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Monthly Archives: September 2018

Speak to the person in your head, not the person in your heart

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Although telemarketing is known to be one of the most powerful marketing tools, talking to potential customers over the phone also brings challenges. As Skills You Need says:

“Talking with a customer on the phone can often be a difficult task.  Without seeing an individual’s face, messages can become muddled and meanings misinterpreted.”

As you can’t use all your senses and don’t have body language cues to fall back on when speaking on the phone, you need to come up with other techniques to help you get your message across. Finding different ways to communicate and connect with your potential customer is important if you’re going to create a two-way conversation and get as much as possible from your telemarketing call.

Visualisation

One of the best ways to overcome the challenges of telephone communication is visualisation. When you pick up the phone to call a prospect, try to picture them in your mind’s eye. During the conversation imagine their facial responses. This technique will help you better empathise with your prospect. Getting a better understanding of who someone is and what they want, need, and prefer, will help you build greater rapport with them and present your message in a way that appeals to them. This goes a long way in helping you to succeed in your calls.

Fooling your senses

When you speak to a person face to face, all five of your senses are called into action. Although you may not realise it, all of your senses play an important part in both giving and receiving signals from the person you’re speaking to. If any one of your senses is impeded, it can be harder to get your message across or to pick up on the subtle cues your potential customer is giving off.

By actually ‘seeing’ a person in your mind’s eye, you can fool your senses. This makes it possible to artificially overcome some of the barriers of telephone communication. You will sound warmer and more confident, which will help breakdown any resistance that the person receiving your call may have.

Focusing on your head

When making telemarketing calls, it’s all too easy get bogged down listening to your internal monologue. If you’re not focused on the person you’re speaking to, you may begin to think things like, “Why did I say that?”, “What do I need to say next?”, or “Oh, I forgot to ask…”. As well as being distracting, these types of thoughts can stop you from listening to your potential client and can make it a lot harder to have a truly two-way conversation. Holding an image of the person you’re speaking to in your head is a good way to overcome this problem and help you to stay engaged with your potential customer.

Although visualisation takes a long time to master, it can have a big impact on your telemarketing success, so is well worth the effort. Find out more about effective telemarketing techniques by taking a look around our site today, or contact a member of our friendly telemarketing team to discuss your telemarketing strategy.

Keep on keeping on

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Keep going

If you’ve ever done any telemarketing, you’ll know that it has its challenges. Getting your foot through the telephonic door takes skill and energy. Dealing with objections, building a rapport, and working to close a sale can easily and quickly exhaust you. If you don’t get the results you were anticipating, or experience a run of unsuccessful calls, telemarketing can begin to be a source of stress. Learning how to push through these tough times can help you to improve the results of your telemarketing campaign and make the job itself a lot more enjoyable.

Hitting the wall

When you make a run of unsuccessful telemarketing calls, it can be all too easy to feel like no one’s in, nobody wants to talk to you and that you’re getting nowhere fast. This is what’s known as ‘hitting the wall’ and is something that happens to everyone involved in telemarketing, at some point in their careers. Recognising when you’ve hit the wall, and learning how to overcome it, will help to keep you motivated and ensure your telemarketing campaign is a winning success.

Increase your output

One of the best ways to get over your slump and beat the wall is to increase your output. Dial faster, make more calls, and increase the success of your attempts. By increasing your speed, you should find you have more successes in a shorter space of time.

There are a number of things that happen when you increase the rate at which you’re working. For a start, you’ll be too busy to feel ‘down’ or frustrated. What’s more, as you begin to have more success, you’ll feel more motivated and more energetic. This will come across in your voice and potential customers will be more likely to get a positive impression of you and your business. This will give you a better chance of making some valuable leads.

Create realistic expectations

A good way to avoid feeling frustrated during a telemarketing campaign is to set yourself realistic expectations. As Small Biz Daily puts it:

“Before embarking on any campaign it is essential to review what expectations you may have, if you aren’t realistic there is the possibility that you will become disappointed if the campaign doesn’t perform how you expected.”

If you’re not sure what sort of success rate you should be aiming for, speak to marketing professionals about what results you can realistically expect from your campaign.

If you’re having a run of bad luck in your telemarketing campaign, don’t let yourself get bogged down thinking you’ve lost your touch. Instead, simply increase the rate at which you’re working and devote even more energy to your calls. You should find your luck turns around before you know it.

Explore our site today to learn more about practical and effective telemarketing techniques, or send us an email to discuss how to step up your telemarketing campaign.

Positive vs negative questioning

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Negative vs positive

Questions are one of the most important tools telemarketers have at their disposal. When they’re well-crafted and carefully deployed, they can open up a conversation, lay the foundations of a productive business relationship and help you build rapport with the person you’re speaking to. As Hub Spot says:

“Unless you ask the right questions, you won’t uncover the right needs. Unless you ask the right questions, you won’t understand the right problems to solve.”

Learning the right questions to ask, and how to ask them, is an incredibly important part of telemarketing. All too often, simple mistakes in phrasing can limit the impact of a question or even shut the conversation down altogether. Learning how to avoid these common errors and perfecting your question-asking skills can help you to get more from your telemarketing calls.

Negative questioning

One of the most common mistakes that people make when talking to potential customers is phrasing their questions negatively. Negative questions invite negative answers. For example, asking “So, I couldn’t interest you in a meeting then?”, as opposed to, “Would you find a meeting helpful?” makes it easy for prospects to simply say no. This brings the conversation to an end and makes it difficult to get more out of the call.

Use too many negative questions in a telemarketing exchange and you’ll struggle to move your conversation forward or leave your potential client with a good impression of your company.

Changing negative to positive

Transforming negative questions into positive enquiries is a simple matter of phrasing. You can ask exactly the same things in a much more productive way by avoiding any negative words and phrasing questions in a way that ensures they’re more likely to result in a positive answer.

The best way to avoid using negative questions is to train your brain to avoid them. Make a list of the most common questions you ask during a telemarketing call and then spend a few minutes thinking about the phrasing. Do the questions invite a negative answer? If so, try to write down a few alternative ways to phrase the question, removing any negative words as you go. Use these questions in a role-play with staff to see if your minor grammatical changes have a major real-world impact.

Once you’ve learned how to identify and alter your negative questions, bringing more positivity to your telemarketing calls should be easy. This should help you to get more from the conversations that you have with potential clients and make it easier for you to achieve your telemarketing goals.

With something as simple as phrasing having such a big impact on the potential success of a call, it’s well worth putting some time into analysing your questions and the way you talk to potential clients. If you’d like to learn more about simple but effective telemarketing techniques, or find out how we can help you to boost your results, take a look around our site, or get in touch with a member of our team today.

Unwitting messages

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Control tone of voice

Most of us are aware that the words we use are only part of the story when it comes to getting our message across. Body language, tone of voice and facial expressions all play a large part in conveying information and meaning, whether we’re talking to someone in person or speaking over the phone.

According to widely accepted studies, quoted in Psychology Today, “The belief is that 55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken.” This means that there is a huge scope for altering the meaning of your message, or the way it’s received, without changing the words you use. Learning how to master these complementary forms of communication can help to ensure you make your point clearly and efficiently and that you don’t include any unwitting messages in your telemarketing call.

Unwitting messages

Unwitting messages are messages that you communicate without meaning to. Often, these messages are picked up in the tone of voice you use. For example, if someone asks you how you are and you reply in a low, quiet voice that you’re OK, they may well infer from your answer that you’re not.

If you call a loved one at their place of work, something in your voice will tell the person who answers the phone that you have a right to speak to them. Even if the person you speak to doesn’t realise this, they will have picked up on your tone or your confidence, and will therefore be a lot more likely to put you straight through.

Likewise, if you make a telemarketing call and you don’t really believe you have a right to speak to the decision maker, it will come across in your voice. Even if you don’t realise it, you may be unwittingly apologising for your call. The gatekeeper will be a lot more likely to block your path or to interrogate you further before putting you through.

Controlling your messages

These unwitting messages can do real harm to your chances of telemarketing success. Learning to control what your tone of voice conveys will help to ensure you get the right message across when making telemarketing calls. The more confidence you have in your company and your products, the more positively you’ll come across and the less apologetic you’ll sound.

Before picking up the phone, try to think of five to ten really good things about your business or brand and take a minute to consider how your company could help the businesses you’re speaking to. Keep this in mind, when you’re on the phone and your confidence and pride will be conveyed through your voice, making it a lot more likely you’ll get past the gatekeeper and achieve your goals.

Find out more about practical telemarketing techniques by taking a look around our site, or getting in touch with one of the members of our expert team.