Specific Sales Solutions
In alignment with the suggestions above, here are three specific sales solutions that you can adapt and implement to immediately make your inside sales team more effective.
These are proven skills that will help your team navigate past some of the common objections, brush offs and situations they encounter on a daily basis. You can use these techniques as sales meeting topics and have your team help to customise them to fit their selling situations.
Qualifying Techniques
Question the red flags
One of the best ways to determine who actually does make it into your sales pipeline is to make sure you avoid one of the biggest mistakes 80% of sales people make when qualifying. And that is to overlook or not react to obvious red
flags prospects give during the initial qualifying call.
In their haste or desperation to ‘generate a lead’ or to ‘fill their pipeline,’ many sales reps will hope that any possible objection they hear on the front end will miraculously go away once the prospect sees their information, or product, or service.
But you all know from experience — it never does.
In fact, the rule for calling back leads is that: Leads Never Get Better. What appears to be an objection or deal killer on the front end, always is.
A sales rep told me about a prospect who wasn’t calling him back, and who (once he did reach him) told him that he was leaving the company. He wrote to me and said, ‘I guess intuitively I knew he wasn’t the right guy to make the decision anyway.’
And I’ll bet he intuitively knew this because he heard (but didn’t question) the Red Flags the prospect raised during the qualification call.
You can’t ignore these Red Flags. Do what the Top 20% do: As soon as you hear something that triggers your intuition or that gives you that sick feeling in your gut, stop and ask the tough qualifying questions.
Teach your reps how to avoid getting brushed off
So many times prospects aren’t really interested, but they either don’t know how or won’t come out and tell us. Instead they will say things like, ‘Go ahead and send me the (information, brochure, demo) and I’ll take a look.’ Or, ‘Put that quote in writing and send it to me.’
When a top closer hears this, his/her first thought is, ‘I don’t have the time to do that, and I especially don’t have the time to follow up with an unqualified lead.’ Here’s how they handle it and how your reps should, too:
Put off #1: ‘Go ahead and send me your information.’
Your response: ‘I’d be happy to, and if you like what you see is this something you would move on in the next couple of weeks?’
OR,
‘Before I do, I want to make sure you’d be ready to act on it if you like it. Let me ask you…(qualifying questions on budget, decision-making process, etc should be asked next).
OR,
‘Sure, and after you review it, how soon would you make a decision on it?’
OR,
‘And what would you need to see to say yes to it?’
Put off No. 2: ‘Put that quote in writing and send it to me.’
Your response: ‘I’d be happy to, and from what we’ve just discussed, does it sound like you’d go with it?’
OR,
‘Absolutely. How does this compare with the other quotes you’ve received so far?’
OR,
‘Great. Based on the quote/price I just gave you does this sound like it fits within your budget?’
