Help & Advice
Acquiring and Keeping Customers over the telephone

Acquiring and Keeping Customers over the telephone

By definition businesses need to grow to survive and often turn to the telephone as a way of generating new business or business leads for their sales team. The emphasis of this activity is often on winning new business. Outbound telephone activity is most successful when it is part of an overall strategy for developing business.

In business-to-business sales, your strategy needs to consider where you will get most payoff from your activity. Many businesses are forced into outbound telephone activity by a need to grow or to defend themselves against a competitor who is eroding their market share. Consider the calls you make in the context of your overall strategy and your database of customers, nil accounts (ones who have stopped spending with you) and prospects. If you don’t do this you run the risk of investing huge amounts of time and energy in call activity that gives meagre returns and is demotivating for all concerned.

A lot of businesses give the outbound calls to people who have been employed as inbound call handlers or administrators. Very often these people hate the idea of telephone selling because they associate it with the calls they receive when they are settling down with their favourite television programme or are in the middle of their evening meal. Business-to-business telephone sales is different. Your fundamental aim should be to develop relationships with potential and existing customers so that they understand the benefits of doing business with you and value your contact.

The contact you make needs to be meaningful and increase your revenues. That can not be done in one phone call. Successful campaign management activity is both a science and an art. If you examine your sales process, and develop dialogues that work for each type of call you need to make; if you do your sums about the numbers of calls that can be made and where those are best placed; if you train your people, and ensure they are not distracted from their outbound activity; in short, if you are clear what you want to achieve, and organise your people to give yourself the best chance of doing that, then your outbound call activity will bring results for your business.

But your competitors are probably calling the same customers that you are identifying as important to your business. How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors? Quite simply, you differentiate yourself in the calls that you make. If they are heavily scripted, that vital chance to connect with the customer is lost. Your emphasis is usually on the number of calls rather than the quality or outcome of the calls. Don’t make the fatal mistake of just setting targets based on the number of calls that people make, believing that the numbers will get you results. Don’t count calls – make calls count!

The people you select to telephone your customers need to understand your competitors, your products and services, and how to explain them over the telephone. They need to understand your sales process and handle objections effectively. Most importantly, they need to understand how to structure a call, and then have the skills to connect with and relate to the customer. They need the skills to have meaningful conversations, to allow intelligent dialogue to build a relationship that benefits both your business and the customer. They will be trying to build a relationship, maintain a relationship or indeed regenerate a lost account. They can only do this if they understand how the telephone affects communication, and what they need to do differentiate your calls from those of your competitors.

If your company has a clear brand your brand values can be incorporated into the call to create the Brand Voice. This can be a really useful coaching tool and can translate your brand into behaviour which builds your reputation. The language, the call structure and the communication skills of your people and their coaches will build the experience for the customer, which will reflect the promises you make in your advertising. By developing the skills and processes to manage customer relationships by telephone, you will see how cost effective this can be as a means of good contact with your customers.

http://www.intelligentdialogue.co.uk/