Sunday, June 7, 2009

Effective Telephone Selling For Todays Market

By Terry Stanfield

Effective telephone selling happens because of the following five steps. You will learn what you need to do to accomplish effective telephone selling. This can be one of the most effective ways to find new clients. Few people are willing to take the perceived risk to do telephone selling so this can put you in the small minority of business owners doing this. This is an avenue of business where little competition will occur.

The first point of effective telephone selling is to set a goal and create a script. Whenever you are developing a script, it is important that you have a goal. How can you determine whether you are successful if you have no way to objectively look at your overall results? The script helps you so that you can have consistent habits every single time with each prospect. This will help so that you can remain on point.

The second point of effective telephone selling is to look for the person who makes the decision. It does not matter if you have a good conversation with employees of a business if you are not able to sell to the decision maker. You have to go after the one who has the ability to write checks. You want to respect your time and you are not respecting your time if you do not go after the decision maker right from the start.

It is then important to make a quick introduction and explain to the decision maker why he or she needs to listen to you. This is the third point of effective telephone selling and it is important to have the decision maker understand through the use of relevant facts. You only have one chance when working to create business and this step is so critical.

The fourth step in effective telephone selling is to accomplish what you set out to do. You want to create a business case and then close. Closing can take two different forms primarily when you are looking to do effective telephone selling. You may look to sell directly over the phone or you may look to do prospecting. Prospecting will happen if you have a difficult service or product to sell. This is important because it is easier to sell and close in person than over the telephone.

The final step is to assess your results. It is important to follow the script and go after the decision maker followed by the conversation closing. This will help so that you can get through effective telephone selling. You need to look at the end at your results and see how you can improve. This will make your business that much more effective.

About the Author: