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Telephone Appointment Making
Love it or hate it, to grow your business and customer base at some stage of
your sales teams career, they will have to pick-up the telephone and make
appointments.
So why do so many sales people put off making the calls on the telephone to
get appointments with people they have never met and why is it such a terrifying
ordeal, rated right up there with the fear of public speaking?
This brings us to a company we worked with recently.
Case study — Company X
Initial situation:
Sales team of 50 mainly experienced people, all paid on new business, but not
meeting with enough new prospects.
What we did: 5-step approach
- Each person arrived at the venue with a list of 40 prospect companies
- Each person developed a 5-step telephone approach relevant to their own
individual target market segment
- They then practiced their individual approaches on each other and we
coached them until they were able to articulate their approach comfortably
- Horror of horrors we then made them all pick-up their telephones and put
the theory into practice and actually telephone real live prospects
NOTE: this is a major point of difference between KONA and ‘training’
companies.
Most training companies would have built the scripts, maybe got the team to
practice then left them to their own devices in the hope that the managers
or sales people would then discipline themselves and go away and make the
calls.
The training company would then pat themselves on the back saying what a
great programme they ran because everybody said how much they enjoyed it
(and lunch and the scones and cream at morning tea were excellent) and then
send the client an invoice. Unfortunately the sales people would have gone
back to their offices/cars/ areas always saying that they would get around
to making the calls as soon as they get time. Unfortunately, in 95% of cases
they never do.
- We had the sales people make the calls and coached them after each one
to make the next call better
Outcomes:
- Over 50 telephone approaches to be used for future reference
- More importantly, in the space of 1 hour — a
43% success rate!
Prospects called = 369
Call-backs = 170
Knock-backs = 40
Appointments made = 159
So what are you waiting for? Pick up the telephone and call us to see how we can motivate and coach your sales team to increase
their customer base!
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