Anouk van Deurse
B2B telephone acquisition is an important way to get new customers. While it's obviously nice to call contacts where you already have lines of communication, it's also definitely important to approach companies not yet in your network through structural market approach. As Stephen Shiffman points out in his book on cold calling wrote: the phone acquisitions you make now create the revenue you can reap 6 months from now.
In this blog, we give 7 concrete tips that are going to help you acquire better. First, three tips for the pre-call phase.
1. Make sure the target market is clearly defined
Get specific about who your ideal client is, what sector and industry they are in and what are the key components that make this client ideal. Company size? Minimum annual sales? Region? By identifying these things, you will ensure that you can prioritize your time commitment.
2. Devise a good elevator pitch
Delve into the proposition you want to sell and create some unique selling points. These unique selling points should highlight why prospects should prefer your product or service over that of a competitor. Consider the following:
- What is ‘different’ about my product from others?
- Does my product or service highlight a particular premise that competitor products or services do not?
- Am I (a lot) cheaper than my competitors?
Make sure this elevator pitch no longer is more than 3 sentences. You want to convey this important information in such a way that it is manageable for your interviewer and therefore sticks in their mind. Conclude your elevator pitch with a open question To elicit interaction. An example:
We act as remote commercial inside sales for our clients and take B2B telemarketing off their hands from a well thought out sales plan. I'm curious how you are currently acquiring new customers?
3. Map out who the decision maker is
Analyze some of your current customers and determine what the function of the person with whom you made a deal is. Is that at the C-level? Or would it be better to plug in a level lower? Doing the analysis of this decision making unit (DMU) properly will ensure that you are at the right table at a later stage. So less waste of time!
After putting together a good prospect list, describing the core of your proposition in an elevator pitch and being able to pinpoint the decision maker in a journey, you pick up the phone. But how exactly do you make that call? Here are some tips.
4. Don't use a call script!
Take the elevator pitch you have defined and use it as a handle in your conversations. At all times, you want to avoid sounding ‘manufactured,’ or like you are speaking more than your interviewer.
5. Make smart use of ‘nonverbal’ communication on the phone
It is a huge misconception to think that telephone acquisition cannot use nonverbal cues. Nonverbal communication refers to the transmission and interpretation of any form of communication other than language (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1998). That, of course, includes things like intonation, speed, rhythm and timing! Be sure to match your intonation to that of your interlocutor. Drop a silence at the right moments. In this way, you ensure that you optimize how much information you get from your prospect. Make sure your sales call is a dialogue, not a monologue. Dropping silences at the right moments is a great way to accomplish this. In fact, in many cases, the prospect will fill this silence himself.
You've made a sales call, but there's no immediate interest in your product or service. So how are you going to make sure you can eventually convert this contact into a lead? For this, here are two tips.
6. Track your contacts neatly
It is hugely important to follow up on your sales calls. Hear from your prospect that the topic is not on the agenda for now? Then ask when they have more time to consider the topic. That way you have made it concrete when you can call back again. Then do the same! Mark the date in your calendar and actually pick up the phone again on that date. It happens all too often that a long-term sales-opportunity is established, then nothing is done with it. That, of course, is a shame! Good sales funnel management also means following up on contacts made at the right time and staying in contact with your target group on a structural basis!
7. Provide strong visual content to send to the prospect
Paivio's (1971) Dual Coding Theory states that information presented through multiple modalities is better remembered. Therefore, it is a good consideration to again visually present the information you have just presented to the prospect over the phone in an email or brochure that you send the prospect after your phone call. Because you provide the information both verbally and visually, it sticks better in your prospect's memory.
Do you notice that preparing and setting up a sales meeting correctly is a point that needs more attention? We would like to help you generate more leads!