Section 9 Recap

International Telephone Marketing

Many companies use overseas agents and distributors and these are almost essential. However they will concentrate on developing the business from clients who are the most profitable and on products that are the easiest to sell. If you are in a niche market or sell high value products that require a lot of work or technical expertise you may find your agents and distributors prefer to be reactive rather that pro-active.

Very few agents and distributors will refuse help from your own sales team and with a little persistence you can open up new business opportunities across the world even where there are language barriers. This is great fun and is similar to the process involved in selling to large organisations. The following step by step process was learned from selling high value specialised pharmaceutical equipment globally both in terms of direct sales and in supporting distributors.

Using Telephone Marketing to...

Sell Professional Services

The basic concept of contemporary telephone marketing:

There is a time scale between when a potential customer 

first expresses an interest to when they are ready to buy.

You must keep in touch with a 

potential customer during this period.

Ways to find potential customers

who might be interested.

Advertising, a website, email and the phone.

Sequence step by step

1. The buying process

2. Your ‘USP’ can do more harm than good

3. The phone versus a website to start the process

4. Using the phone professionally

5. Ways to find potential customers

6. Choose your marketing tools

7. List building

8. Email works and how to make it work for you

9. Building confidence and trust in your professional skills and experience

10. Nurturing potential customers through the buying cycle semi automatically

11. Campaign checklist

12. Selling’s little ironies

13. Breakthrough, from potential customers to paying clients

Wishing and hoping don’t work

Wishing and hoping won’t bring new customers but planning and taking action will.

Wishing for something can give a sense of anticipation. Anticipation can be exciting and rewarding. The reward we get from wishing is called hope. Hope won’t build a business.

Wishing needs to be combined with action. Action needs a plan. The basis of a plan is a set of goals. Almost everybody sets the wrong type of goals. Because they are the wrong type of goals they are not achieved.

Almost everybody sets ‘outcome’ targets. For example “I will find one new customer every week.” Almost every training course and book on planning and goal setting tells people to set outcome targets. Almost every manager sets outcome targets for their staff and more often than not they don’t get met.

Outcome targets can be met but only by default or by doing the things that are needed to achieve the outcomes.

In order to meet outcomes we need to plan the things we need to do to bring them about and then take action to do those things. Goal setting should be performance based and concentrate on the ‘input’ targets. The things that need to be done. An input target could be, 

“I’m going to identify 10 potential customers. Then I am going to make contact with them. Then I am going to keep in touch with those who express an interest. In due course when they are ready I will convert one or two of the original 10 into paying customers.”

The rest of this manual covers these input targets.

Once these input or performance targets are set it is crucial to keep doing them week in and week out until ‘breakthrough happens.

The first input target is to consider in some detail exactly who is your potential customer or client. Then consider in some detail what they want from you. Note, do not think about what you can do for them. Consider in some detail what they want from you...

How to sell professional services in a nutshell

Make initial contact either just before or early in the buying process.

Keep in touch to nurture the relationship and build trust and confidence.

Convert a potential customer into a paying client

Be Selective...

When you employ someone you draw up a shortlist from all of the candidates.

When you are selling professional services you can do the same.

Take time to think about who is your ideal customer and build a profile.

Then go and find them.

If you are looking for a significant commitment from a potential customer you have to show them you care during the sales process. It is difficult to do this with a long list of prospects.

The biggest mistake ‘old school’ salespeople make

is to only care about with ‘hot’ leads

the key to success is to nurture potential customers from an early stage by keeping in touch with useful and interesting snippets of information

Consider a timeline

At the start is an ideal customer who has never heard of you.

At the end they have become paying clients.

What happens in between?

Several things need to be in place.

They have some sort of problem and need a solution that you can provide.

They need part time or some form of outsourced help.

This requirement must be big enough for them to want to take action.

They must understand and have confidence that you can provide the solution.

It has to be within their means or you will help them make a profit over and above what you cost them. Or they perceive your value to be higher than your cost to them.

They must believe that you have the skills, experience and abilities to do the job.

you must be the kind of person they can work with.

Assuming they have a problem and you are the solution, when you make contact the situation will be more or less urgent. No matter how urgent the problem is, you will still have to work through the necessary steps for them to feel confident in your abilities.

Ways to build trust and confidence in a potential customer...

Case studies where you share skills that will help them.

Success stories where you demonstrate how people who have had a similar problem solved it. Share with your potential customer how it happened.

Write down the steps your customer will need to take in order to reach a decision. Then brainstorm a series of helpful, useful, practical and interesting ways you can help them during this period.

You have two main communication tools during this period, the phone and email, use them in combination to help your customer make a decision.

A useful sequence...

After the initial introduction call where they have expressed interest...

Call and give them some useful information.

Send an email with more detail.

The more practical this is the better even if you give away something you might normally charge for.

If you can’t make it useful, make it interesting.

Don’t try and sell, keep it brief, just leave them with something useful or interesting.

Be conversational and polite when the time is right the potential customer will start a more in depth conversation.

The buying process

In order to use your services a potential customer must a have a problem that needs solving. This problem must be sufficient to make the customer think about hiring professional assistance and there has to be a possible solution.

Very occasionally a problem will arise suddenly but normally the problem emerges quite slowly and it takes time for the potential customer to look outside for assistance.

The time scale can be anything from days to years.

When you make initial contact the potential customer will be somewhere along the scale of ‘no problems’ to an urgent need. If a potential customer has no requirement move on and find someone who does need your skills and experience.

If you make contact at the early stage and then leave things until the requirement is urgent your chances of being hired are low. If you make contact at the later stages you might be lucky but more likely is that a choice has already been made.

The good news is that most potential customers are somewhere in the middle of this process. They are aware of a problem and they might need assistance at sometime in the future.

The next step is simple. Keep in regular touch as if they are already a client and give them ‘advance customer service’.

The aim is to build a pipeline of potential customers and build up pressure in this pipeline until a steady flow of new customers is the result. The job is remarkably easy.

If you ignore potential customers they will never know how good you are.

If you are looking for a significant commitment from a future customer you need to show them how much you care about them first.

It is easy to think about building strong relationships with existing customers but the process begins before they become clients.

Make a shortlist of your ideal clients.

Think through a plan about how you can give advance customer service.

In practise this is done by giving them interesting and preferably useful information and inviting them to interesting and useful events.

If you invite potential customers to interesting and useful events, including webinars, it doesn’t matter if they don’t attend.

Your ‘USP’ can do more harm than good

The idea of USP (Unique Sales Proposition) was put forward in the 1940s by an advertising expert called Rosser Reeves.

If it is applied properly it asks you to focus on your customer. In practise it forces you to focus on your product or service.

The irony is that potential customers are not interested in how good you are or how good your product is! What customers want to know is what they will get from your product or service.

It is more effective to think in terms of a ‘value proposition’. What do your customers get from your product or service. Consider this entirely from your customer’s perspective.

The phone versus a website in finding potential interest...

The internet has revolutionised business. Every business needs an effective website. If your website gets a reasonable level of traffic it is by far the most effective way to find potential customers. In reality most business websites don’t get that much traffic and quite often they don’t get any realistic traffic from potential customers.

Why over 90% of professional services websites don’t work very well and how to make them work better.

Most professional services sell a premium service to a relatively small client base. This means a relatively small list of potential clients. Geographic factors often come into play making the pool of potential customers even smaller. This tends to lead to a lower level of website traffic - which is a good thing because most of your visitors are probably interested rather than just browsing.

A smaller list is a strong advantage because you can use contemporary sales approach to get to know your potential customers and allow them to get to know you and build up trust and confidence in your skills before they buy.

Mass marketing doesn’t come into play for most professional service providers. Yet almost all web designers based their work on mass advertising methods.

No matter how much SEO you try the level of traffic does not increase or you have a higher level of website traffic that is not relevant to your service provision. In this way you get a high level of traffic with low level interest.

The same solution solves both problems and it is easy.

Your website is a crucial part of the contemporary sales process. You need potential customers to both visit and respond to it. The main aim of your site is to get a response and the design should reflect that used in direct response marketing rather than be like an advertisement, company report or brochure.

You need permission to make contact and keep in touch with customers through an email campaign. The easiest and if it works, the best way is through your website. It should be geared towards getting permission to send them more detailed information.

The landing page should have a means of getting in touch. This is usually a request for more information. The minimum amount of information should be asked from the potential customer at this stage, email and name is all you need. No forms and no personal details.

The information you offer must be at least relevant and interesting. If possible it should be useful to them. Newsletters are ‘old hat’ and require too much work and don’t get results.

If traffic volume is low just use the phone to start the sales process.

You can use email to start the process if you are really scared of using the telephone but the response is much lower.

Using the phone as a professional sales tool.  

                                                       The first call... 

check for interest and get permission to send an email

1. Introduce yourself and your firm.

2. Ask if they have a minute (because this is all it will take)

3. Explain very briefly what you do.

4. Ask if this is something they use.

5. If they say yes ask if you can send some information.

6. Send them a PDF leaflet introducing your firm.

7. If they say no, as most will, apologise for bothering them and put the phone down.

The second call... keeping in touch

About two weeks after you have sent the first introductory email prepare an email where you know the content will be of interest to the potential customer. It is even better if the content is of practical use and value to them.

1. Call and refer in passing to the introduction email, without pausing quickly explain the interesting and/or useful information and ask if you can send it.

2. If they say yes ask if you can keep in touch from time to time.

3. If they say no, thank them for letting you introduce your firm, put the phone down and remove them from the list of contacts.

You now have permission to start an email campaign. Every email you send must have value to the potential customer and preferably of practical use. The best way to do this is to give away part of your service provision. (Give and you will receive tenfold).

You can, if you want, make a quick call before you send each of some of the emails and the campaign can be semi-automated.

All organisations need to market their products and/or services. The person in charge of marketing will normally get sacked if s/he is not successful. Professional service providers hate the very word selling and will do almost anything to avoid it.

A small number of firms are very lucky in that they can place a few ads, do some PR or publish a web site and enough work comes in as a result.

If we consider the sheer number of firms in the UK alone and compare this with the number of potential customers it becomes clear that ‘marketing’ alone doesn’t work and as Government policies bite harder this year the use of (paid for) professional services will drop probably more than any other sector of the economy.

Professional services is a ‘backroom’ job, behind the scenes work. But then so is most of the work that takes place in an economy. Big household brands are made up of components that no-one knows about, all these behind the scenes manufacturers and service providers - making up the vast bulk of firms, have to market their products skills and services. They all face the same problems that advertising, PR and websites are weak as tools for finding new customers and they have to resort to selling.

The tools available to a salesperson are the phone. Face to face meetings - normally arranged by phone, email and letters. Backed up with a website, brochures and other online sales communication tools such as social media and blogs.

By far the quickest, easiest and most effective way to start the sales process is to pick up the phone, call a potential customer and ask them if they are interested in what you have to offer.

Most people hate doing this even though it is incredibly easy. The probable reason is that almost all sales is done in the ‘old school way, as we know by the calls we are pestered with every day at work and at home. ‘Old school’ selling is still the norm and it looks set to stay that way for the foreseeable future. This is bad news in some respects and good news in others because if you sell in a professional manner the results will be great and no-one will mind getting your calls.

First we need to realise that almost all your potential customers are not in a position to buy from you in the reasonable future. perhaps as many as 97% of potential customers who would benefit from your skills and experience are not able to use your services. The main reason is they are using someone else and even you are better in every way they won’t change. If you are lucky only about 92% of your potential customers won’t be able to buy from you. This leaves between 3% to 8% who are interested in the reasonable future.

So. roughly five out of every one hundred potential customers will be interested. This can be broken down further and between 40% to 60% of these will go on to use you. This last stage is dependent on your selling skills. On average about three people out of every one hundred customers contacted will become customers over a reasonable period of time.

The first job in selling professional services is to find those people who are interested and the easiest way to do this is to call them and ask.

The beauty of ‘old school’ selling is that it concentrates on trying to persuade the 95% who are not interested to become interested. Of course ‘old school’ sales people still pick up the 5% who are interested unless someone else uses a more professional approach. When this happens the ‘old school’ sales person doesn’t stand a chance.

The first stage in using the phone as a professional sales tool couldn’t be easier. We just find a list of potential customers, call them and ask if we can send them some information. We do this in such a way as to encourage them to say something like “No thanks, I’m already fixed up.”

We are looking for the small number who are interested in the reasonable future. The reasonable future varies from weeks to years but I usually allow about six months to a year as this allows time for them to get to know us and build confidence and trust.

When someone says yes, you ask if you can send the information by email and if you can keep in touch from time to time. The first stage in professional selling is as simple as this. When someone says no - they don’t actually want information or they don’t want you to keep in touch - you believe them, apologise for bothering them and move on.

Stage two of selling professional services is done through email and you have full permission to keep in touch.

Email marketing 

Build an effective list.

If you do not have permission your email campaign is spam.

The most effective way to get permission is through a website but this is difficult in the real world.

A sure fire way to get permission is to call and ask.

Factors relating to whether people opt in and give permission or not.

Plus factors

A reason to opt in, usually called an incentive (I) and the more relevant this incentive is, the more likely people are to opt in. This reason/incentive can be a ‘lead magnet’. (even contemporary sales professionals cannot break away from ‘old school’ terms).

Give your potential customer something of value (V). If a potential customer thinks or feels they will get something of value they are more likely to opt in.

The first half of a formula is incentive plus value (I+V).

Negative factors

Long forms, asking for too much information and distractions cause ‘friction’(F).

People perceive a risk when opting in. Factors such as spam, not looking professional being ‘salesy’ will increase this sense of risk (R). psychologists call this dissonance.

The formula is (I+V) - (F+R) = likelihood of opt in.

Value Added Marketing.

Most firms strive to give their customers good service or value for money. Value for money is when the customer feels that the service provision is higher than the cost.

You can add value during the sales process. This builds up trust and confidence better than any list of testimonials or referrals.

Romancing your (potential) customer.  

This is a hot topic in customer relations but it can start during the sales process. It is the difference between a one night stand and a long term relationship. Just show you care by keeping in touch and treating the potential customer to things they like.

14. Useful information

15. Events where they will learn something of value

16. Free advice

17. Wishing and hoping won’t bring new business; planning and action will

Simple ways to find sales opportunities

1. Set Google alerts to report issues that your product or service addresses.

2. Look at job vacancies in your area of expertise and contact those who are looking for the skills and experience you provide.

3. Look at who has recently been appointed or promoted in your target customers

4. Who, among your potential customers is advertising 

5. Approach all your competitors’ customers where they are listed.

6. Join special interest groups and get notifications and make good use of the free information you get get from Linkedin

7. Make notes when you travel around

The marketing tools that salespeople can make good use of

You can try and get more work from existing customers

You can ask for referrals. In practise this is very weak and a little ‘old school’.

You can do networking and this is also weak and a little ‘old school’ because most people at a networking event are selling not buying.

You can run events like seminars, webinars etc. This is strong and it doesn’t matter if no-one attends.

Direct mail is useful when highly targetted and personal but it is expensive.

Sponsorship is altruistic if you can afford it but it won’t bring in much if any new business.

Advertising is effective providing there is a media that most of your customers actually read, listen to or look at. It will only work if such media is available. 

A website is a must and direct response methods should be incorporated. Most websites do not incorporate any direct response. If you get a reasonable amount of traffic and incorporate direct response methods this plus an email marketing campaign could be all you need. The reality is that this does not happen very often.

Social media is a waste of time for most professional service providers even though it is given a lot of hype.

Telephone marketing will not fail even if it is done in the ‘old school’ way. Done professionally it will not fail especially when combined with email marketing where the phone is used to get permission to send information and to keep in contact.

Email marketing is extremely effective when combined with the phone.

Plan a ‘rifle’ approach using two or three methods. Telephone marketing combined with a planned email campaign and a response orientated website will not fail.

Choosing the marketing tools.

This guide concentrates on three marketing tools, the phone, email and a blog/social media.

There are plenty of others such as advertising, networking and ‘PR’ none of them are as effective as professional telephone marketing. 

About the author.

An engineer by trade he worked as a technical author and moved into sales. In 1982 he was the sales manager of a large company whose sales were in decline and he was charged with improving sales. He realised that traditional sales reps could not see enough customers. The sales office team were great but the number of incoming calls were falling. He decided that a possible answer was to telephone existing and possible customers with low key calls. The sales office team flatly refused to make outgoing calls so he did it himself and it worked almost immediately. His secretary saw how easy and effective it was and she started making calls and this was followed by the rest of the sales team.

By accident they had stumbled on the exact way of telephone marketing at a time that almost all sales people were told not to take no for an answer.

Lord Weinstock the then CEO of GEC offered him a managing directorship saying "Graham has exactly the right ideas at exactly the right time."

He then became a university lecturer and during this period he researched effective telephone sales methods by working in a variety of calls centres and businesses. He instigated peer to peer coaching with students who worked in telephone sales.

He now works as a part time or temporary telephone sales person and undertakes telephone sales training assignments. A recent project was in the pharmaceutical industry which is very difficult to break into. His biggest sale in value uncovered by telephone marketing was for enterprise level software for an American company worth £2 billion

Good prospecting and keep in touch

  

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Acknowledgements:

Bill Good author of:

'Telephone Selling Techniques that Really Work' 

First published in 1986 and in the UK by Piatkus 1991.

Ron Holland author of Talk and Grow Rich.

Ian Brodie  Ian’s approach to email marketing 

has taken my sales performance to even higher levels.