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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

The Government are still trying to balance the books in UK PLC!  Just like any business when a company has gone through the sort of trauma that the country’s finances have suffered over the last couple of years, and it’s in the sort of debt that the country is in, costs have to be cut back substantially in all areas of the businesses.

The coalition’s austerity plans continue and we’re still hearing about public sector spending cuts. It’s clear that the public sector doesn’t have the money to spend that it used to have and spending will no doubt continue to be under the microscope for plenty of time to come.

The private sector, of course, funds the public sector in various ways and I hear David Cameron talking about the need for businesses to grow and become more profitable so that they generate more tax revenues to bring some balance back to the country’s accounts.

So what impact has all this had, and having, on your business with the public sector? Are you continuing to drive your marketing team to go after what business does exist in the public sector? Are you also increasing your targets for private sector sales to replace any public sector sales that are missing, or that may go missing in the future.

There’s an awful lot of business to be had out there, it’s simply a case of targeting the right areas with the right products, services and messages – both public and private sector.

Good selling in 2012.

Only a week to go before Christmas! It’s the time of year when the media turn to reviewing the year coming to an end; ‘A review of 2011’ and all that sort of stuff.

How was 2011 for you? What were the highlights of the year?

Someone once said to me that running a business is like driving a car. When driving, you spend a lot of your time looking forward through the windscreen and take an occasional glance in the rear view mirror. You do this in a similar ratio to the size of these 2 lumps of glass. You have a large windscreen and look through it a lot and you have a small mirror that you look at a small amount.

So it is in business – spend most of the time looking forward with the occasional glance into the past! After all, no matter how good or bad the past has been, you can do absolutely nothing to change it; you can do everything to change the future.

So, looking forward, how is your New Year looking? Do you have plenty of opportunities lined up to convert to business and get 2012 off to a flyer? Having a great start to the New Year makes the rest of 2012 seem much easier to achieve.

Have a great, prosperous and successful New Year!

Whether you get your news online, in a newspaper, TV or whatever, it all has something in common these days; it’s all very depressing and very negative. It’s easy to get sucked in and let it get you down, isn’t it??

I have lived my life convinced that what I think has a massive impact on how I perform in every aspect of my life. I am the classic ‘glass half full’ person and spend my life focusing on the positive in any situation. Sure enough, I have my share of issues and problems to address but I never immerse myself in them and spend time thinking what would happen if this or that problem arose.

There are plenty of positive thinking techniques that can be used but one that I have been involved in, and continue to use, is HeartMath. One of the very spooky things with this is that you can plug a heart rate sensor into your laptop, run the HeartMath application, and you can see your heart rate variability on the screen.

The HeartMath technique involves breathing and visualisation exercises and as you carry these out, you can see your heart rate varying in front of your very eyes. This goes some way to prove the link between your thoughts and the way your body behaves. Fascinating.

Our month on month business growth this year is running at over 20% – and this is our 15^th year in business. This is no small way due to the way we set targets. We completely ignore SMART goals! You know the ones – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. It’s the realistic and achievable that doesn’t work in our view!

We set goals driven by ambition and then really go after them. That forces us out of our comfort zones and forces us to be really creative and innovative in amassing the resources we need to get to those targets. The results speak for themselves!