Engaging to Win
Customers and Prospects contact your business by phone or call in to make enquiries about your products and services.
They expect to be acknowledged and greeted and treated like VIP’s when they make contact with you.
No matter what size company anyone works with, the best advice for business owners and sales team members is to be completely in-tune and focused on the client or prospect when he/she makes contact with you. In fact, nothing else matters when you are engaging with a client or prospect.
Here are some tips to shed some light on our philosophy:
- Put everything aside and focus on the person making the inquiry. Have a pen and note pad handy and make notes while they are talking. Make sure you are not distracted by background noise or other conversations in your office.
- If the caller has to wait for more than a minute then have someone take a message. Ensure that you will call them back with urgency. If your clients and prospects call into your business and you can not serve them immediately, the best response is to acknowledge them and tell them you will be with them shortly.
- Start the conversation by building some rapport. Don’t get right into business, build a conversation that will “schmooze” your caller. Talk about the weather, or something of interest that happened in the news, whatever the conversation is, ensure it is pleasant and positive. building a good rapport with your client, is that it makes the client or prospect feel more comfortable with you. It is the first step towards building trust.
- Take note of their name, a good contact number, and an alternate way of contact like their email address.
- Use their name at least three times throughout the conversation. It makes the conversation more personable and it keeps them engaged.
- Take a genuine interest in their inquiry. Ask open ended questions. Try and establish their pain – the sales people that establish the clients or prospects pain are the ones that win most of the business. When you establish the clients’ pain, you can then increase your enquiries to wins ratios, but more importantly you can often sell your premium high margin product and can stand a better chance of selling more “duty of care” items. Duty of Care items are what we describe as “add-ons”. It’s the add on sales that help you gain more turnover and more profit in your business.
- If the clients calls into your business, show them the product first hand, let them touch and feel, ( or experience ) the product. Don’t just give them a price. Total engagement with a client or prospect means they are getting to know how much you care – this builds even more trust.
- Explain the benefits of the product – too many sales people tell me about the materials that a product is made from rather than tell me what the benefits of this space age material will mean to me. Really when you think about it, it’s all about the client or prospect and what’s in it for them.
At some point you need to ask the client if they would like any more information, and if not, then it is time to ask them for the order. This is a topic of another conversation, but remember the 8 tips above will certainly have the client in a better position of trusting you and will give more of a chance of winning the deal.
The next time the phone rings or a customer calls in remember “the reason you exist is to be 100% focused when a client or prospects makes contact with you”
George Manolis is a speaker and author who delivers public and in-house training programs in sales all around Australia – you can contact him on 1300 791 571 or via email: george@sfsi.com.au.