Best practices to ensure successful telemarketing sales calls

Monday, July 20, 2015


Contact center agents in telemarketing campaigns are tasked to turn simple engagements over the phone into sales. While there’s always a high chance that their sales efforts are turned down by potential customers, there are effective ways to convert mere leads into paying customers. Here are a few best practices to make successful telemarketing calls.


1.   Prepare before the call

Make sure to read all the necessary information about the products or services your company offers before calling your leads. This will help you explain the features of your offerings and you'll be ready to answer any inquiries. It would also help if you believe in what you're selling. You should be able to talk about the features of a product persuasively to stir the interest of a possible customer at the other end of the line. It also helps to visualize oneself in carrying out the call, and find ways to discuss product matters effectively, with interest and excitement.

2.   Greet possible customers professionally

Any campaign that requires phone-based engagements usually comes with a script of spiels and canned responses for customer questions. Whether these spiels are short or lengthy, a telemarketing agent should be able to deliver them professionally without sounding boring and canned. It's best to always use a conversational tone which can persuade people to talk to you further and listen to your sales pitch. It would also help if you personalize your approach by addressing your potential customers by their first names or by using relatable anecdotes. These can give you better opportunities to sway them your way and even get them to agree to buy what you're offering.

3.   Get the customer's attention immediately

During any call, you'll have about 15 seconds or less to catch the attention of potential customers. After that, they'll begin to realize that it's a telemarketing call and might lose interest, stop listening to you, and hang up. As such, you should think of strategies to quickly grab your prospect's interest immediately after the call starts, and keep them on the line. It’s up to you to carry out unique or professional-sounding greetings; or clear, and straightforward ones.

4.   Don't take "No" for an answer

This is one of the effective and most important traits of a telemarketer. Of course you must not be too aggressive since it'll only make your prospects feel like they're being coerced to do something they don't want to. To create a good number of successful calls, you should be assertive enough to direct the call to your desired direction and end it with a successful sale. Use different strategies that might work with your specific customer. Perhaps you can highligh how your product will prove valuable to them, or how people in their same profession or age group are enjoying your product.

5.   Close every call

Whether you've successfully made a sale or your prospect has successfully rejected your offers, it's always best to close the call on a positive note. This helps ensure a good customer experience that will reflect positively on your company and can help ensure that your prospect will still be open to future sales opportunities (instead of demanding to immediately be included on your Do Not Call list). If you feel that the customer isn't interested with your offer, then you could say something like this:

"I'm afraid I haven't made a good job today in presenting the features of our product, do you think there were issues I failed to discuss?"

Statements like this can help you understand your mistakes, and identifies what part of your pitch the prospect disagrees with, enabling you to address their concerns and perhaps even close the sale.