Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 25, 2009 @ 01:19 AM
Every day I monitor my website to see what search terms people used to arrive at www.alextrain.com Today, someone searched on "how should a telesales person dress for work". I've never addressed the issue, but this comes up sooner or later in virtually every telesales department. So here's my answer, with an important caveat (see below):
A telesales person could dress in a clown suit or be nude (some at-home workers do this, I'll bet), and as long as he or she is a producer, it doesn't matter. One of the perks of working in inside sales is that you don't have to "dress for success," like you would if you were in outside sales. There is no extant data of which I'm aware that links professional dress with telesales success, so if you're an inside sales manager, I'd give a lot of leeway to how your inside folks dress, and prioritize productivity challenges instead. One of the best telesales people I ever worked with was John Dee, and I don't believe I ever saw John wear anything but shorts to work. John's management was smart enough to recognize that John was an all-star, and John responded by making great numbers and treating his customers really well. So there's an example from the real world in terms of how little dress really means to telesales success.
Now here's the caveat: if you're an inside salesperson, and you have a goal of eventually getting into management, you will have to dress for success, from day one. A good rule of thumb is to dress like your executives dress, whether it's business casual or in suits. It's an unwritten rule that execs always notice the good dressers in the work force, and if you dress well, you will be noticed. And when it comes to getting promoted, superior dress habits are definitely factored in, although not always explicitly discussed. So if you're a telesales rep that's on a mission to run your own department someday, please consider investing in a professional wardrobe if you haven't already. It's never too late to start dressing professionally, so if you don't, and want to get considered in the eventual management picture, why not start tomorrow?
The subject of dress rarely comes up in my telesales courses, although once, as we were returning from a break, the class was engaged in a spirited discussion of naked telemarketing from home. I put the kibosh on it, returned to the curriculum, and suggested the class take up the subject in off-hours. I've got a lot in my telesales curriculum, but nothing on that!
So bottom-line, dress any way you want as long as you're making your numbers, but do keep an eye to professional dress if a promotion to management is something you see in your horizon.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 18, 2009 @ 12:25 AM
As salespeople, sometimes we're so happy about getting an order that we forget to do an important bit of upselling, namely telling the prospect what he or she could get with a little more of an investment. When I go out shopping, I'm sometimes confused by the vast number of products and options available in virtually everything I buy. And frankly, many salespeople don't do a very good job helping me. A classic example is what happened recently when a friend bought a laptop computer, as I was along for the shopping trip. And yes, there's a sales tip here that is relevant for telesales people.
My friend was focused on getting a certain brand of computer, looked at all the models, read the specs, and decided which one he wanted. So he asked the sales rep to pull one out of stock and write up the order. "Just another question," I said, "what's the next step up?" The rep showed us a more pricey unit, but with a better screen. As it turns out, my friend often views multiple documents on the same screen, and that better screen was worth the money, so my friend bought it. But the salesperson never asked, so I had to!
In my inside sales courses, I preach a lot on the value of asking the prospects' needs, but even the best reps sometimes forget. So here's a sales tip want you to consider. The next time you're writing up an order, just stop for a moment and tell the prospect the following:
"From what we've discussed, I think this solution is going to fit your needs very well. Before we start on the paperwork, let me take a moment to tell you what just a little more of an investment will buy you." Then tell the prospect, and let him or her make the decision.
As a consumer, I can't tell you how many things I've bought that were upgrades from what I originally intended to buy, from cars, to electronics, to antiquities. In each case, I had to ask the salesperson about "the next best thing." About 50% of the time, I bought the higher-end item. Sometimes it was thousands of dollars more, but I was a lot happier with my purchase. You can get into this habit yourself while shopping for almost anything. Always ask about the next step up. Once you do, you'll probably finding yourself paying a bit more, but getting better stuff! An old sales adage says that "when you buy quality, you only cry once." And you can transfer this habit to your own sales prospects. Make this one of your call objectives. Always tell them about what they'll get if they pay a little more, and add this sales technique to your Best Practices Playbook, and I'll bet you'll increase sales numbers, too.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 11, 2009 @ 01:30 AM
Acquiring a superior skillset for closing sales is a lifelong proposition, and one of the things I tell people that attend my telesales training classes is that you always want to be in learning mode whenever you're buying something yourself. You can pick up great techniques when buying from good sales reps, and you can also learn what not to do when buying from sales reps with poor sales skills.
There are three ways I've seen sales reps repeatedly lose easy sales, and this week's post describes what they are, along with examples of how they occurred. Although my examples are all from face-to-face selling, they occur in telesales as well. And they all have one thing in common, which I'll discuss at the end of the post. Here they are:
1) Thinking the prospect is too ignorant to understand your solution. Sometimes arrogance can prevent a salesperson from making a sale. When I founded my company, I needed to buy a really great car to replace my hot red Camaro, which was not an appropriate business car. I went to a Mercedes dealership dressed in blue jeans, because if I was going to be involved in price negotiations, I didn't want to look like an easy target. The sales rep came out to meet me, and my first question was "Tell me why I should buy a Mercedes." He told me to go to the library. I'm not kidding! I told him if I wanted to go to the library, I'd already be there. Instead of asking me why I was even considering a Mercedes, he just walked away. And so did I. The rep mistook my good question for an ignorant one, and didn't get the sale.
2) Not being persistent enough to stay in touch with prospects that contacted you first. Still thinking a Mercedes might be a good choice, I found another small dealer that had a bunch of classic Mercedes vehicles in a very large garage. He was informed, treated me well, and I told him I'd return the next day to test drive one. The next day, he referred me to his nice-looking daughter, who was a salesperson for his company. I picked one I liked, and asked her for a test drive. She told me it was too much of a bother to move a few cars to get that one out, and that typically Mercedes buyers knew what they were looking for. So I said thanks and walked away. Neither the nice Mercedes guy or his daughter ever called me back. I guess I wasn't a very good buyer. A couple of days later, I bought a nifty Porsche 930 Turbo from someone that let me take a test drive and didn't treat me like I was an idiot. A little bit of persistence from the Mercedes people, and they might have been able to get me back and sell me a car.
3) Forgetting that Sales is primarily about taking care of the needs of the prospect, not yours. One day my laptop computer died, and I desperately needed another one, as I was designing a sales course that had an immediate deadline. I walked into a well-known national computer company store where they had several on display. There were two salespeople sitting at a desk in front of a computer, and since neither had greeted me, I went over to them instead. "I've got a question about that laptop over there," I said. "Sorry," replied one of them, who appeared to be a manager, "we're doing sales training right now. Can you come back tomorrow?" I looked at the fellow that was being trained, and said to him "You have nothing to learn from the sales training you're getting right now." I walked out, and they let me go. I drove further down the street and bought a laptop that I took home on the spot. The manager at the first store could have paused the sales training to do some real-time mentoring and assist his salesperson in getting the sale, but was so focused on what he was doing at the moment that he caused his store to lose a sale.
So what do these three "lost sales" situations have in common? They were all "bluebirds." Companies spend thousands of dollars every year on marketing list mailings, trade shows, seminars, and websites, attempting to encourage bring serious buyers to contact the company. Inbound calls we call "bluebirds" fly in through the sales window, but it's not by accident. Someone worked real hard in the background, trying to get the prospect motivated enough to make the first contact. Each of the examples above represents a bluebird, a situation in which the buyer needed the product, had money, was ready to buy, and just needed the salesperson to make it easy. Because the salesperson was focused on his or her agenda rather than the prospect's, the sale was lost, and a competitor got the business. In a complex sales environment, sometimes it becomes all too easy to ignore the simple stuff and take the business when it's virtually handed to you. Those bluebirds represent the results of a tremendous amount of effort on the part of your marketing department. Please don't make the mistake of thinking the inbound prospect is ignorant or wasting your time, even if his or her questions aren't predictable. If the prospect calls, it means something. These people probably have a list of three of four companies they're going to call. If you do a great job of understanding their needs and offering an appropriate solution, you may be able to handle sales objections, prove the effectiveness of your solution, do some price negotiation, and get the order on the spot without having to do an evaluation or demonstration. After you've done your qualifying, never forget to ask for the order, even if it's on that first inbound call. Bluebirds don't happen by accident. Add this approach to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 04, 2009 @ 01:30 AM
This has got to be one of the more serious sales objections in any salesperson's day, and because technology is moving so rapidly, can occur at almost any time. I'll tell you how it happened to me, and what I did about it.
I once sold a hardware-based software debugger, a great product, and we sold thousands for $5000 each. One day, a new competitor came up with a product that did a lot of what ours did, and sold for $400. We tested it, and it was a great product! The only feature difference was that it didn't have something called hardware breakpoints, a feature that not all software developers needed. So I had to reposition our product. I never like to knock the competition, so I decided a good approach was to "damn with faint praise" and position our competitor into a small corner of the developer world. Our prospects and customers were savvy buyers and read all the journals, and a large percentage of them started asking how our product, which cost ten times more, stacked up against theirs. And even if they didn't need hardware breakpoints, here's how I responded. Let's call their product the ABC Debugger:
"ABC makes a really good product, and it's terrific if you're building a home software program to run a sprinkler system. But if you're in serious production mode, and have a hard timeline for getting a product to market, our debugger is the only way to go."
Of course, I had to sell the value of hardware breakpoints, too, even if the value wasn't perceived initially. You know that I place a real value on asking ROI questions, which I teach today in my telesales training courses, so I knew what they were building, who their customers were, and had an idea of how much revenue that product was going to produce for them. My customers' concerns about product rollout timefames turned out to be way more important than a $4500 cost differential per unit, and our sales never faltered. Within a year, our own engineers developed a new flagship product that sold for $20,000 and was wildly successful, but we never stopped successfully selling our $5000 debugger, either.
Damning with faint praise is a great technique when your prospect brings up the name of a worthy competitor. Use it along with your important ROI questions, and add it to your Best Practices Playbook. And if you have another way to handle this sales objection that's worked successfully for you, tell us about it!