Sales Training for Telemarketers

Communication, customer management, and cross-selling skills are easily learned through sales training courses for telemarketers.

Sales courses and sales training courses were not created to train only the one-on-one seasoned sales executive or the ambitious company door to company door new sales person. Telemarketers are sales professionals. Sales training can turn your telemarketers into sales professionals. If your telemarketers are still reading off a script, your sales are not meeting their potential. Script reading can devalue company credibility and customer satisfaction. Script reading hinders the telemarketer to take the customer on a personal tour through your product or service. And now, more than ever, the Internet has armed customers with information on products, services, and your competitors. The telemarketer's potential customers and clients differ in their background, their stored memories and information, lifestyles, and key buying motives. Selling off a script wipes out all of the experiences and motives that can inspire and initiate a closed sale. Sales training creates more than improved selling skills, it increases confidence and motivation as well.

There is little doubt that a large telemarketing department needs consistency to make the department manageable. But consistency in exceeding sales goals is more profitable than a consistency in sales pitch recitals. Sales pitch recitals limit profit potential. There is no room to improve the environment for the sale or encourage questions that might result in a sale. Every customer has a unique personality, and every telemarketer has a unique sales personality. Sales courses and sales training courses for your telemarketers will give them the skills they need to manage the independent nature of a potential customer, and the skills needed to incorporate their own personality into the formula. Sales training does not create robots - it teaches people how to sell. Sales training is a great way to increase profit.

Courses in sales training for telemarketers can train a telemarketer how to define a product or service in a manner that will uncover the key buying motives from the potential buyer. Product definitions can be complex. Limiting a product description to a feature that pleases the masses will miss the sales opportunities to those who value other, previously unmentioned qualities of the product. A well-informed and well-trained telemarketing staff will be able to disseminate the product or service qualities that are most likely to result in a closed sale with the current potential buyer. One customer may be interested in specific materials or safety, another warranties or service, and yet another may be interested if it passes a particular test when used in a particular application scenario. If a telemarketing staff is informed of all product specifications and qualities and has gained the necessary sales knowledge and skill set through appropriate sales courses, a product can be sold under all of these circumstances based on the customer's key buying motive.

Sales training for telemarketers turns script readers into sales professionals. Telemarketers are hired to sell, but they cannot sell to their fullest potential if they are bound by a script, untrained in sales skills, and limited on their knowledge of the product or service. Training through sales courses and sales training courses for telemarketers will turn you telemarketers from a staff of enthusiastic readers to a staff of enthusiastic sales professionals. Get rid of the script and train your telemarketers to sell. At the end of the year, mediocre sales from your read-aloud story will be replaced by soaring profits from your telemarketing sales professionals.

(Article Source: By : Tim Williams Home)

Sales Management Training - Managing Lead Generation - Sales Prospecting

For salespeople to be effective lead generators, they must have both active and passive marketing programs. Now (1) their marketing program must be their own - not the company's (although the two can be in sync with each other), and (2) they will do both, halfheartedly or not at all unless you the sales manager shows them how and holds them accountable. Accountability means setting goals, actions and measurements. Then, review progress on a regular schedule to give meaningful feedback and motivation to reach agreed-upon metrics.

So here are some sales management training tips for managing an Active Lead Generation Process.

Active marketing is networking (a) up and out within existing accounts, (b) into competitors' and lost accounts, and (c) new markets.

For existing accounts do your sales people have 100% of their existing accounts' business? Do your sales people what it will take to steal accounts from your competitors? Do your sales people have a method to introduce and integrate your products into new markets? Probably not.

Now, the easiest way to get more business is to spread like a virus through all accounts, focusing on eventually getting to the C-level and/or profit center leaders and their immediate staffs. Your goal as a manager is to keep them focused on connecting with more and more people to learn their problems and potential opportunities that relate to your solutions portfolio. Then, with their gleaned knowledge, develop suggestions and strategies that these leaders find helpful. Try not to concentrate at first on the purchase, but rather on learning and then their buy-in to your suggestions. Learning their thinking will show what it will take to get buy-in. With buy-in comes support, and with support comes networking to those with the power to mandate changes, create budgets and to authorize purchases.

If your sales people stick with their one or two main contacts, their ability to discover opportunities and make suggestions that lead to purchases is severely limited. Therefore, you must insist upon an Executive Relationship Chart. The elements of such a tool include:

1. Who are all (up and out) involved people by name and title in that organization?
a. The powerful -- C-Level, Profit Center Leaders and their immediate staffs.
b. The influential, the functional and the impacted.
c. The administrators -- purchasing agents spec writers, engineers, and controllers.
2. Where does your sales person rank on the credibility pyramid for each of these people -- 1-low to 6-a resource/consultant?
3. What actions is each taking to improve his or her position with each decision maker?
4. When will these actions be completed, and
5. How will you know it's complete and how will you measure it?

Obviously, if your salespeople are a 5 to 6 on the credibility pyramid with the powerful, they will have access to new opportunities, which they have helped create. Conversely, if they are stuck with low-level administrators and functional people, they will be just another one of the bunch of competitors.

Your job for helping your people create quality leads is to keep them networking, learning from each individual and offering-up ideas. This process will take time, but once it catches-on, it will produce an ongoing flow of leads from new divisions, for new products, and more and more. This applies to existing and lost customers, competitors' accounts, and new markets as well. My rule is 50% of sales people's prospecting time should be spent on existing accounts, 30% on lost and competitors' accounts where they have contacts, and 20% in those accounts where they have no contacts.

So start creating Executive Relationship Charts for each of your existing accounts and those accounts you would like to penetrate. These charts will yield your networking plans and the actions your people will take to improve their credibility with the powerful and influential. From these actions will emanate the leads that generate sales.

More Management training

Greatest Sales Strategy Ever

By Jon Gordon

As a student of people and ideas I had to admit that what two guys are doing in a Northeast Florida Starbucks is absolutely genius.

The other day as I tried to pay for my green tea at my local Starbucks the cashier said, “Don’t worry about it sir.

Those guys over there are paying for it today.” She then handed me their business card from a stack by the register.

Turns out the guys were wealth management, financial planners who once a week, at different times, will spend a few hours at this Starbucks and buy customers their coffee.

Most people, like me, will walk over and thank the gentlemen and walk away with their business card in our pocket.

I thought about how brilliant this was. People love their Starbucks in the morning. While they are waiting in line they smell that aroma and think, “Yes, there is a God for only God could make something that smells so good.”

For many the Starbucks experience has become a ritual or right of passage that helps them take on the day. It’s become an emotional experience that makes them feel good. It’s become a bond of love.

Imagine yourself at the register, which is very easy for many of us, as you anticipate holding that coffee in your hand, thinking “YES”. Then the cashier tells you it’s FREE. Wow, an unexpected gift. Now instead of feeling good you are feeling great.

You feel so good you don’t mind placing a stranger’s card in your pocket. When you walk over and say thank you to these financial planners they cease to be strangers and become more like acquaintances and neighbors. Then about an hour later when the caffeine really kicks in you’re feeling so great, you think, “Wow, those financial planners are great guys.”

Now instead of acquaintances they have become more like long lost friends. These financial planners brilliantly connected something you love with a service they offer.

Not surprisingly I found out that these men do receive a good number of calls from the Starbucks customers interested in planning for their financial future.

It is said we remember one third of what we read, half of what people tell us and 100 % how feel. Whether we are watching a commercial, listening to a teacher, or talking to a sales person it is how we feel that impacts us the most.

We can’t remember what we ate for lunch a week ago but we can remember where we were on 9-11 when we saw the World Trade towers collapse. We remember how we feel and when it comes time to investing our money, buying a product, purchasing insurance, or choosing a restaurant and we will make choices based on these feelings.

This leads us to the greatest sales strategy ever—but it doesn’t involve coffee. While the Starbucks idea is brilliant it isn’t the best way to build a business.

There is a far more powerful strategy to create an emotional connection and foster and emotional memory. It’s so simple and it doesn’t even cost a dime. It’s to love your customers. Caffeine is temporary but love lasts forever.

Love and business are two words you usually don’t here in the same sentence but when it comes to sales, customers do business with people they like and who love and care about them.

When customers feel like they matter and feel cared for they love back with more loyalty, more business and more referrals.

So if you are in sales, and we all are, I encourage you to make loving and caring about your customers your top priority. You don’t have to buy them coffee to connect your product or service with something they love. You can be the connection. Your love can be the bridge that connects your customer with your product or service.

After all no matter what we are selling, people are always buying our energy and making decisions based on how our energy makes them feel. And while coffee is an energy source that makes people feel good it doesn’t compare to the energy of love.

Look out for your customers interests. Show them you care. Share the love and you’ll be so successful you’ll be able to buy your own Starbucks and give away all the coffee you want.
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Jon Gordon is a speaker, consultant and author of the international best seller The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work and Team with Positive Energy and The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work, & Training Camp: What the Best do Better than Everyone Else. Visit him at www.JonGordon.com

*brought to you by SalesTrainingAdvice.com

The Benefits of Sales Training

A vigorous sales force is the basis upon which any successful business is based.  Without sales, there are no accounts to service, no products to deliver and no services to offer.  The company that is able to best get the word out about what the company has to offer is the one that captures the lion’s share of a given business.

Sales training can be difficult to implement in-house for a small company with few resources.  Therefore hiring a sales training consultant is a means by which any organization, large or small, can achieve similar results.  Sales training can rely upon anything from printed materials and books to live sales presentations to meetings and sales presentations live on the Internet.   Carefully consider the training needs of the company before deciding on the right sales training course.

Another important consideration is deciding which employees need to be trained.  Include members of company management and administrative support staff in addition to account executives. For example, learning a new sales training technique can enable a customer service representative to deal with a difficult customer in a positive and mutually beneficial way.

In the end, choosing the right sales training regimen for your particular organization will ensure greater levels of client retention and satisfaction, in addition to increasing the number and value of accounts that are secured.  In a given industry, excellent sales training separates the most successful companies from all the rest.