Five Ways To Improve The Scheduling Of Telephone Appointments

Five Ways To Improve The Scheduling Of Telephone Appointments

By:


Scheduling telephone appointments is one of the key steps where it is important to execute well when making cold calls. The good news is that there are some clear things that we can do to improve our success rate in this area.

1. Communicate Value

One area where there is often room for improvement is the area of effectively communicating the business value that we have to offer. Our natural instinct is the introduce ourselves, tell the prospect about the company we work for, and tell them about our products and all of the great things that they can do. While this points are important to share with the prospect at some point, the biggest thing that the prospect cares about is how we can help them from a business value standpoint.

The products or services that we sell likely have a set of features, and these features will provide some sort of technical benefit or value. For example, if we sell software that helps to automate a manual process, this automation is a technical benefit. And while that is important to discuss with the prospect, it is not the business value that we offer. The automation of this process likely helps to decrease costs, increase revenue and profits, and maybe helps to improve compliance. This benefits are at the business level and this is the value that can help to schedule telephone appointments.

2. Uncover Pain

It is very help to persuade a prospect to agree to telephone appointments when we are able to uncover pain. Pain that the customer is experience is essentially something that is not working well or something that could be working better. If we want the prospect to keep talking with us and move on to an appointment, it is very important to identify pain as if there is no pain, there is no reason to make a change.

3. Build Interest

Once we uncover pain, it is important to work to build interest on the prospect's side. If we don't build interest, it could be like trying to reel in a fish that has a hook in its mouth but the hook in not hooked on to anything. We want to share some information with the prospect so that the hook gets lodged in there when it is time to close for telephone appointments.

4. Build Rapport

People buy from people they like so building rapport can greatly impact our ability to schedule appointments and close deals. Some people believe that rapport just naturally builds between two people and that it is either going to be there or it is not. The reality is that there are some very clear things that we can do with the prospect on a cold call to decrease their guard and take some steps toward establishing rapport.

5. Sales Role-Play

Cold calling is one of the most challenging sales activities that a sales person will do. Not only do you never really know exactly how a call is going to go, but there is also likely a lot of information that you will have to have fresh in your mind in terms of some sort of call script. One way to make cold calling easier and improve results is to practice anticipated scenarios and objections through some sort of sales role-play.

About the Author:
Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Telephone Appointments or Sales Coaching.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


Tags: , , , , , , , ,

|

Loading...
Related....
Videos...

Recent UnCategorized Articles

Comments

Still can't find what you are looking for? Search for it!

Loading

Site Navigation:

Copyright 2005-2011 ArticleSnatch, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Service.