What do you say when you make your first telephone call to a prospect?
Being the commercial director here at Great Guns Marketing, I receive a lot of cold calls. Most of them, very annoyingly, start with “Hello Mick, how are you today”.
Why do people insist on doing that? All it says to me is ‘here comes a sales call, put your sales call handling head on’. This isn’t a very helpful head, I can tell you.
The call usually continues with “I’m Harry, calling from Acme Telecoms”. Harry will then recite “We are the UK’s biggest and best supplier of landline and mobile communications”. Are you really, many congratulations, but so what?
Harry now moves on to the next piece of his script.
Now, I’m like just about every person who buys anything anywhere; I buy benefits! Thus far, Harry hasn’t mentioned a benefit as I’m sure you will have noticed. Not only that, I’m a human being – awkward things human beings. I don’t respond well to someone reading a script to me – a script that he’ll also read to the other 99 people he’ll call today. So Harry has no chance of getting me hooked or making my ears prick up with what he’s said so far.
It’s often said that you have a few seconds on the phone to get someone’s attention – that’s very true – Harry’s had his few seconds and completely wasted it.
Some recent research identified the top 3 business imperatives concerning directors at the moment. The top 3 were:-
- I need to save money
- I need more revenue
- I need to save time
If Harry had not wasted my time by asking how I am and immediately gave me a strong benefit that helped me address one of my business imperatives, he may well have got a hearing. I’d certainly be interested enough to continue the conversation and if he was on his game, he’d ask a very wide open question to find out more about what’s keeping me awake at night, giving him the opportunity to give me more detail on how he can help me sleep.
What our telemarketers find gets them the results our clients want is to give a quick introduction – “Hello Mr Spain, I’m Harry Smith calling from Acme Telecom” – then presenting the prospect with a very strong benefit tailored to address their business imperative, they’re off to a good start and built a foundation for a conversation.
Following this with a carefully crafted wide open question will bring out the information we need to build a conversation leading to getting our client in front of the prospect.
Like most things in life, it’s not rocket science; except rocket science, of course!
Are you doing enough marketing?
In many ways, the more important question is “how much marketing do you need to do to achieve your revenue and profit targets”?
If you can answer that question with a degree of accuracy, then don’t bother to read the rest of this blog!
If you’re still reading, I guess you can’t answer that question with confidence. Well, something that we do continuously, that may help you, is to analyse the results we achieve from our various marketing channels. In that analysis we collect data showing how much marketing effort we have put into each channel, the ratio of effort to results and the resulting number of orders and volumes of revenue from each channel.
We then apply those factors looking forward based on our revenue and profit plans for the year ahead.
Of course, we add intelligence to those numbers in terms of how the markets are maturing and how the results of our marketing activities will change over time. We then define all of the actions we need to take in order to make those projections a reality, and this becomes our marketing plan for the year.
The progress against this plan is monitored weekly at the operational level and monthly at board level.
Using this approach, our company has consistently grown by more than 25% over the last 14 years.
We call it our ‘Go for Growth’ strategy and it really works for us!
Pop a cork on us!
We have a great incentive for anyone referring prospects to us and I thought you may like to hear the idea. It works for us and could work for you unless you already have a better way of doing this.
It works like this; if anyone refers a prospect to us, and that prospect places an order, then the referring person gets a case of wine. This is a great win-win as we save on our marketing and selling costs and the referring person gets a nice case of wine to drink at their leisure.
We have a small promotional card that we hand out to people explaining the principle of this scheme and explaining what to do.
Give it a try and if you know someone looking for a brilliant telemarketing company; you know where to come!
How much time do you spend thinking about your business?
I read an article today about a man called John Elfreth Watkins. Back in 1900, Watkins made a number of predictions about what the world would be like in the year 2000. A number of his predictions have come into being such as digital photography, mobile phones and ready cooked meals.
Watkins didn’t use terms like ‘digital photography’, that would have been amazing, but he did predict the principles embodied in digital photography.
Reading the article it made me think about how much time busy business people spend thinking about the future and thinking about what the world will look like in a few years time, and what impact that world will have on their business. The key question being, of course, what do business leaders need to do to plan and prepare to continue to succeed in the world of the future.
The business guru Charles Handy introduced us to ‘discontinuous change’ several years ago – change that can’t be predicted by extending a straight line graph into the future. Take digital photography for instance, if you manufactured digital cameras in the early days, you may have predicted the growth of the digital camera market along a straight line into the future. That straight line has probably been destroyed by the majority of mobile phones having a high-resolution digital camera in them.
This does raise a question for business leaders. How much time do we spend thinking about the future of our businesses and the world in which we will be operating in the future? How much time to we spend planning and preparing our businesses to continue to thrive in that future world. Working on the business as well as in the business, as they say!
12 blogs of Christmas; number 12
What’s your customer service experience??
So, the 12 blogs of Christmas come to an end (thanks for taking the time to read them) and the 12 days of Christmas are about to start! For our last blog let’s think about one of the most vital parts of business – customer service.
What’s the general view of customer service in this country?? We all experience service all the time be it in a local shop, supermarket, garage, tax office or wherever? There’s also plenty of service to experience in many and varied ways online.
Take 5 minutes and have a think about your personal experiences of service. How many times do you think it was great and would result in you going back to that company time and again, and how many times was it left sadly wanting?
We all know that delivering great service to every customer every time is a real challenge and we all know the impact that great, and poor, customer service has on the bottom line.
So, have you spent your 5 minutes thinking about the service you’ve received? When was the last time you were really, really impressed with the service you received? Think about what made it so good. Think about how it made you feel. Think about how your picture the company that delivered that service.
Now think about your own company. If your clients had gone through the same 5 minute exercise as you just did, would they have identified the service provided by your company as one of their greats? Have you ever experienced your own company’s service. You may have mystery shoppers and all the other sensing stuff but there’s no substitute for your own experience. Ring your own order or help line; place your own website enquiry; buy from your own shop, etc. See what it’s really like and what your customers really experience.
We all know that it costs 6 times as much to attract a new client than it does to keep an existing one, we all know that renewing clients are the drivers of profitability, etc.
At Great Guns, we’re members of the Institute of Customer Service and have their ServiceMark accreditation for excellence in service. Working with them has really helped us focus on this critical area of the business and help us reap the benefits of getting it right.
Let’s make 2012 the year of service and lets all reap the buying and selling benefits that it brings!
12 blogs of Christmas; number 11
When does a hot lead go cold?
Welcome to blog 11 of our 12 blogs of Christmas. It’s nearly there – getting very excited now – so are the kids!! Maybe this blog is a bit negative for the season, but let’s have a think about it anyway.
I am often astounded by the responses I get when I express interest in a company or a product through a website. Sometimes I get no contact from the company at all, which speaks volumes about that company and is likely to result in me never showing interest in them or their products again.
Sometimes I get contacted a few days later which again makes me think that I’m nowhere near the top of their priorities as an interested hot prospect.
Other times I get a call almost immediately from someone really keen to talk to me about my areas of interest and how the benefits they can bring that can help me address my issue.
This is equally true of all other marketing methods where the response from the companies doing the marketing can be very variable.
It seems bizarre to me, particularly in this day and age, that marketers often put out great and effective marketing programmes using a range of techniques, but the process of responding to the enquiries stimulated by those enquiries just doesn’t carry the same urgency.
We all know that hot leads don’t stay hot very long these days with the many pressures business leaders are under. We also all know that new prospects are unlikely to only be looking at your solution and are more likely to be looking at a number of options to make comparisons of price and performance. The one company that responds quickest and most positively to leads and enquiries often ends up in pole position to win the business.
Think of a lead like this; if your average order value, or value of a new customer over the first year is, say, £10,000 and every 10 leads or enquiries result in a new order or new customer, then EVERY lead or enquiry that you treat right is worth £1,000. Focuses the mind a bit huh?
Happy business growth in 2012!
12 blogs of Christmas; number 10
Is this week a good time for sales appointment making?
This week is a bit of a wind down week for Christmas isn’t it? It’s the week where the year comes to an end and the hard work during the year slows down. It’s a week of Christmas parties.
So is this a good week to be generating leads and trying to make sales appointments? Well, our 14 years of telemarketing would testify that this certainly is a good week to do just that. This can be a very fruitful week for generating new business for a number of reasons:-
- Given that it is a wind down week means that most people don’t have loads of meetings in their diaries so they are more available to catch up and clear their backlog. This means that when you telephone them, email them, Linkedin them, or whatever, they are more likely to respond so you can at least have an initial conversation giving you the opportunity to turn that into a lead or sales appointment.
- Your prospects still have the need that the benefit of your product or service satisfies. Talk to them about it.
- It’s a great week for people to catch up on their post and clear out those emails that they have reserved for later reading. So now is a good time to follow-up anything you’ve sent to prospects with a well-timed call to close for an appointment.
- People are simply feeling good this week about it being Christmas and are more likely to engage in conversation. This gives you time to explain the detail of the benefits you bring to businesses like theirs and how you can ease their business pressures.
Have a great business generating week!
