Telemarketing experts are great at taking a business, breaking down its attributes and creating a pitch that blends and flows beautifully. They have to be, or their projects simply won’t retain. But how do you get a knack for seeming passionate and well informed across a wide-ranging product set from financial services to combinatorial chemistry systems. Blue Donkey Intelligent Telemarketing is about doing just that, all day every day. So, what’s our magic formula?… We’re glad you asked!
More open questions please
Open questions are important tools for telemarketing experts. They pave the way for expansive, detailed discussions about what’s important to a prospect when making specification decisions. They are what the telemarketing expert, or seller, uses to understand what the buyer needs. However, they have an exciting dual function. Open questions are also important when building your pitch. They are effectively what you think your buyer will want to know about you. So we can use them to craft our sales pitch.
Who, what, when, why, how
Getting across who you are and why you’re special isn’t always an easy thing to do. Yet do it you must. In a few short sentences to begin with. Telemarketing experts refer to this as the Call Opening where you simply tell the buyer who you are – first and last name, your company, what you do, and the reason you’re calling. Then you draw your buyer into a conversation, during which you’ll use a combination of open questions to help you understand your buyer’s needs, and sales messaging designed to show how you meet those needs.
One way telemarketing experts build a story, or pitch is to start with open questions. Who are you (your organisation)? What do you do? How do you differentiate? What’ are the special features? How do buyers benefit from those features? Who are you working with? Where do you specialise? How do you compare with others? What need or opportunity are you meeting with your product? What are your unique properties? Where are your strengths? The list could go on.
Build a story
When you’ve asked and answered the open questions, roll it all together into a narrative that feels comfortable. Prioritise what you say in favour of what the buyer needs from you. It’s essentially storytelling. Storytelling has become a popular method telemarketing experts use for engaging new audiences about the specialness of a business.
It’s a powerful technique for inserting your business in the mind of buyers in a way that feels authentic to the teller and memorable to the buyer. Communication trainers at consulting firm The Story Mill say “Branding is about creating a unique identity and landing a memorable message that moves people into action. Communication, flashy imagery and catchy taglines have long been the tools of the branding trade but, they don’t engage or inspire action nearly as powerfully as an expertly crafted and well-told story”.
Magic pennies
When telemarketing experts are pitching to a potential client, their narrative is used very sparingly. If the story is blurted out without taking a breath, it’s uninteresting, and comes out like a machine gun fashion. Instead, it should be peppered onto the call as a response to what the potential buyer tells you. Hence, you ask a good open question, they answer, you cascade the elements of your narrative according to which parts of the story fit their needs.
If you’re doing this correctly, your moments speaking will be used like magic pennies; if used wisely they buy you more talk time. If you blurt everything out, your time runs out and opps… dead call.
At Blue Donkey, we’re telemarketing experts who’ve developed some powerful routines that help us maximise the return on telemarketing investment. At the same time, we’re making sure each contact made has a magic of its own, even when it’s not generating a lead for the short term. By building an army of advocates in this way, one by one the propensity of your prospects to become committed, and high spending clients profoundly increases with each week’s work.
