Inbound and outbound sales add value to the current process of calling customers and are an essential part of the sales approach and delivery of customer service.
Your aim should be that every person contacting your business has a positive and helpful experience.
Inbound and outbound sales should strive to achieve the following goals:
- To increase the customer base and sales performance of your business
- To enhance the level of brand and product awareness of your business
- To build your customer partnerships
Inbound sales are about:
- Seeing every customer as an opportunity
- Making the most of every sales opportunity
- Building relationships with your customers
- Increasing awareness of your brand
- Creating additional sales
How can it add value to your business?
- By building your customer relationships you are positioning your business as experts. Your customers will know they can come to you for advice not only on products and services, but on those that suit their needs and solve their problems.
- Through building our customer relationships, upselling and on selling your products and services, you will ultimately increase sales profits for your business.
- By providing additional service to the customer that they did not expect you will be exceeding their customer expectations, and they will tell someone about that. That is free marketing and they will become a customer advocate for you and your business.
In a general sense, there are many types of inbound calls
- General sales enquiries
- An incorrect call for another part of the business
- Technical product or service support call
- An order confirmation
In each of these situations, there is an opportunity to engage with your customer and an opportunity to build your relationship with them so that they can hang up feeling like their experience was a positive one.
Here is a simple five-step process for inbound calls
- Build rapport with your customer
- Create an offer
- Assume the sale
- Adding on and upselling
- Overcome resistance and objections
Your role is to build your customer relationships to be more than a sale.
But how do you do this?
1. Building rapport
- Ask the right questions and have a great opening line
- Establish a person to person relationship as opposed to a salesperson to customer relationship
- Break down customer resistance
- Use positive communication
- Acknowledge the customer
- Be unique, sincere and relevant in your reply
- Make a verbal contract with the customer
- By showing interest that you are available if required creates a reason to return
- Allow them time
- Listen to their entire need, because if you don’t listen to the whole thing, you might miss something
- Be informed – the more information you have the better
- Be unique and sincere
- Engage in a verbal contract
- Build confidence and trust
- Have knowledge of the products
2. Create the offer
- Focus on knowing your customer and what their service and product offerings are
- What is their past purchasing pattern?
- What offer have you created that may be attractive to their future and business needs?
3. Assuming the sale
Assuming the sale means that right from the beginning, and all the way through the process, you believe and remain committed to achieving the goal you set. Assume the customer is going to book the service or buy the product and that this will set expectations. It is the state of mind that you are assuming the customer can’t do without what you are selling.
4. Adding on and upselling
Add on close is getting the sale and adding another product if possible
- To close the sale on the primary item
- To sell additional items
- To uncover any hidden customer objections to buying now
Why add on?
- It is good customer service
- It removes the awkwardness of closing
- It let your customers decide
Remember, it doesn’t have to be pushy – it’s just a question:
For example:
- Have you thought about a…?
- Did you know we have the upgraded version of that product?
- Are you happy with the features of that model, because the next model up offers more….so let’s look at some of our products to see how we can do this.
5. Overcoming objections
We need to learn to handle objections to determine the customer’s real reason for not buying and to save the sale.
How do we do this:
Investigate what the issue is, working through price objection to close the sale
Understand that objections can occur due to a lack of trust or value
Let’s look at some common objections and what we can do to overcome them
For example –
-No, I’m not interested
-No thanks
-I can’t afford it at the moment
Don’t defend
It is about identifying and eliminating the obstacles that are preventing the purchase.
Steps in handling objections
Step one: Listen to the entire objection
Step two: Acknowledge the objection
Step three: Ask permission to continue
Step four: Offer a reasonable solution
Listening tips that can warm up a sales call
- If there is demonstration, listen and interpret why they don’t want to participate in the conversation and adjust your focus accordingly
- Respond to demonstrate respect – treat their concerns as valid and real to them
- Always ask permission to continue
- Always recount their words and how they relate to our product solutions to gain agreement and trust – we are all on the same page
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Show them a reason to listen
- Create confidence to show you know what you are talking about
- Refer to your research – what is their business
- Provide relevant product suggestions related to their past purchases
What happens if they don’t respond to closing the sale? First attempt? You dig deeper, but with respect.
Tips to remember:
Never lose sight of the fact that the customer owns the call, not you. If they say no, don’t push, make it easy for them to come back to you.
Example – No problems. Would it be ok if I sent you an email summarising some of our conversation that may be of interest?
Can I sign you up to our newsletter which outlines our monthly specials?
Remember, it’s about future sales and the building of a relationship first.
The dos:
- Always be positive and use positive language with all replies to customers
- Remember, the customer sees the company as one
- Handle each inquiry with pride
- Always be professional in your replies
- Always use your name at the beginning and end of each call
- Don’t treat every customer the same
- Aim to resolve the matter in one call
- Don’t leave the customer on hold for too long
The dont’s:
- Don’t make them feel guilty for not having the time to talk to you now – make it easy for them to think of you in the future
- Never push for a commitment – remember that this is new information to the customer
- Don’t presume you have the right to keep talking – always ask for permission as this creates respect and trust
- Never cut them off – bring them back to the purpose of the call
- Never promise, follow up or sending them something you can’t do
- Don’t treat every customer the same
- Don’t leave the customer on hold for too long
Just because a customer doesn’t buy today doesn’t mean they won’t buy in the future.
We should be looking at every customer as an opportunity.
Your inbound call checklist:
- Give your name at the beginning and end of each call.
- Smile when talking to the customer (they can hear it in your voice).
- Remember, the customer sees all businesses as the same, so have a point of difference. Why would they come to you for a service or product?
- Ensure that every experience the customer has is a positive and helpful one.