Telemarketing tips to help self-employed people and small business owners to get more customer by making sales appointment cold calls.
Many small business owners haven’t had access to training on appointment setting.
To get more customers they may want to make cold calls to arrange meetings to present their sales offers, but without training they can get a lot of rejection and soon become de-motivated.
One of the biggest mistakes is not knowing how to use benefits and features effectively. These telemarketing tips will show you how and where to add benefits and features to your cold calls for appointments and get in front of more potential customers.
Telemarketing Tips on Making Great Sales Appointment Calls
What makes a great sales appointment cold call is understanding how and when to use benefits and features in your call script.
The reason you should use them is because benefits are what your customers get, so for the prospects you call it tells them what they could potentially gain by listening to you.
Benefits are about the prospect you cold call. It’s what they gain from being your customer. It’s the savings on time or money that you can offer. It’s how their life or business will be easier. It might be something they must have, or something they want to have, but it’s not how they get it, that’s the feature that supplies the benefit.
Benefits are often feelings or emotions. Feelings of safety or security, being happy, satisfaction, success, or whatever else they will feel when they become your customer and the features of your service give them the benefits.
Poor telemarketing calls for appointments often include lots of features and few, or even no, benefits. Features are all about you and your products or services.
Benefits are what the features do for the customer, they are what the customer gets by using what you supply, and it gives you a chance to talk about the customer and the changes your sales offer will make for them. You may have to mention features as you explain how they get the benefits, but keep it brief.
Where on Your Calls to Use Benefits and Features
You want to get more customer by making appointment calls, so one of your aims is to keep prospects listening to you. You want to get past the first few lines of introduction and into a conversation about them or their business.
To do that you should use benefits in your call introduction, supported where necessary by features. What will, or potentially could, give the prospect a benefit. Maybe you are the best, the cheapest, the most experienced, the fastest, the most caring, the most qualified, at what you do. Those are all features so you then have to state what the feature you select will do for your potential customer in terms of a benefit to them.
The Reason You’re Calling
The next telemarketing tip is to use your best benefit, and supporting feature, as the reason why you’re calling the prospect.
What many self-employed people and small business owners don’t know is that the reason for calling is again all about the prospect. You might think that your experience and credentials, qualifications, and a list of existing customers are really good reasons for calling a prospect to arrange a sales appointment, but they’re not.
When you tell your prospect why you are calling, select a benefit you think will grab their interest and explain what it could potentially do for them.
Gaining Agreement to a Meeting
When you’ve qualified the prospect as a potential customer that you want to meet you need to gain agreement from them to the meeting. Here again is a great place to use a benefit to influence them to take that next step.
You explain to the prospect that they could gain a benefit, and by meeting with you they will have the opportunity to see exactly what the benefit could do for them. You can use the same benefit that you used earlier as your reason for calling. You started by saying that was why you called, so here you’re saying it’s why you should meet.
Small Businesses Should Use Benefits to Get More Customers
That’s 3 places where you can add benefits to make your telemarketing calls more successful.
The more effective your calls, the more opportunities you get to get more customers.
Look at what you’re currently saying on your cold calls. Are you using features that tell the prospect all about you, your business, or what you do.
It only takes a small reframing of your viewpoint to change those features into benefits and talk more about the prospect than about you. This simple change will make a big difference to your calls. It will increase the number of meetings you get, and you will get less rejection and fewer objections, so you’ll enjoy making more cold calls.
