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Monthly Archives: March 2017

How the telephone can help you achieve more sales

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Hit targets

Despite its huge potential for building relationships, generating leads and boosting brand awareness, the telephone remains undervalued as a sales tool by many businesses in the UK. Often, this ambivalent attitude is the result of a lack of confidence on the part of the company, a previous telemarketing campaigned that has failed due to a lack of consistency or a lack of planning or simply limited understanding about the power of the telephone.

At Blue Donkey, we know just how impressive telemarketing results can be – we also know that it takes planning, skill and persistence to achieve these results. If your company is considering running a telemarketing campaign, or if you’re currently working on a telemarketing strategy, here are our top tips for real telemarketing success.

1. It’s all about the database

The database you use for your telemarketing campaign will have a big impact on its success rate. A database that’s well-profiled and up to date will help your telemarketers to hit their goals, if your data is wrong to begin with then it will impair the quality of your calls and will make it almost impossible for your team to achieve their sales targets.

2. Create a benchmark for success

A big part of creating a consistent telemarketing strategy is finding a way to measure performance. The more information you have about your team’s approach and their success rates, the easier it will be to create benchmarks and drive your team onto ever better results.

3. Keep track of results

As soon as your telemarketing campaign gets underway, try to keep track of vital information like how many dials it takes to reach a decision maker and how many conversations you need to have with a decision maker to generate something useful. Once you know this information, you’ll be able to get a better idea of how your telemarketers are performing and if there’s anyone in the team who is struggling to hit their targets.

4. Get your message right

Another important thing to note is how many people are saying they’re not interested in the products or services you’re offering. If a high percentage of the people you call aren’t interested, it could mean your database needs adjusting or that your message needs a little attention.

5. Get a little something extra from each call

Even if your team can’t secure a sale on every call, they can aim to get an email address, permission to call again or the name of someone in the organisation that might be able to help them. By getting something from every call, your telemarketers can widen the scope of your campaign and boost its long term impact.

As well as focusing on short term goals, it’s important to remember that one of the biggest benefits of telemarketing is the opportunity it offers to build long term relationships with your clients. The telephone can be used to create and maintain these relationships, making it an incredibly powerful sales and marketing tool. To find out more about intelligent telemarketing and the impact it can have on sales, get in touch with a member of the Blue Donkey team today.

Smile as you dial – it makes a difference

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Smile whilst dialling

Though we’re always looking for ways to innovate, push the boundaries, and improve our telemarketing techniques – sometimes we have to admit the oldest techniques in the book are there for a reason. One tried and tested approach, that really does make a difference, is smiling while you dial. A great way to improve the quality of you calls, connect with the person you’re speaking to and make your workday more enjoyable, putting a smile on before you pick up the phone could transform your telemarketing success rate. If you’re still not convinced, here are just a few of the benefits of this fail-safe sales technique.

Does smiling really make a difference?

Though the person you’re speaking to can’t see you smile, they can hear it. The tone, pitch, and flow of your speech will all be affected by your smile, and the contact you’re trying to sell to will hear the difference. This is very important in the world of telemarketing, as we have to rely on our ability to communicate purely over the phone when engaging people, navigating gatekeepers and convincing decision makers.

First impressions

No one wants to answer the phone to someone who sounds bored, miserable or uninterested. The busy professionals your team are speaking to need to be immediately engaged in the call if they’re going to be convinced by the pitch. If the telemarketer is smiling, those crucial opening sentences are going to be exponentially enhanced, creating a good first impression, engaging the decision maker and giving the call a better chance of hitting the mark.

Communication

The vast majority of the information the person you’re speaking to will gain during the call comes from the tone of your voice. If you smile when you dial, the person you’re calling will hear it in your voice and it’s likely they’ll respond more positively to you. The way you speak, rather than the words you use, will help them decide if you’re trustworthy, if you’re genuine and if they can connect with you on a personal level. This will have a big impact on the success of your call and could even be the crucial factor that tips the decision for or against you.

Company image

If you want your business to be seen as positive, passionate and energetic, ensuring your team are smiling whenever they pick up the phone is a great place to start. If every interaction a business has with your company is engaging, positive, and fun, they’re much more likely to feel a connection to your brand and use your company in the future.

Sometimes, the simplest techniques make the biggest difference. To find out other methods for improving the quality of your telemarketing calls, contact Blue Donkey today.

Why you don’t need to spend time preparing for each call before you dial it

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Clock

When telemarketers are nervous or procrastinating, research can suddenly seem like the most important thing in the world. Telemarketers who are putting off their next call often begin trawling the target business’ website, carefully looking up their products, services and history, mentally preparing themselves for the upcoming call as they go.

Though this sounds like a sensible and thorough way to prepare for a call – and there’s no denying that a bit of research can make a big difference to the quality of your communication – spending five, ten or even fifteen minutes researching a company every time you make a call is very impractical. Not only is it unnecessary, research is time consuming. Too much research can put a serious dent in your productivity and can prevent your company from getting the results it needs from its telemarketing campaign.

Productivity and success

On average, reaching a senior decision maker in an organisation takes between eight and twelve attempts. If a telemarketer spends valuable time researching a company before picking up the phone every time, their productivity will be severely reduced and it will take them a lot longer to hit their targets. At Blue Donkey, we’re used to making the most of every moment we’re working on a project. We want to give our clients maximum value, so we’ve developed techniques for making our research more efficient and our call rate much more productive.

Research

Instead of looking through a company’s website before we pick up the phone, we begin dialling while simultaneously logging onto their homepage. This gives us the time we need to have a quick look through the products and services on offer and to get an idea of what the company stands for. With a bit of skill and practice, this will provide us the information we need to ask insightful open questions and get the person we’re calling engaged in the conversation. As well as boosting productivity, this mini research technique ensures our telemarketers don’t develop any preconceptions about a business or how they’ll react to the call. By avoiding assumptions, we can ensure we approach each call on its own merits and get more out of our interactions.

The toolbox

As an outsourcer, everything we do at Blue Donkey needs to be benchmarked, measurable and based on best practice. We need to be powerful and effective on the phone, but we need to do it fast. To help us to achieve our time sensitive goals, we’ve developed a basic toolbox of telemarketing techniques. These tools give us the ability to gain a clear and compelling understanding of the products or services we’re representing. By using them in our working practices, we’re able to take on the voice of our clients and understand what it is they do, what makes them special, the industry they operate in and how the products or services we’re representing can help the decision makers we’re speaking to.

By turning research into a fine art and carefully honing our telemarketing techniques, we’re able to get great results quickly and efficiently. To find out more, take a look around our site or contact a member of the Blue Donkey team.

The impact of the first impression in sales

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Greeting and phone

No matter what your role and what sector of industry you’re involved with – first impressions matter. Though it may be a cliché, it’s true that you only have one opportunity to make that all important initial encounter a good one. As well as getting your sales pitch off to a good start, a positive first impression will lay the foundation for a positive business relationship. This is something that can then be built upon to create an ongoing partnership, giving you and your business a client you can work with for years to come.

First impressions

Though first impressions take just moments to form – according to Business Insider, it’s only seven seconds – their impact can be very long lasting. Come across as aggressive, bored or, untrustworthy, and your brand’s reputation could be in tatters before you’ve even launched your pitch. Come across as friendly, reliable, passionate and knowledgeable on the other hand and your call could be on track for success from the start.

Making a good first impression

Recovering from a bad first impression can be difficult at the best of times, when you’re trying to make a sales pitch over the phone, it can be all but impossible. This means it’s essential for salespeople to make a good first impression if they want to hit their goals.

Though there are no hard and fast rules for making a good first impression, there are lots of techniques you and your team can use to make sure they start their calls off on the right foot. As we’ve said before, it’s important to smile as you dial, this gives your voice a more engaging tone and puts you in a more positive frame of mind.

Another of the techniques we use is positive visualisation: we ask our team to think about the person they’re calling, visualise their face and focus on the positive outcome of the call. This will help the telemarketer to engage with the contact on a more human level and give them a better chance of a successful outcome. We also encourage our telemarketers to get excited about the product or service they’re promoting by helping them focus on its competitive benefits before they pick up the phone. This enthusiasm will come across in the call, helping to create a great first impression.

Improving your technique

By continually working to improve the quality of the first impressions you and your team make, you can help your sales department to achieve its goals and create positive relationships with the companies you contact. If you need help developing your telemarketing techniques, or if you think there’s more your team could learn from us, get in touch with Blue Donkey today.