Call Us

Monthly Archives: January 2017

How can salespeople get their prospects talking?

Posted on by

Get prospects talking

One of the biggest challenges in sales is getting a prospect talking. Once you’ve started a conversation, it’s easy to make your pitch, get your message across and begin to develop a relationship. However, if the prospect won’t engage with you, your chances of a successful call will be all but gone. Though this is an important part of sales, a lot of people are still baffled by how to get prospects talking. While some people may be held back by fear or nerves, others may simply lack the communication skills needed to break down barriers and make meaningful connections.

One of the most important moments of any call, is the second between getting past the gatekeeper and waiting for the decision maker to pick up the phone. In this moment, when you’re taking a deep breath and are poised to make your pitch, the success or failure of your call is often determined. If the next few seconds go well, you’ll be able to glide effortlessly into your call and connect with the prospect you’re speaking to. If you make a mistake however, you could end up fluffing your pitch, making the call awkward or even crashing out altogether.

To ensure disasters like this don’t happen, we’ve developed a range of techniques to guarantee a great first impression every time. Keep reading to find out more.

Quick and basic opening

Make your opening introduction as quick and as straightforward as possible. Introduce yourself, say which company you’re calling from and the reason for your call. The sooner you can get this bit over and done with, the sooner you can ask your opening questions and get the prospect engaged with the call.

Ask an open question

An open question is a question that can’t be answered with either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. Try to make the question relevant to your call, so you can glean an insight from the answer. Avoid generic questions, like ‘how are you?’, as these are not relevant and won’t further your call.

Be interested and be interesting

If you want to get a prospect talking, you have to show that you’re really interested in what they’re saying. Listen to their answers, probe relevant details, and show how your product, or service, aligns with their needs. Rather than listing off the benefits of your products and services all at once, prioritise the information you give according to your prospect’s particular requirements, preferences or business.

Have fun

Though your call should always be professional and on point, as a skilled telemarketer you should also be able to inject an element of fun into the conversation. If you’re confident and a good communicator, then this sense of fun will automatically enter your call as most people get a lot of enjoyment from doing a job they’re good at. The more success you have, the more you will enjoy yourself, and the more your enthusiasm will be communicated to the person you’re talking to.

At Blue Donkey, we’re always looking for ways to improve our techniques and our success rate to ensure our telemarketers are as happy, confident, and successful as possible. To find out more, or to learn how we can help boost the success of your telemarketing team, get in touch with us today.

How to create the right mood music in a sales call

Posted on by

Sheet music and a piano

In order for any kind of sales call to be successful, all elements of the call need to be carefully thought through and expertly sculpted. Whether it’s inbound or outbound, a call to customers or prospects, using cold or warm data, the call needs to take the appropriate shape in order to achieve the desired outcome.

At Blue Donkey, we call this careful orchestration of the telemarketing process ‘mood music’. The rhythm by which the call develops, the way the conversation flows and the level at which it resonates with the potential buyer all influence the success of the call and the likelihood of a long term business relationship developing from the contact. As well as helping telemarketers to boost their success rate, getting the mood music just right maximises the customer experience and increases the chances the caller will seal the deal.

Tempo

The tempo of the call refers to how it’s paced. The speed of the dialogue, the quality of the opening questions and the responsiveness of the contact all have an influence on the tempo. Get the tempo spot on, and the call is much more likely to be a success.

All too often, the people making sales calls begin their calls too quickly. Whether because of nerves, fatigue or pressure to hit their targets, they’re likely to start their calls off too quickly. This can make it difficult for the contact to engage with them and can place barriers in the way of effective communication. A good tempo can be achieved by the caller using a natural pace, listening to the person they’re speaking to and responding appropriately. This helps the customer to feel like they matter and gives weight to the sales pitch itself.

Posture

Even though you’re using the phone, posture is incredibly important when making a sales call. Often, when we’re tired, unmotivated, or reluctant to make a call, we automatically assume a slight foetal position at our desks. This can make the voice sound suppressed and unconfident. Like a wind instrument, the human voice creates a clearer sound along straight lines. By sitting up straight or even standing callers will find their tone is improved and that their pitch comes off more confidently.

Tone

When we talk to people face to face, we use our words, our body language and our tone to get our meaning across and engage our counterpart. As body language can’t be read over the phone, it’s left to the tone we use to convey subtle ideas and connect with the person we’re speaking to. The tone you use during a sales call can impact on everything from the perceived credibility of your words to the empathy of your message.

In general, high tones indicate excitement and enthusiasm. However too many high tones can come across as contrived. Low tones on the other hand are calming, welcoming and engaging, but go too low and your call could come across as boring. By using a combination of tones, and being mindful to avoid overuse of any particular pitch, you can engage your contact and draw them into the conversation.

Language

Language is one of the most important parts of any sales call. In many cases the words we choose are the key to our success, with positive words, descriptive phrases and easy to understand pitches helping salespeople to connect with their contacts and communicate their message. Taking words like ‘maybe’, ‘could’ and ‘might’ out of sales vocabulary and replacing them with words like ‘can’, ‘do’ and ‘will’, makes a call seem more positive, more confident and more trustworthy.

Unlike face-to-face contact, talking on the telephone is a learned behaviour. By using the right tone, the right words, the right posture and the right tempo, you, and your team, can ensure your calls resonate with your potential customers and that your sales campaign gets the results it needs. If you need help honing these essential skills, get in touch with Blue Donkey to find out how we can help.

5 steps for making the best telemarketing hires

Posted on by

A job interview taking place

As with any business, staff are one of the most important aspects of telemarketing. Dedicated, committed and talented staff can make a huge difference to the success of a telemarketing project. As well as being better able to engage decision makers and get their sales message across, good telemarketers can lay the foundations for a long lasting business relationship.

However, finding excellent staff is no easy task. Here at Blue Donkey, we’re always asked how we’re able to find such exceptional telemarketers. Though there’s no single answer to this tricky question, we’ve had a long, hard think about it and come up with five key steps any business can take to find, and hire, the best telemarketers around.

Step one: Look for a natural carer, not a natural seller

In general, the best way to connect with another person and another business is to put their needs and requirements at the heart of your call. People who are solely focused on hitting sales targets can often fail to engage the people they’re calling, putting their sales pitch before a genuine two-way conversation. Though you of course need your telemarketers to be able to sell, we believe staff who can empathise, and who want to deliver an outstanding customer experience, will be more likely to ask the right questions and communicate the right message, two things that can do wonders for building a trusting, long-term relationship.

Step two: ask the right questions

The best way to get an accurate idea of the character of a potential hire is to ask the right questions. We believe that situational questions reveal the most about a candidate’s personality and aptitude. Often beginning with the phrase ‘tell me about a time when….’, situational questions force candidates to talk about their actual achievements and talents. If you simply ask an interviewee to talk about how they would hit their targets – it’s likely they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear, instead of what’s really relevant.

Step three: don’t sell the role as a steppingstone to something ‘better’

All too often, telemarketing jobs are seen as a steppingstone to a ‘better’ position. And though it’s true that the skills employees learn working in telemarketing will stand them in excellent stead for a wide range of sales jobs, it’s crucial you don’t describe the job as being a low level position in your organisation if you want to attract the best people.

Step four: look for stamina

With the telephone being their primary work tool, it’s no surprise that most telemarketers spend their days making call after call. In order for someone to be a successful telemarketer, they need to be able to put the same energy, enthusiasm and passion into every single call. Look for signs of stamina in the candidate’s CV, keep an eye out to see if their enthusiasm levels wane during the interview and ask them questions aimed at revealing whether or not they will put 100% into each call they make.

Step five: personality, passion, persistence

These three qualities are essential for any truly successful telemarketer. People with personality, passion and persistence will stand out immediately at the interview, filling the space with their confidence and charisma. As well as being great at their jobs, these people will help to lift the entire team, helping to motivate and inspire your workforce and giving your telemarketers the passion they need to achieve their goals.

If you can find people who are naturally positive, engaging and enthusiastic, and who enjoy being part of a team, you’ll be well on your way to building an unbeatable telemarketing force. To find out more, or to learn how we can help supercharge your team, contact us today.

3 easy steps to get over your fear of cold calling

Posted on by

Call centre

It’s a well known fact that no one likes cold calling. However experienced you are with making telemarketing calls, and however confident you are in your products or services, picking up the phone and dialling someone who’s not expecting your call, and whose body language you’ll be unable to read, can be daunting.

However, with cold calling continuing to top the leaderboard of marketing methods that consistently succeed in building relationships and securing leads, it’s a tactic that no business can afford to ignore. What’s more, as cold calling allows you to speak to infinitely more companies than face to face meetings, it’s an absolute must for any ambitious professional.

At Blue Donkey, we know a thing or two about transforming cold calls into warm business relationships. How do we do it? You’ll just have to keep reading to find out.

Step 1: Be confident in your products and services

If you’re confident about your products and services, this enthusiasm will come across as soon as the other person picks up the phone. Before you begin, write down 10 excellent features about the product or service you’re promoting. These should be things that will excite and enthuse your target audience – the things that set your product or service apart from the competition.

Spend some time thinking about how these 10 features could benefit the company you’re calling. Consider their workplace, their business and their company goals. If you can demonstrate how your product or service can save them time, save them money, make their life easier or improve the quality of their work, you’ll be onto a winner.

Step 2: Use your senses

The more senses you can use when making a business call, the better. Though the telephone takes a number of senses out of play, you can increase your awareness of the situation by using visualisation. Next time you make a cold call, try to visualise the face of the person you’re speaking to before you begin. When they answer, talk to them as if you were speaking face to face. This should help to make the conversation flow more smoothly and will make it less daunting to pick up the phone.

A lot of professional sports people use visualisation techniques to improve their performance in big competitions. As well as helping them to focus on their ultimate goal, visualisation helps to build confidence and create an expectation of success, two things that are incredibly important when making cold calls.

Step 3: Set smart goals

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed. By setting yourself these parameters at the beginning of a call, you can push yourself to achieve tangible goals and maximise your impact. If you can get yourself into the right mindset, use positive visualisation techniques and set yourself clear, achievable goals systematically, regularly and in a disciplined manner, you won’t only find your cold calling is more successful, you may even find it empowers you.

At Blue Donkey we call this process, intelligent telemarketing. We’ve seen our client companies go from good to great by embracing the opportunities presented by systematic, intelligent use of the telephone.

Talk to us today to learn how we can develop and train your in-house telemarketing crew, or outsource your lead generation to Blue Donkey’s seasoned teams of expert communicators, and transform your business.

Improve your chances of getting past the gatekeeper

Posted on by

A padlocked gate

Unless you’re lucky enough to have a direct line to every decision maker in your call list, you’ll have to get past the dreaded gatekeeper before your sales pitch can find its target. As the person who controls which calls get through and which are politely declined, winning over the gatekeeper is one of the most important parts of any sales call.

Almost every sales person will have their own technique for getting past the gatekeeper. Here at Blue Donkey, we’ve developed our very own set of tactics for navigating our way around the gatekeeper and getting our calls to the people that matter.

Speak with authority

The more confident and positive you are when you make a call, the more likely you’ll be to get past the gatekeeper. Speak with authority and confidence. If you sound like you know what you’re talking about, and like you have a right to speak to the decision maker, there’s a good chance the gatekeeper will put you through without asking too many questions.

You can also try to use visualisation techniques to help boost your chances of success. Build a picture of the gatekeeper in your mind’s eye and hold this image in your head when you make the call. This will help your voice to sound more confident when you ask for the person you need to speak to and should help to prevent you from being blocked.

Think about what the tone of your voice communicates; if it unwittingly says, “I’m selling something and my call is not important”, there’s a good chance you’ll be blocked. On the other hand, if your tone of voice suggests you have something to discuss that the decision maker will want to hear, you’ll be much more likely to succeed.

However, it’s important you remain respectful and professional throughout this stage of the call. Don’t pretend you know the decision maker and don’t make your call out to be something it’s not, just to get through. Remember this initial call is designed to begin a business relationship, build trust and create rapport, so start as you mean to go on.

Don’t pitch to the gatekeeper

Though you’ll probably need to give the gatekeeper some basic information, it’s important you don’t begin to pitch to the first person you speak to. If you give them too much information, you could tempt them into making a decision on the buyer’s behalf, or even to relay your pitch to the decision maker instead of putting you through. As both of these scenarios lower your chances of success, try to keep your introduction brief and be clear that you need to be put through.

Avoid asking for the person who ‘deals with’

If you ask for the person who ‘deals with’ HR, buying, accounts etc. you’ll probably end up speaking to the day-to-day administrator, rather than the person in a position to make decisions. Instead, ask to speak to the person ‘responsible for’ or ‘in charge of’. This will give your pitch the best possible chance of reaching the ears of someone who can act on it.

Don’t leave a message

One of the key strategies in sales, and telemarketing in particular, is retaining the element of control as much as possible. If you leave a message either on a voicemail or with reception, you’re giving that control away. If the decision maker doesn’t call you back – and the chances are they won’t – it’s that much harder for you to call again after you’ve left a message that hasn’t been returned.

When making any telemarketing calls, it’s important to respect the rules of the game. Always check your data against TPS or CTPS lists and ensure that your calls are compliant to ensure your brand is presented in the best possible light. To find out more about how you can improve your telemarketing techniques, or to learn how the Blue Donkey centre of excellence can boost the quality of your calls and help you to generate new leads, contact a member of our team today.

Dealing with rejection over the phone

Posted on by

Dealing with rejection

When you work in telemarketing, rejection is a part of everyday life. Though we work to ensure our success rates are as high as possible, you’re always going to come up against decision makers who don’t have time to talk, aren’t interested in your products or simply don’t want the hassle of switching suppliers.

Though it’s a hazard of the job, regular rejection doesn’t get any easier, especially for telemarketers who are committed to getting the best results possible from every call. To help our team cope with the knockbacks, and to ensure rejection doesn’t impact on the productivity of our workforce, we’ve developed a range of strategies to help our team cope.

Mindset

If you’ve ever worked in sales, you’ll know just how powerful positive thinking can be. In fact, we believe a positive mindset can make or break a sales call. As well as helping our telemarketers approach each call in an optimistic and confident way, a positive mindset helps to convey the benefits and the appeal of the products and services we’re promoting.

One of the tactics we use to put our team in a positive frame of mind is to encourage them to remember the last time they had a really good call. Those calls where the recipient is engaged, when they had a mutually beneficial conversation and when their message really hit its mark should be kept at the front of a telemarketer’s mind whenever they pick up the phone. This will help to fuel enthusiasm when the telemarketer makes a call, and should give each contact a stronger likelihood of achieving the objectives set.

Give your call the best chance of success

Often, an unsuccessful sales call comes down to an inappropriate call list. If a telemarketer makes a call and the recipient isn’t receptive to the sales message, they need to take a look at the type of companies they’re calling. If the product, service or sales message is unlikely to be of interest to the names on the list, the telemarketer has a limited chance of success, no matter how enthusiastic they are. However, if the list is appropriate, it may be the positivity of the message – or the timing of the call that need to be adjusted.

Even if the product or service isn’t right for the recipient at this moment in time, if the telemarketer can stay positive, engage the person they’re speaking to and have a meaningful discussion, there’s a good chance the telemarketer will be able to come back to the company in the future. As well as helping to line up potential customers, this will help to ensure the next time the telemarketer contacts the company, the call is warmly received.

It’s not personal

Often we feel rejected when we perceive that the person on the other end of the phone is dismissing us. In these instances, it’s important to remember that rejection, in a business sense, isn’t personal. Instead of feeling despondent, we encourage our telemarketers to try putting themselves in the buyer’s headspace and thinking about how their language or their explanation can be improved to better get their message across. Failing to win buyers on every call is not rejection, its life.

In business, no one can be successful 100% of the time. Instead of focusing on the negatives of rejection, it’s important to think about how you can create positives from the situation. As well as helping to improve your mindset and make the working day even better, this positive attitude will be reflected in your success rate and could help you achieve more than you ever thought possible.

Data-driven marketing identified as a top 5 prediction for 2017

Posted on by

2017 title image

With 2016 having now drawn to a close, marketing experts, business leaders and other professionals involved with the marketing industry are working hard to predict how the sector is going to evolve over the next 12 months. One of the most hotly predicted trends is data-driven marketing. Made possible by the huge volume of data that’s now collected on companies and individuals across the country, the move to data-driven strategies is set to increase in pace in 2017.

If you are planning your marketing approach for 2017 and are looking for techniques that will inform and improve it, data-driven marketing could be for you. Keep reading to find out more.

What is data-driven marketing?

Once upon a time, salespeople had to work blind. Most knew virtually nothing about the individuals or companies they were calling, relying solely on their finely honed sales skills to get results. These days however, we have a huge amount of data to work with. Collected across a range of platforms and by a variety of providers, this bounty of information helps marketing professionals to target their calls more effectively. This can help to dramatically improve results, enabling businesses to make lucrative leads and boost their income.

How can data inform telemarketing?

One of the most important elements of telemarketing is list creation. The more time and effort professionals put into creating informed and accurate lists, the better chance they have of success with every call they make. Marketing professionals can use the wealth of data that’s now available to them to refine their lists, allowing them to make a call sheet that’s filled exclusively with businesses and individuals that are likely to have a real interest in the product or service that’s on offer.

Giving each and every call a better chance of success

By using data to create targeted call lists, telemarketers can ensure each call they make has an excellent chance of success. Because data is now so well profiled, when telemarketers dial a number, they have the assurance of knowing that the company, their activities, and the person they’re speaking to are relevant to their call. In theory, this means every call has the potential to produce an important business relationship, something that’s great news for growing companies everywhere.

Using the telephone to add intelligent information to your lists

In the hands of a skilled communicator, the telephone is a powerful research and marketing tool. An intelligent company like Blue Donkey can take the basic information offered by data-driven marketing and add to it. We’ll append key information to your marketing list like the name of the decision maker, relevant contract renewal dates, turnover and staff numbers. This will give you a much more valuable list and give your company an excellent starting point for your next marketing campaign.

As well as being essential for telemarketing, a reliable, data-packed list can be used to develop professional contacts and cement business relationships. For example, if you’re holding a meeting or event, you can personally call and invite relevant people on the list. By calling each person individually, you can increase their chance of attendance and boost the event’s chances of success. After the event, you use the list to call attendees and build on your professional relationship. This will allow you to maximise your return on marketing and help you to develop valuable contacts.

Thanks to the exciting opportunities data-driven marketing offers to telemarketers and companies across the UK, it’s no surprise it’s one of the most talked about trends of 2017. To find out more about innovative marketing techniques, or to plan a telemarketing campaign of your own, contact a member of our team today.