6 tips for better sales calls

Be clear about what you want to achieve

Everyone has sometime been contacted by a salesperson who starts the call with “Have you got a few minutes? I’m not going to try and sell you anything.”. It’s easy to think the recipient will be more open to listening if they think you don’t want them to buy anything. But unfortunately, it’s usually a huge waste of both your own and the recipients time.

People don’t make sales calls in order to make friends. When you’re borrowing someone else’s time, be straightforward about what you hope to achieve. If the goal of the call is to set up a meeting, then sell the meeting and not the product or service you represent. At the same time, ask questions that give you a good base of information to take with you into the meeting, as that’s where you’ll focus more on the product or service you offer.

Prepare your questions in advance

You’ve probably heard that you should avoid yes or no questions in a sales call. But it’s not that easy to come up with open questions if the conversation stalled and you start stressing out. Be well prepared before you pick up the phone by planning a few questions for situations like that. Want some examples of questions? Here you go!

• “What are your biggest challenges?”
• “How do you make decisions about these types of issues?”
• “Who’s involved in the decision when you purchase a product or services like this?”

With a few open-ended questions to fall back on, you can easily keep the conversation going forward if it’s not going in the direction you want it to.

Listen to your customer

Sales calls are all about understanding the customers needs and their challenges. Without understanding their pain points, you have no idea what value your solution can create for them. That’s why it’s important not to be in a hurry to talk about yourself and what you can offer them. Instead, ask them to describe their business, processes or employees. Only after identifying the customers needs and how you can meet them can you move on to your sales pitch and explaining what you’re trying to sell them. Trust us, you’ll be a lot more successful if you just listen to your customer!

Keep the sales pitch short

During your sales pitch, it’s good to show that you’ve understood their problems by suggesting or describing solutions to two or three of their biggest challenges. No one remembers any more talking points than that. If you’ve asked the right questions and listened to the customer, you should have an understanding of what they need. Keep the sales pitch short and to the point! Save any longer explanations for the meeting you’ve set up instead. It’s a good idea to mention a reference in order to create trust with the customer while doing your sales pitch.

Be yourself

Sales calls always flow the best if you can relax and be yourself. Instead of reading from a long sales script, just have a few quick points written down. That allows you to conduct the conversation in a more natural, relaxed way. You’ll only appear credible if you’re able to be yourself, so don’t pretend to be someone else. Trust us, it’ll be to your benefit in the long run.

Take your time

Last but not least, always take your time to think before answering the customer’s questions. If you’re not sure about something, it’s always better to ask if you can get back to them. If you answer incorrectly or make a promise you can’t keep, it’ll affect your relationship with the customer for a long time to come. Being able to get in contact with the customer again about something that was said earlier is also a great excuse to reach out to the customer and follow up on their thought process.  How good is that?

Want to know the best time of day to make a sales call? Read our article The best time to contact customers.

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