Jenny Cartwright .......................................................Effective Telephone Follow-up Increases Sales.........
Having literally made hundreds of thousands of telephone sales calls in my 35 plus years of promoting world class
speakers like Tom Hopkins, the late Jim Rohn, Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Dr Deepak Chopra and my own public
workshops, I find telephone follow-up calls as the most important part of the selling process to get right.
Whenever you mail information or quotes out, only 1% on average will call you back these days. It is vital that
you follow-up everything you post or email out or you will miss an opportunity to gain business from 20 to 25%
of your prospects.
If you haven’t done this, then I challenge you to call everyone you did quotes for in 2013 to see if you can revive them.
You will be amazed how many people did not go with a competitor and did nothing. So often you can revive their
interest to do business with you. On previous trials of this method I have revived 25% of my formerly considered
“dead quotes”.
SEVEN TECHNIQUES FOR A PROFESSIONAL FOLLOW-UP CALL
- Always introduce yourself with your name and company name. Don’t assume they will recall you from the last
call.- Do not ask “Did you get the quote?” or “Did you get the information?” You never want to start a call with a closed
question because it shuts off any hope of moving forward into a conversation.- The customer could be saying they did not get the information, just to get rid of you. What you could do is answer
with “That’s okay, if you are online now, we could run through the information together on the website” or “That’s
okay, are you sure it is not sitting in your in-tray? If it is, we could run through it together over the phone and I can
answer any questions you might have.” - Clients are busy and distracted when your call comes in so refer to the problem, opportunity or concern that they
might have had and then ask an open-ended question like “I’m curious, what would we have to change to make it
of interest to you?” By doing that you may get the customer into a conversation about what he is looking for.
Alternatively say this:-- Instead of an open-ended question at the end of the last 2 examples, you could say “Let’s take a minute to go
through what I sent you to see if it makes sense for us to precede further.”- Find a talking point to reinforce them going with you by giving an example of another customer who had the
same situation or problem as they have had.- Do a trial close to test the ground before you ask for the order like “How do you see your company benefiting
from our offer?” “How much do you think you could save by using us?” Imagine if this could attract 20% more
business, it might be worth considering, mightn’t it? (i.e., use an open-ended question or a tie down question).Having made tens of millions in revenue for my employers and being successfully self-employed for over two decades,
I recommend you utilise these seven techniques and you will be one of the top 2 % of business people using the
telephone to the best advantage in your industry.
Jenny Cartwright is a multi-award winning sales and telesales trainer, keynote
speaker, coach and author of “Don’t Get Hung Up (How to sell products and
services by phone”) Based in Sydney Australia, Jenny can be reached on
+61 9427 3479 or Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.telesalestraining.com.au