Telephone For Building Sales Relationships

Lead Nurturing is About Relationship Building not Selling

Building sales relationships during the sales process is more important than selling itself. In fact, building sales relationships is the foundation for multiple sales and long term customer relationships. Instead of worrying about closing sales, you should be focusing more on creating and nurturing a sales relationship. Once you build that relationship, sales will follow automatically almost effortlessly.

The telephone is the single most important tool for converting visitors, leads, and prospects into loyal customers. There is nothing quite like it when it comes to building sales relationships. 

If you are serious about turning your customers, prospects and leads into loyal customers, the telephone is the only tool you need. By using the telephone to build and nurture sales relationships you are bringing life and human interaction to your sales process. Something that can not be achieved when using digital marketing methods.

Building Rapport

There is nothing quite like real-time interaction and social engagement for building trust, rapport, and confidence. The telephone is an important tool in building sales relationships.  When you pick up the phone and to call prospects, you can put your voice, friendly demeanor, and charm to good use. Social cues like a polite tone and even friendly gestures can also create a big impact. You can influence prospects and leads more strongly via social interaction. 

With the phone, you have access to the greatest means for building solid relationships – real-time social interaction. Your suave, charisma and confidence can have a lasting impact on listeners and swing their opinion in your favor.

With other methods, you do not have access to this superlative means for creating rock-solid relationships. For example, ads are totally impersonal and intrusive. People dismiss them as noise and view them as a major nuisance. People use ad blockers and go to extraordinary lengths to avoid ads. In fact, people are willing to pay for YouTube membership simply to avoid annoying mind-numbing ads that nobody cares about. In simple words, ads are such a nuisance that people will pay money to steer clear. Most importantly, there is no element of real-time interaction and social engagement via ads.

Likewise, people have a strongly disapproving attitude towards emails. Few words elicit stronger opposition and disapproval than ‘spam.’ Even for newsletters that people subscribe to, they hardly read any. Why? Because emails lack personal touch. They are just automated mass-mailed messages sent at the click of a button. There is no human voice to talk to with emails. Thus, emails too are largely ignored.

Although there is enormous hype about online content, the truth is less rosy than what most people think. The explosion of content means that online messages appear as mere noise. With so many websites clamoring for attention, your brand will get lost in the crowd. Online content also suffers the same setback as other methods – you cannot use real-time interaction and social engagement. Although you can create videos, you cannot speak live to prospects and influence them the same way that you can by using the phone. 

Personalization

Personalization is the name of the game when it comes to building sales relationships. You cannot send the same message to countless people and expect good results. Ads, emails, and online content allow you to do that, but the problem here is that you cannot personalize messages according to what will appeal to leads and prospects. You are just sending the same message to countless people, and all recipients are aware of that. Nobody is going to be excited about receiving automated messages that numerous others are getting. There is no real human voice in such messages. Even if you use videos, it is prerecorded and not in real time. 

But with the telephone, it is a completely different story. Leads and prospects take phone calls more seriously since there is an actual human being behind the call who is talking and interacting in real-time. It is not another prerecorded message that is mass delivered to innumerable others. Equally importantly, the call is personalized according to what the prospect wants.

Before calling up prospects and leads, savvy outbound marketers do their research. They look up details concerning the prospect and prepare a plan accordingly. Instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach, telemarketers talk to prospects based on their needs that marketers uncover through research. Prospects will be flattered when their needs are addressed and solutions proposed accordingly. You can nurture trust and foster confidence by showing that you have put the effort into understanding their needs in advance and have a plan for their woes. This manifests your customer-centric approach and your commitment to providing them with the most relevant and useful answers to their pressing problems.

You can create a strong impact via live interactions when using the phone. Oftentimes, prospects are unwilling to buy from you simply because of a misconception. You can address their concerns, educate them, and clear up any misconceptions to pave the way for a deal. You can impress leads and prospects with relevant answers to their doubts and queries. When you alleviate their concerns and provide useful information, you will win their trust. When you gain trust, then you can be sure of a deal. A phone allows you to build relationships and foster understanding so that sales follow automatically. 

The same cannot be said for ads, emails, and online content. Using the phone, you can provide sharp, incisive, and rapid-fire answers to the listener’s doubts and concerns. But you cannot do this with online content, emails, and ads. With these mediums, you cannot provide on-the-spot answers to your customer concerns. Hence, unanswered doubts and queries will persist with emails, ads, and content, due to which prospects will refrain from buying. 

But with the phone, you can ask several questions about their doubts, provide answers and display your interest in client needs. The fact is that people are more willing to trust you and like you if you take a genuine interest in their issues by asking them questions. 

One study from the Harvard Business School shows that people are happier when you ask them more questions. The experiment was done in a social setting where subjects were asked a series of questions. Researchers found that the more questions you ask people, the happier they are because they get a chance to speak and express their views and opinions. When you listen intently and carefully, you can make them feel even better and deeply appreciated.

That’s why asking questions is such a powerful sales tactic. Smart telemarketers know that instead of selling, peddling, and pushing products, you should be asking questions. When building sales relationships as a consequence, sales will follow easily.  

Read More About Using The Telephone For Business Success

Voice Tone

It is not just the food or hospitality industry that can benefit from the motto ‘service with a smile.’ Professionals from these industries know that a smile can create a big impact. Even the smallest of polite gestures can improve customer perception of your brand and turn them into loyal customers. 

Using the phone, you can talk to prospects using the most professional, polite, and friendly tone. This can have a massive impact and is simply not available with ads, emails and online content. While you can use videos, nobody will get too delighted with prerecorded messages. Prospects know that the same message has gone to countless others and they are unlikely to pay attention unless someone is actually speaking to them. Thus, they tend to ignore messages delivered via emails, ads and online videos. 

But things are different with the phone. By default, people receiving calls take them seriously because they know that there is a real person behind the phone.

With the magic of charm, suave and charisma, you can create an indelible positive impact on your prospects that will remain with them for life. People can forget facts, but they don’t forget how you made them feel. With your voice, you can make people feel good and swing their opinion towards your brand courtesy of the phone.

Targeting Valuable Leads

Savvy telemarketers are able to deliver stellar results because they target the right people. Instead of calling people randomly, they do their research to uncover interested persons most likely to use your products and services. After finding out about such individuals (whether it is online or through their own network), telemarketers then take their needs into account and decide how they will approach leads to elicit the most positive response. 

Thus, smart modern day telemarketing is a very different affair from old school cold calling. All horror stories you hear online about outbound marketing providing paltry results are because such studies are concerned with cold calling, which obviously does not work and is totally different from smartly targeted telemarketing. 

There is a huge amount of hype concerning online content marketing and emails. The reality is that no matter how good your emails and content are, you can always get better results with the telephone. 

You will certainly be aware that many thought leaders and content providers are making it big via emails and content. While it is certainly true that they are doing good business, even these persons could massively increase their conversion rates by using the phone. 

As explained, there are many prospects who are not motivated enough or on the fence due to some concern or the other. Thus, you should make it a point to call up people on your subscriber lists and newsletter lists to engage them at a far more profound level using the phone. Your brand will come to life this way. Your website will no longer be just an online portal. By calling up leads, your website becomes far more than just another online portal among the various websites out there. Your website can come to life thanks to the power of the human voice. You can engage leads in a far more profound manner by talking to them live.

This will have a far bigger psychological impact than text, images and videos. The truth is that neither is there any substitute nor any alternative for social interaction. Live social interaction has always been important and is a powerful medium for engaging prospects at a much deeper level. 

Since phone calls allow for a much deeper engagement, you can increase conversions dramatically, even for your online and email campaign using the phone. In fact, if you are not using the phone for your emails and content campaign, you should be in doubt whatsoever that you are losing out on a lot of potential revenue and customers.

At this point, you might be thinking that you don’t have the time, skills, or energy to call up your subscribers and online visitors individually. You are right about this since your business certainly demands a lot of your time, energy, and effort. Calling up prospects is a daunting task and requires a lot of skill, confidence, social skills, and years to experience to execute correctly.

That is why you should outsource telemarketing to the most prestigious names in the industry like Gen Leads. At Gen Leads, you have the most proficient, diligent and successful telemarketers on your side who will leave no stone unturned in your quest for more customers. 

At Gen Leads our staff know what it takes to foster strong sales relationships. You can count on us to reach out to your prospects and leads for the best results in your favour. Contact us to learn more.