Consult with operators

Effective scripts differ from ineffective scripts in that they are designed with feedback from employees in mind. In contact centers, operators interact with customers most frequently, so they are the sources of valuable information about customer preferences, questions, and objections.

Collect feedback from agents on a regular basis. This approach will provide a number of benefits: improved customer service, higher level of staff engagement and interest.

Review scripts regularly

To create working scripts, regularly review and update them in accordance with market trends and your company’s development vector.

Create a group chat

Implementation of a group chat will allow contact center employees to promptly receive supervisor’s advice in the process of dialog with the client. Besides, with the help of group chat supervisors will be able to notify operators about errors in conversation with subscribers.

It should be noted that the group chat has a disadvantage – there is a probability that it will be used for personal communication of the CC employees.

Use autocomplete customer data

Automatically entering customer data from CRM into the script will save operator hours. It will also save contact center employees from the need to repeatedly find out information that is already in the system: date of birth, initials, contact information.

Use intelligent scripts

Intelligent dialog forms will make communication with customers better and more flexible. The system automatically analyzes the entered data and determines which form to open next.
This approach is extremely effective when conducting surveys. For example, a subscriber has told the operator his age – 18 years old. The system will automatically avoid questions intended for an audience over 21.

Do not create frames of communication

Try to create guided dialogs rather than scripts. They are more responsive to customer needs and help ensure high levels of customer satisfaction. Scripts, on the contrary, create rigid boundaries and make communication with subscribers extremely limited and unnatural.

Give operators more freedom

Each conversation with a customer develops according to an individual scenario. Therefore, scripts will work more effectively if you give operators more freedom and flexibility in developing dialogs.

Use an automated online help system

A real-time dialog analysis and monitoring system can be a great complement or even a replacement for scripts. It connects to the conversation, and displays in the operator’s work application useful tips and solutions according to the topic, focus and development of the dialog.

This system makes communication with customers more flexible, qualitative and natural.

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Why the customer objects

Even if the contact with the consumer is established, he perceives information well, shows interest – in most cases it is impossible to avoid objections from his side. Working with a problematic customer requires special skills and abilities from the operator, an untrained person is unlikely to cope with the task. There may be many reasons why a customer objects: he is in a bad mood, he is not satisfied with the offer or price, he wants to bargain, or simply used to leave the last word to himself.

Objection in the sale of anything is common. To correctly respond to the objection, you do not need to look for a convincing argument. It is important to remember that the perception of the client and the operator may differ significantly, and the argument will not always be convincing for both. You should always respond to any objection from the customer, even if the answer does not seem strong enough. Answers should be given with small pauses: if the client feels that he is answered according to a premeditated pattern, most likely he will stop further communication.

How to communicate correctly

It is recommended to add jokes to the conversation, compliment the client, use small digressions from the main topic of conversation. And call center outsourcing is suitable for this purpose as best as possible. Let’s consider some answers to customer objections from real conversations of professional operators:

Method one – counterargument

Client: “Too expensive.”

Operator: Yes, but our product/service is of the highest quality.

Customer: “I’ve seen negative feedback.”

Operator: These are exceptions, there are many more positive reviews.

Customer: “Delivery is too long.”

Operator: It is possible, because we have a wide range of goods in stock.

Method two – comparison

Customer: “Too expensive”

Operator: Let’s try to compare (comparison of the volume of batches, the possibility of postponement, payment terms, assortment, etc.).

Method three – paraphrasing

If the consumer says that “it is too expensive”, the operator asks a counter-question with an affirmation at the end of it. For example, “Do I understand correctly that if you are convinced of the higher quality of our services/goods, you will use our offer?”.

The above methods of working with objections work almost always, if their use is appropriate. That’s why it’s better to entrust this work to professionals. An untrained person will not be able to effectively resist the objections of the client. Especially if the work with objections in sales by phone. The operator must feel the intonation of the potential customer, the change in his mood, to be able to adjust to each individual client.

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For effective cold calls it is necessary to:

• The first principle of cold calling is to make it so that neither the receptionist nor the decision maker identifies the cold call manager, from the first words. The easiest identifier is an elaborate detailed introduction of the company and yourself. Simplify the beginning of the dialog and you will be more willing to talk to you.
• Don’t count on anyone needing your great offer without establishing trust and dialog. For interest, start calling and offer your product at half its actual cost or for free, you will be very surprised, the number of refusals will not decrease much.
• Clearly define the portrait of your client and the questions by which your client can be calculated. For example, at a car dealer training, the first question we asked was “Do you operate cars?” Statistics showed that 93% of car buyers already have a fleet of cars. Therefore, we could find out whether this is a target client for us or not, even without getting to the presentation and introduction.
• Call about something unrelated to the sale. If you offer something, you may be immediately sent to email or even further away. If you want to invite to a free seminar, or send an industry overview, or send a free test sample, the likelihood of making contact and continuing the dialog increases dramatically.
• Determine the primary purpose of the call – to identify a potential customer and establish a relationship with them.
• Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and embarrass yourself.
• Put calls into the system. It should be clearly understood that one cold call is nothing, even if it is more or less successful. Ten or a hundred contacts is also a little bit for cold calls. Practice shows that you can achieve stable sales on cold calls only when the manager in the base of more than 300 customers with whom there was a productive dialog. All the more so because every call made adds experience and confidence.

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The ideal client is a client who understands your value, is happy to pay you, and is excited to work with you. This is a client that you are happy to work with now and want to continue working with in the future. Your ideal client profile is a representation of your real ideal clients based on data and research. It’s not a wish list of a client that doesn’t exist. When gathering data and information for your ideal client profile, it’s best to be as specific as possible and include as much detail as possible.

Here are nine ways to look at and evaluate data to create your ideal customer profile:

Demographics of your ideal client

Demographics explain who your ideal customer is. A demographic profile is a set of objective, factual, statistical data about a specific group of people, often used by companies to segment and target their marketing for better results. This data is similar to the data often found in census documents. The first step in solidifying your ideal customer profile is to get a clear idea of who your ideal customer is and determine their demographic profile, including:

• Age
• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Income
• Amount of loans
• Landlord/tenant
• Marital status
• Geographic location
• Number of children
• Type of vehicle
• Occupation
• Level of education

Psychographics of your ideal customer

The next step to understanding who your ideal customer is is to create a psychographic profile based on the demographic profile. Psychographics are data about a specific group of people that focus on attitudes, aspirations, interests, lifestyle, and other psychological criteria. This data explains why customers buy from you and their motivation to buy. Unlike the objective facts of demographics, psychographics are more sensitive and focus on soft information. A psychographic profile provides a deeper subjective understanding of who your ideal customer is and how they think.

It covers things like:

• Thinking and attitudes
• Beliefs and opinions
• Aspirations, goals, dreams and wishes
• Interests (parenting advice, pet ownership, traveling, wellbeing, weight loss)
• Entertainment (hobbies, books, shopping, restaurants, TV shows, movies, how they spend their free time)
• Personality and values
• Lifestyle and priorities
• How they spend their money
• Anxieties and fears

Ideal customer behavior analysis

Behavior analysis is the process of understanding the behavior of a specific group of people. In an ideal customer profile application, this is based on demographic data and psychological information to see how they make decisions about what to buy, when to buy and how to buy. A behavioral analysis of the ideal customer focuses solely on their behavior and actions towards what you are selling and offering. Here are some of the things you’ll see in a behavioral analysis of the ideal customer profile:

• Internal marketing data such as what types of emails they open most often, what blog posts are read most often, what email subject lines work best, what social media posts have the most shares
• Analyzing data to determine what action, email, blog post, sales page, ad, etc. triggered sales
• Real feedback – good and bad – from customers about their experience with your brand, products and services, both online and offline.
• When sales increased and why – time of year, holiday, special promotion
• Find out why loyal customers keep buying and what motivates new customers
• Who uses your product/service the most, how they use it, when they use it (time of day, day of week, frequency)
• How potential customers gather information before making a purchase
• How they are influenced by price, quality, convenience and prestige

The story of the ideal customer

Another way to truly understand your ideal customer and where they are in the buying process is to understand their backstory and be able to tell that story in a compelling way that resonates with similar people. Your ideal customer’s story is the story of how they got to where they are today. You need to know where they started, what challenges they faced, what they accomplished, and where they are now. By understanding exactly where they came from, you can segment your market stories and messages to resonate with potential new customers. When they resonate with your message and you feel like you’ve “got” them and what they need, it’s much easier to close the sale.

Target the ideal customer

Many marketers will tell you to sell based on benefits, not features. Or they’ll advise you to go for benefits and keep an eye on features. Or they might even talk about how benefits target the emotions behind buying decisions and features feed the logic behind the buying decision.

All of these tips and approaches are valid, but to create the most effective marketing messages and promotional texts, you can’t stop there. You need to go one step further to fully understand the benefits or the final destination your ideal customers want to reach.

Describing the benefits of your product or service is the first step. Then you need to look at what impact each benefit has on them and their life or business. Again, what is the benefit of the benefit? What is the ultimate reward and goal they dream of achieving?

The story of your future ideal client

Once you know your ideal client’s story and their dream goal, it’s time to write a story about what they can achieve in the future if they hire you, buy from you, or subscribe to you.

A compelling and compelling future story makes your defined psychographics work by telling the benefits your products or services bring, how those benefits will improve and change your ideal client’s life and/or business, and what they will accomplish if they decide to invest in you.

Your ideal client’s future story brings to life your ideal clients’ journey right now to where they most want to be, and illustrates how your product or service can help them get there.

Ideal customer objections

Objections are an inevitable part of any sales process. Whether it’s the need to ask or consult with your spouse, more time to think about it, the desire to do more research, the need for more money, lack of time, fear of judgment, or even too much effort, at some point a potential client will have objections and consider saying “no.”

If you take the time to dig deep and get a clear understanding of the most common objections that potential clients may have and the reasons why, you will be able to counter these objections in advance. This provides the necessary emotional confidence and factual grounding in your marketing messages and promotional texts.

Risks of the ideal customer

Just as you need to look at the benefits your ideal clients will receive when they decide to invest in you, you also need to consider the risks they may face, including positive risk and negative risk.

Positive risk: these are risks that have a positive outcome including the risk of getting too many clients, making so much money that they will need an investment strategy, boredom due to lots of free time.

Negative risk: these are risks that have a negative outcome, including the risk of missing an opportunity, losing new business, falling behind others, feeling overworked, feeling stressed, financial turmoil.

By knowing what they risk gaining and what they risk losing, you can target your marketing messages and calls to action, and segment your audience to speak directly to a specific ideal customer profile.

A day in the life of your ideal client

Another great way to get to know your ideal client is to identify a “day in the life of your ideal client.” Create a plan or timeline of what a typical day looks like for your ideal client. Identify things like:

Do they wake up early and have time for coffee and reading before starting their work day, or do they toggle their alarm clock three times before getting out of bed?

• Do they eat a healthy breakfast or do they run out of the house and eat something on the way?
• Do they drive their kids to school? Do they pick them up?
• Do they bring their lunch to work or go out for lunch?
• How many work meetings do they have? How many phone calls do they make? Do they have an office or special work area at home?
• Do they cook dinner, eat at a restaurant, or order take-out? Do they prepare food in advance? Do they eat fresh or frozen food?
• How do they relax in the evening after work? Do they watch TV, read, just chat with friends on social media, play with their kids, go for walks, play sports?
• What time do they go to bed?
• What are they focused on? What are they worrying about? What causes them stress? What causes frustration?

Knowing what a day in the life of your customer looks like is extremely valuable when developing the marketing stories you tell in blogs, presentations, sales and website pages, and sales conversations. Why? Because you’ll be able to connect with your ideal customers on a more personal level with stories that position them as the protagonist.

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Meet people who talk about it all the time. But cold calls combined with the right strategies work. Cold calls can be one of the most effective ways to get to customers. That’s exactly the case at my company. In this article, I’ll share twelve simple steps to cold calling that work.

Step 1: Cold calls can’t hurt

The first step to effective cold calling is to realize that cold calls won’t hurt you. Managers are so afraid of rejection over the phone that they recoil when it comes to cold calls. To implement cold calling strategies, learn to take risks. This means you need to face your fears and realize that cold calling is not scary. It is important to realize that the customer cannot hurt you. The best way to deal with cold calls, turn them into a game. Don’t be nervous, take a risk, pick up the phone and start calling.

Step 2: Make cold calling a game

Cold calls are phone numbers. Learn not to be afraid of rejection. Call until you reach the right customer. The reason most people hate cold calling is because of the low success rate – about 1% or 2%. What that means. Sales newbies have to make 99 calls to get one scheduled client meeting. Make cold calling a game. If customers are rude on the phone, activate your game. Pretend it’s just a game. Relax and don’t be nervous.

Step 3: Warm up the customer

This is more of a tip for those with long sales and a big transaction check. The point is to warm up the contact as much as possible before you contact them on the phone. Then already the conversation on the phone will build most effectively. Customize the search campaign to your customers. A search campaign should be a complete process of 20 touches over several months. Send them emails, stop by to visit their office, understand how they work, who the decision maker is, what his or her name is. Once you’ve gathered all the information you need, phone contact will be easier. As technology advances, it’s harder and harder for managers to get their ass out of the warm chair and go into the “fields.” Now is the time of touching the customer. To sell a product, you need to touch the customer at least 7-8 times. This can be social media advertising, contextual advertising, email blasts, meetings. Be sure to warm up a cold client, get closer to him and already a cold call will not be so cold.

Step 4 Write a script for the conversation before you call the client

Now sales managers will say, “Why do I need a script, I don’t sound natural on the phone”. A script is 100% necessary for newbies in sales. It removes fear and gives the manager confidence in the conversation. It’s up to the discretion of the “mature” salespeople. But from experience I will say that if you sell different services, for example, as in my company it is participation in business events. Each training, speaker is different. And “old” managers can be lazy to look for information about the speaker, read his books. They begin to invent, exaggerate the merits of the speaker to sell, not knowing the true information, and just something can be overlooked and not tell the client. This is where the script comes in handy, which will not let you forget important details and save time in a conversation on the phone. Can you imagine if movies and TV series were shot without a script? How long it would take to make a movie. Appreciate the time.

Step 5: The first 7 seconds are very cold in a conversation

The first 7 seconds in a phone conversation sells us the next 25 seconds. Take the customer by surprise so that the customer enters the conversation with you. It’s like a meeting. If you don’t sell yourself in the first few seconds, you’ll never sell yourself later. Prepare for the first seven seconds by writing an opening statement. Get the client to focus on the conversation. Have the client ask themselves a few questions: “Should I talk to this person?”, “Do I know this person?”, “Should I send him or her away or is it better to have a conversation?”.

Step 6: The more you talk about yourself, the worse it is

The more managers talk about themselves or their company, the more they reduce their chances of making a sale to a customer. No one wants to hear how great you are, everyone wants to hear how great they are. Start by introducing yourself and talking about what you are calling for. Introduce yourself, state the purpose of the call, and then focus on the customer’s own concerns and goals. That’s what the customer cares about.

Step 7: Focus on the problems around you

During the call, one of the best ways to engage potential customers in conversation is to focus on the problems you see in the marketplace. This will show that you have your finger on the pulse and have the information. You show that you have real experience and you are not talking about yourself. You provide some real value around the key issues the client is facing. You are an expert, not just a sales manager. You increase your chances of engaging the customer in a conversation they really care about. And those are the chances of meeting and closing the deal.

Step 8: Engage the dialog

Customers need to be spoken to so that the conversation can be more meaningful. Don’t turn the call into a monologue with yourself. You talk about the customer’s problems and they don’t listen to you. Ask questions, have a conversation, it will bring you closer to realizing that the call was not in vain. Let’s say you say this, “Mr. Jason, right now I see that many companies in your market are facing the following problems: x, y and z “Ask an engagement question, “Mr. Jason, how does the market feel about your company?” “Is it for real?” This engages the customer in the conversation. The customer answers: “No.” Put it this way, “Yes, there’s no point in talking about the issues at all, the conversation doesn’t make sense. Before I hang up, can I ask you one last question?” And customers, in most cases, will answer, “Yes.” Say, “If there was one thing you could do with (something related to what you sell), what would it be?” Have him or her answer. Engage your customers to start talking.

Step 9: Explore what’s going on with the customer

Don’t go into monologue mode. When a customer says, “One of the problems we’re dealing with is this,” don’t immediately interrupt with the phrase, “Well, I have a solution for you!” Instead, say, “Tell me more about it.” Dig into what’s really going on for him. Ask questions about the problems the client is having. Make sure the customer understands the value of solving those problems. Find out, does the customer need your product? Will it solve his problems?

Step 10 Cold Calling: capturing the next step

This is the most important part of cold calling. You absolutely must capture the next step. If I ask the question, “What is the purpose of the call?” You’ll say, “To make a sale.” But that’s not true. Yes, the ultimate goal is to get a sale in the long run. But the short-term goal of a cold call is to get a clear next step planned. That means we need to make sure we capture that next step. Whether it’s a face-to-face meeting, a webinar, or a phone call, make a mark in your CRM or calendar for the next step.

Cold Call Step 11: Confirm the next step

When the appointment is agreed upon, send a confirmation email to the client, have the client add the appointment to their calendar. Mail programs like Outlook, Spark and others have this feature. Say, “Mr. Jason, can I give you some advice? How about we set up a meeting, I’ll come to your office and I can share with you some best practices on how our clients have solved these problems before. Would that be helpful to you?” If Mr. Jason says, “Sure, come on over,” you’ll respond, “Great, I’m sure the tips will help improve your company’s performance?” You can confirm the appointment by saying: “You are in front of your computer right now” Mr. Jason will say, “Yes, of course.” Say, “Great. I’m going to send you a calendar invite right now, confirm the appointment on your calendar so you don’t forget.” Confirm the next step.

Step 12: Don’t run away from the phone after every call

Only a high number of calls per day can lead to the desired results. Don’t get distracted by your coworkers’ entreaties to go for a smoke or coffee, focus on the goal. How many client meetings and arrangements did you make today? What will you say to yourself after the day’s work? Did you have a productive day?

Didn’t pass the secretary at one company, call another. This is the only way you can become more productive.

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