For most businesses, the phone is an essential tool for marketing and developing your lead base. Telesales continues to be a hugely important part of this, helping to nurture and build those leads into appointments and ultimately sales.
If you’re looking to bring your A game to the sales floor this year – here are 3 ways you can get the process rolling.
Responding To Hot Leads Quickly
Leads will flow into your business everyday, either by phone, internet or by email. Even so, 78% of companies accept that a portion of quality leads never get the attention they deserve. This real issue here is that leads begin to cool rapidly, as consumers and businesses purchase from other vendors – or simply loose interest.
There has been research into how leads cool, leads that are responded to within 5 minutes convert at a massively higher rate than those left for 30 minutes. It gets even worse the longer that time period takes too, with each hour cooling your lead until it becomes absolutely stone cold.
The easy way around this, is to set companywide policies on how fresh leads are dealt with. By using a dialler system such as the one Blue Telecoms provides, you can also push fresh leads directly into your telesales agents queue to be called. This can help your business ensure as many of your leads are responded to within the 5 minutes golden period.
It’s also worth mentioning that automated responses just don’t cut it in the marketing world. There’s absolutely nothing that can compare with a human response – keeping those leads pipping hot.
Analysing Your Sales And Refining Your Approach
Sales performance is never something that can be left without analysis. Sometimes, one method of approaching a lead might not work – whilst a seperate method will convert at a far higher rate. This doesn’t mean you have to resort to rigid split testing, but a good phone call from a business development manager with the right questions can really point your agents in a right direction.
By optaining feedback from your customers, you can constantly refine your approach to each lead – ensuring slow and steady improvements over time. You can also begin to understand what techniques suit your particular industry, as what works in one arena may not fly in others.
It might be a simple case of framing your proposition in a better way, or possibly there are pricing issues you need to address. Whatever you discover, asking the correct questions will yield you the data to boost your conversion rate.
Profiling Customers
Good telesales agents can also profile customers. Simply by talking with them, they can understand who make decisions, who has influence and also what issues need to be resolved for a hot lead to convert to a sale. Great telemarketing agents can also quickly figure out the “hot button” topic that will lead to sales, up-sells and further opportunities down the road.
With this helpful information, your sales staff can refine their approach on an individual customer basis to ensure the client gets the exact sales response they require. Most companies don’t even consider this, yet it’s possibly the biggest thing you can do to take your sales game to the next level!
A good telesales team does way more than canvass, they can quality leads, find the issues that matter and turn a hot lead into an inferno! Use them wisely!
If you’re interested in learning more about responding to leads within the golden 5 minutes, and how Blue Telecoms can help you achieve this – get in touch with our friendly sales team.
