Ilse van Velsen
When you business to business make telephone acquisitions, your sales funnel of great importance. After all, you want prospects further and further into the sales funnel end up and eventually become customers so that you can achieve your growth goals. To do this, it is important to keep your buyer journey well mapped out. A buyer journey is the process a potential customer has to go through before they actually become a customer. How do companies come to your organizations and how do you make sure they eventually sign your offer? After all, conversion is something you can learn.
You have spoken to a prospect for an exploratory meeting and the follow-up appointment is scheduled. The end goal is to move the prospect so far down the funnel that they eventually sign an issued offer, thus becoming a customer. To do this, it is important to guide the prospect in their buyer-journey to ultimately achieve the desired result: a new customer. In this blog, we will take a closer look at the conversion of leads generated over the phone and follow some focus points for increasing conversion.
1. Map what level the prospect is at
The sales funnel has multiple levels. When you make telephone acquisitions, you want to know where the prospect is in the sales funnel. One categorization you can use for this is the AIDA model. Step 1 is to attract the prospect's attention. Once this is successful, you want to generate interest in your product or service. Outline a need for your prospect that will create a demand in the other party. This will ensure that your prospect is in the ‘desire’ phase comes: The phase when the prospect becomes aware of the problem and actively wants to look for a solution. In this phase you tell them how your organization can fulfill their need and how you are the solution they are looking for. This is therefore a good starting point to schedule an introduction where the prospect converts to a lead: this is how you go from desire to action.
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2. Ask the right questions
When the prospect is in the ‘desire’ phase, you can move on to the ‘action’phase in which you actually have an introductory meeting or demo. At this stage it is very important to gather as much information as possible from the prospect, so that you can respond concretely with your offer to the situation within the organization that you want as a new customer.
TIP: Ask questions that begin with ‘how’ or ‘to what extent. This will ensure you get answers in full sentences. More information for you to take advantage of.
It is also useful to express expectations to each other: what can you help your potential client with and what can't you help with? By being honest and complete about the areas where you can bring solutions, but also indicating where your solution may be incomplete, you lay the foundation for long collaborations and do not make empty promises.
Also read: ‘Tips for an Elevator Pitch in sales interviews’.
3. What's in it for them?
Finally, it is important to make clear why your solution is relevant to the prospect. After your story, your conversation partner mainly wants answers to the question: ‘What's in it for me?’. The answer to this question should be clearly stated in the quotation.
Your prospect needs to know why it is important for his specific situation to implement your solution or deploy your service.
To answer the question ‘what's in it for them?’ you can use the answers prospects gave to your questions in the previous step.