trust with them. Train agents to focus on relationship building rather than one-off sales.
12. Learn to Handle Objections
The key to selling more products is learning how to handle objections during an outbound call. If everyone said yes to sales pitches, agents wouldn’t have to work so hard to make sales. Hold regular training sessions to help agents learn how to overcome objections. Role playing is very effective, especially if one of your agents plays the part of a stubborn customer.
Conclusion
If your company is struggling to attract or retain customers, following these tips can help you make more sales. For more information on call centre success, contact us to discuss your outbound or inbound calling activities.
Submit a comment