10 Successful Telesales Strategies to Boost Your Company’s Growth

Before I throw some successful telesales strategies, tell me if this feels familiar:

If you spend hours calling prospects, yet nobody wants to buy it becomes extremely frustrating.

You start feeling helpless and you have no idea how to get yourself or your company out of this situation. The thing is you’re not alone, every business faces this situation at least once. And it’s out of crisis situations like this that businesses find unique strategies to grow rapidly.

As a business owner, you already put in a lot of effort and all you need to grow your sales is maybe just a little bit of strategy, and a slight change in direction to help improve your overall conversion rates.

As a platform, we have observed hundreds of companies overcome this phase. And based on those learnings here are 10 things that you can do to create a solid sales strategy for your business.

#1 Lead management and segregation

Sales don’t begin with the act of selling, rather it begins once you get the lead, i.e. any potential customer who can be converted into a paying customer by your sales team.

Lead segregation is done considering various factors.

For example, the date of acquiring the lead, background of the lead, the likeliness of conversion into a paying customer, etc. The basis of segregation of these leads could differ from one organization to the other. 

Your team members can be putting in 18 hours a day without any results if you don’t find a way to segregate and prioritize leads. You might get leads from various platforms and find it difficult to arrange and distribute so many Excel sheets amongst your sales team.

As a result, sometimes you might miss out on an important lead or an important follow-up could get missed! This is why properly segregating and prioritizing your leads is absolutely essential.

Here are 3 specific lead segregation workflows that you can implement to get the highest ROI on the sales team’s efforts:

1. Abandoned cart
   These are the people who either visited your booking page or your checkout page and then did not make the purchase. If you track your website visitors and target these specific visitors in your calling campaign it is going to give you the highest ROI. Because these people are already sold, they need that one final push from your sales team to make the payment!
   
2. Renewal reminders
   Whether you are in the SaaS business, pest control, AC repair, or any other business where people repetitively buy from you, you need to keep track of your customers lifecycle and you need to reach out to them when they are about to need the service. Because if they don’t remember you then they will reach out to your competitors. One simple method to implement this flow is using the follow-up call reminders feature in TeleCRM.
   
3. Cooling leads
   Your team called the prospect and he says he doesn’t need it right now. What about two months later? One simple trick to get a sharp increase in your revenue without chasing new leads is by finding all such leads who have been calling for a long time using CRM advanced filters – and sending them a quick bulk WhatsApp or SMS to remind them that you exist. If the sales team establishes the right rapport on the first call then just one message is enough for them to call back and ask for your service. This is especially crucial because otherwise those leads that you previously warmed would have just gone to your competitors!

Also Read: 4 Types Of Telemarketing That You Must Understand To Grow Your Business

#2 Pre-Calling Setup

A pre-call setup is very important as it helps sales executives to be better prepared with some understanding of who the prospect is and what he might be looking for. It also helps him get into the right mindset for getting the best result of the call because he can

Set Call-Objectives-

Before contacting the lead, you need to make sure that you’re clear with what you want out of the call. It could be:

• Make him curious about the product, or
• Get an in-person meeting, or
• Close, close, close

This varies depending on your business.

But deciding it beforehand gives a focus and direction to the call.

And also, a mechanism to track and evaluate, i.e. if you’re able to fulfill the call’s objective, it means that the call was successful!

Setting up a call objective for all sales reps can help you better evaluate the performance of the entire team.

Be thorough

With an understanding of your product and how it’s better than your competitors. An understanding of your product and its unique selling propositions is highly crucial to make sure that you’re able to align its features with what the consumer actually wants. USP basically means the benefit that you provide that nobody else can. While on the call, you might often hear customers saying, “That XYZ company is providing the same product at cheaper rates. Why should we buy from you?” Knowing your USP and the competitive advantage that you get from that USP means having an answer to this question before you even get on the call.

Frame a rough sketch of the lead through all the information that is available to you

Before talking to any prospect, you should know three things about them.

• Who is he, & what does he do?
• What is he looking for?

And two ways that your product or service can actually help him find the answers that he is looking for!

Performing basic research about the person you’re going to contact and trying to form a rough sketch of their preferences and mindset can do wonders for you. It gives you the feeling that you already know and that sense of familiarity means you get the confidence that you can easily close him.

#3 The 30-second rule

The first 30 seconds of any sales call can decide how your lead perceives you for the rest of the call.

Every lead comes into the call with a different mindset and agenda. In the previous section, we defined the meaning of success of that call for you and in order to be successful with the call, you have to understand your lead’s mindset in the first 30-secs of the call.

1. What do they want out of the call?
2. What is the root problem that they are trying to solve?
3. What will motivate them to listen to your entire pitch attentively?

Find out their needs and preferences in the first 30 seconds and then customize your entire pitch and form a better rapport with the lead. 

#4 Don’t be robotic

Use the following techniques to make them feel heard and build a solid rapport

1. Paraphrasing
   
   First, ask a question and then listen without interrupting, once they have stopped talking. Take a moment to process and then summarize what they just said. For example, if your client says, “I went through your software, the pictures are amazing but I think it is a little too complicated for my team.” you can paraphrase it to “You like the features but you are concerned about if your team can use it!”
   • It shows that you were listening and you understood. Subconsciously they are satisfied that you understood their needs correctly as a result, they feel heard and start liking you.
   • Gives them a chance to reclarify, i.e. if you missed something important, they can re-explain. This is one of the most powerful sales techniques because it relies on active listening. Every other sales rep that this client will talk to won’t listen. Their only priority is – jo rat ke aayen hain bas kisi tarah se wo bak dena hai. When you come in and actually listen to what he has to say, make him feel heard and that somebody actually understands him, that alone can close many deals!
2. Non-verbal cues- While physically interacting with your clients, you need to make sure to read the body language and facial expressions of your client appropriately to make sure that you modify your pitch accordingly. 
3. Voice Modulation- Don’t be the call-center guy! You don’t have to understand the science behind voice modulation to know why or how to use it to make your calls better. Using the same tone throughout the pitch can be extremely boring!
   1. Keep it real, talk like you talk in any normal conversation
   2. Keep the excitement of energy high
   3. Don’t get desperate emotional or angry because even if you’re on the phone your voice reveals and the prospect can tell! You don’t need an RJ’s voice to close sales. But you sure as hell can’t close if you sound like the call center guy.
      
4. Modify the mode of language with each lead
   
   
   This is very basic. Be receptive to how comfortable the client is, and if you gauge that he’s not! In the current language just ask which language he feels comfortable communicating in. If you know that language switch. If not, transfer the call to someone who does. Because the call is not about the prospect’s linguistic skills. It’s for the client to be able to communicate what he needs. And if he finds it difficult to communicate with you due to language or fluency barriers then you are unnecessarily making it all the more difficult on yourself!
5. Try to establish an emotional connection of the lead with the product – When a client is emotionally connected to a product/ a brand, they are more likely to invest in it. It’s highly essential for a sales executive to establish that emotional connection of the product with the client so as to fulfill their emotional needs pertaining to the product. Here are two simple questions that can help you achieve this.

1. What’s the biggest problem you are trying to solve with a CRM? How do you feel about it right now?
2. How would you feel if the problem is solved completely?

As we have clearly seen in the section, successfully selling over the phone is not just about pitch rat ke aana, aur bak dena. And if you want to develop this trend and grow in your career as a salesperson then it’s absolutely essential that you figure out these basics of telesales

#5 Align the needs of the lead with what your product has to offer.

As a sales executive, you need to make your clients feel that YOUR PRODUCT is EXACTLY WHAT HE IS LOOKING FOR.

Most people miss out on deals because they just pitch features and fail to differentiate their products for competitors. For example,  If you are selling a phone, it’s not just a commodity with features, it’s not just about that 16000 MP camera. It’s a brand. And talking to the customer (with ads and marketing materials in this case) gives you a chance to create your brand value and a brand image in the mind of that customer. Without that brand value, a Chinese competitor could come in and provide the same features at 1/3rd the price, and still, no self-respect and customer would buy that!

How can you do this with your product or service?

It starts with asking the question – how do I make him feel- “yes there are options but this is the only reliable choice”.

#6 Optimise & monitor your teams’ work with TeleCRM

If you have a big telesales team and you are in a growth mindset, then TeleCRM can be just the tool you need to make your work easy and set your business up for massive exponential growth. You can use

1. Autodialer for superfast seamless dialing.
2. Calls count & duration tracking for perfect team monitoring
3. Lead history to store & view all the information about any specific lead in a single place
4. Advanced filters and campaigns to segregate important leads and take special care of ’em!
5. Real-time reporting to monitor the entire team’s performance from anywhere

So just sit back, relaaaaax, and let effortless growth roll in!! And No, it’s not just about making your life easy or helping your business grow but also about making their job simple and easy so that in an ideal future they start loving their job and become badass at it, and you become the badass boss who runs the badass team.

#7 Satisfied Employees produce satisfying results.

Here’s how much sales managers deal with their sales team members

1. An extra 10 minutes during lunch break get a snarky look
2. Entering at 10:30 instead of 10:00 AM gets an ‘I see what you are doing‘ frown
3. A missed follow-up gets a verbal ‘that should never happen again’
   

That’s just bad bosses in action

No, I get their intentions and I’m not against the idea of discipline! And I don’t advocate complete freedom for all employees either! But this type of micromanagement means your team members are neither inspired know are trained to do their job.

And the interesting thing about managing people is that – you can get them to do their best work by pushing them. And if you want to do it it’s actually simple

1. You have to give them the right tools and training that they need to do their job.
2. You have to inspire them and make them feel that they are fighting a worthy cause.
3. You have to keep an eye out and whenever they get stuck in their pitch, in a difficult situation, or with a demanding/manipulative prospect you have to jump in and get them unstuck.

You might ask is it worth all the effort what if I do all this and they still don’t give their 100%? Yes, that’s absolutely possible! But to be completely honest, I am yet to find one employee who feels that he is working towards a worthy cause with a great team and still doesn’t do his best.

#8 Money is King

It takes time and effort to implement a new strategy across your entire team! So out of 10 which strategy will give you the highest ROI? It’s raining your team to better convert interested prospects into paying customers.

These are typically the people who are already half-sold by the time they reach your sales funnel. And the part that most salespeople find difficult is – OK I have conveyed the value, but now how do I bring up the money conversation?

1. What else do you need to know to make a decision?
2. Would you like to proceed with a monthly or quarterly plan?
3. If I answer all your questions and you realize that this is exactly what your name then when are you planning to start?

If your team knows how to start the money conversation and has been trained in basic negotiation skills, then you can rest assured that at least you are not going to miss out on the easiest leads!

Also Read: Negotiation in Sales – 10 Skills that Top Salespeople in India Use

#9 Out of sight, out of mind

“Jo dikhta hai, woh bikta hai”Agar yeh dialogue samajh lo to ye kisi bhi business owner ki kismat badal sakta hai.

Paise banane ke do tareeke hain! Yah to naye customers la kar. Ya fir purane customer se naye sales la kar

All business owners who are focused on growth focus on the first part but they neglect the easier second part of the business growth equation. This is why keeping in touch with your present customers is crucial. This does not mean sending them spammy Happy Diwali and good morning messages. Though that is better than doing nothing at all! Just find ways in which they can make better use of your product, and send them that as the content! For example

1. If you sell Bulk SMS sent them high-conversion message templates.
2. If you sell digital marketing services send them updates about the latest trends in digital marketing that can affect their business.
3. If you are into real estate send them information about the latest news and trends that can affect their future buying decision.

Basically, help them get more value out of what they have already purchased while staying in their active memory. One of the best ways to execute these keep-in-touch campaigns is through WhatsApp marketing.

#10 In the grand scheme of things, small happenings have their place.

Sales require a lot of patience! As convincing people to buy is tough! And just a few demanding prospects can make this process completely frustrating.

But consistency pays! And the value of consistently doing it starts to add up over time. Eventually

• You start learning how to not care about that one horrible call.
• You figure out the art of listening, and how you can use simple techniques like paraphrasing to make them feel heard, understood, and valued.
• You start becoming more patient and empathetic.

All these things might seem like a big leap from where you are right now but don’t get stuck on any single event or incident. Just trust the process and I assure you that you will get there. Just

• Make all your calls
• Take all follow-ups
• Consistently improve your skills and pitch
• Give every need the time to think it through and make an informed and empowered decision, instead of trying to twist their arm or forcing them to buy right away
• Be patient

It might happen immediately with some leads with others might take a lot of time to think, but understand that “Bade bade deshon mein aisi chhoti chhoti baatein hoti rehti hain“,This mindset will help you move past all the hurdles and understand that maintaining your motivation and patience is the key to closing sales.

Conclusion

A successful sales strategy comprises five essential elements. If used correctly, they can transform your company’s fortune.

1. Understanding yourself, your brand and you are unique value proposition better.
2. Understanding your target audience, and their needs better.
3. Using the above understanding to filter out irrelevant audiences from your sales process.
4. Monitoring, training, and incentivizing your team to close the right customers better.
5. Having a way to upsell the existing customers to get additional revenue.

And when it comes to implementing any new strategy there is only one line that holds true Pehle Istemaal karein phir vishwaas karein! Which strategy will be your first choice for implementing?