There’s a meta-game to be played here. If you’ve made the decision to transfer something over, it’s likely because you’ve realise the value and how much time and all money you’ll save. Without first understanding the principles underlying it’s pending deployment, your efforts would have been for nothing, the return on investment would have been drastically diminished or even lost and you will have wasted precious time. Read on.

The Number 1 Enemy to New Software Deployment

It may surprise you to hear, but the number 1 enemy to a successful deployment is your entire team. We’re creatures of habits and belief systems and, over time, both of these things set into comfortably complacent familiarity. It doesn’t matter how quirky, backhanded, or even laborious a current system may be, it’s human nature to fight changes irrespective of logic. Here’s how to deal with it.

The Transferal of Enthusiasm

Fortunately, as salespeople, we have a significant advantage here. First however, you must help your staff realise the pain the current systems are causing, highlighting and stirring up those negative feelings. Examples may include:

• Time being wasted with the wrong prospects at the wrong times

• Bad workflow limiting potential commissions

• Poor cross-team communication leading to issues with accounts and consequent commission delays

Conversely, make those benefits crystal clear, as transparent as possible. Introduce the news to your staff as a pain-healing, benefit-providing move which is all too painfully obvious.

Another great step is to let your staff members into the bigger picture for the future of the company. Make sure they know they’re important and you can share your grand vision with them for how things will move forward.

Step 2: Identifying the Naysayers

If you’re about to implement a super slick sales-boosting software which will create a lot of work for accounts with your improved conversions, it’s likely your accountant won’t be thrilled about the pending changes.

This negativity can sow the seeds of dissatisfaction everywhere, wrecking the chances of successful deployment. Thus, a quick private discussion can work wonders to soothe the concerns of any naysayers. Something to the following may go down well:

“Hey [accountant name here], you know, I’ll need your help to make sure this new system is deployed successfully because it’s super important for the company. Like me, the team respect your opinion and your work and I’d appreciate it if you’d be optimistic about the launch. If you have any problems or concerns with the system, come and see me first and we’ll talk through things together”

The best way to prevent disaster is to predict it and take precautions.

Step: 3 Setting Expectations

Finally, give people a heads-up of what to expect. As we become accustomed to our daily processes, we get better at them. Learning something new takes time and patience, so giving your team the heads-up that things may be a little slower when they come in on Monday morning makes all the difference. Point out that they’ll save time, make money or any other benefits, but a little work comes first to get over this first hump.

The post 3 Steps to Success: How to Transition Your Team to New Sales Software appeared first on CallProof.

But what makes a customer loyal? What reasonable steps can be taken to win loyalty, ensuring that when competing salespeople approach your customers, they’re turned away without a second thought? Here are three tips to nurture such a relationship.

1. How to Research Your Customer’s Language

It would be easy for us to say “speak their language”, a generic best-practice in sales, the principle of which most salespeople at least understand, if not use. Considerably more valuable though is practical advice and, after all, this is a CallProof blog post. Here are three steps to achieve speaking your customer’s language fluently.

 A) Get stuck into LinkedIn

We often doubt the value of LinkedIn to improve sales, this use is no different. Look out for signal alerts, groups they’ve joined, companies they’re connecting with and anything they’re interested in from a business perspective.

B) Follow your clients on Twitter

Twitter may be ‘just’ another social media channel, but it tends to have more personal touches. Imagine the power of connecting with your customers on a business level, then moving conversation easily to the baseball game you now know both of you watched over the weekend.

C) Sign up to their newsletters

Always sign up to customer’s newsletters. If you’re selling payroll services and you see a promising new product is soon launching, you can gauge and react early to any pending increased interest. Your finger will be on the pulse.

Consistent, Unobtrusive and Personal Contact

It’s easy to stay in constant contact with our clients, we can just send out an auto responder e-mail, right? Wrong. This is a painfully common error. Unless carried out with considerable skill, this approach is often more harmful than anything else.

Stay in touch with personal messages on Twitter, occasional compliment slips, personalized e-mails or, if local, consider stopping by their office to drop off an extra latte you just picked while you were at Starbucks.

The goal should be to have a consistent, personal dialogue to let them know you’re there to help with their account whenever they need you. This brings us to the final point.

Let Your Customers Know You Care about Their Business

Care about your customer. Let them know you care. Care about their organization, their concerns, problems, successes and family. Use an ongoing dialogue as a vehicle for this. If your customer gets the sense you only talk to them when you want their money, when they’re visited by that talented competitor salesman, you can bet she’ll know how to pull their emotional wallet strings.

Example: A Great Anecdote Which Combines All of These Factors

A previous employee of mine at another company held several accounts, all very close to one another. Because he kept half an eye on what was going on via Twitter and spoke to his customers regularly, he knew whenever a problem arose.

He made a habit of going out of his way to show he cared about their businesses by always heading over to fix these problems when they arose. Incidentally, he also won a fair few referrals using this process, though more about this in another blog. Good luck.

The post The 3 Key Ingredients to Winning Loyal Customers appeared first on CallProof.

Do you have a strong routine or are you a business card shuffler?

If you’ve never done it before, you’ll no doubt know somebody who has. A salesperson sits at his desk, paralysed by the fear of rejection, perhaps even just too lazy to pick up the phone. Business cards sit in a tantalisingly untidy pile at the end of the desk. You better believe they’re in for a good shuffle prior to any calls being made.

We’d like to offer you a challenge in this blog. If you can see even the remotest bit of logic or value in the following post, commit to sticking to a routine, for 4 weeks and see your results at the end.

 Having a steady routine focuses you on one task at a time, allowing you to execute it regularly, effectively and in a way which can be easily monitored to spot room for improvement. If you set aside a block of time to do a specific sales task, you’ll focus yourself on achieving that task and you won’t have time to shuffle anything unnecessarily, business cards or otherwise.

Prospecting Comes First 

Prospecting should always be at the forefront of your routine considerations. Whether you find it best to prospect weekly or daily, a certain time should be set aside for this task and done without fail. If you’re enjoying a period of good sales, don’t think it’s okay to drop the ball and slack off with your prospecting or you won’t be winning any Cadillac prizes next month.

When I was still on the sales front line, I’d be at my desk by 8:00am every morning, ready to make the first call and I wouldn’t move until 11:30, by which time I’d aim to have the following morning full of appointments. I wouldn’t agree to any meetings, appointments or anything else which distracted me between 8:00 and 11:30. 

How to Use a Routine to Avoid Bad Habits 

This is the power of the routine and you avoid bad habits because you’ve got targets to hit. If you commit to your schedule and to avoid all paperwork orientated tasks until Friday afternoon, you’ll simultaneously avoid the all-too-tempting Friday-afternoon slump. 

Another good example is the watercooler. The watercooler has become a metaphor synonymous with time wasting and you can bet that people with schedules don’t spend so much time chatting with Joey about the latest episode of The Voice. There are appointments to book up for tomorrow’s schedule. 

The Best-Kept Secret of Successful Salespeople 

Here’s a secret for you. When it comes to routines, top salespeople don’t wing it their days. They know exactly what they’re going to do throughout the day before they’ve so much as started eating their Cheerios in the morning. They have a schedule made up of smaller individual routines. They have routines for the way they travel, they have routines for the way they talk to their prospects and clients, they have routines for filtering out ready-to-buy prospects they’ll book meetings with rather than just sitting down with anybody. Try using a schedule for four weeks, stick to it and the question won’t be whether or not your commission increases, it will be by how much. Good luck.

The post Why a Strong Routine is Essential for Sales Success appeared first on CallProof.

Just because you can’t find a word in your printed dictionary doesn’t mean it’s not worth knowing. Gamification (or gamify for the verb) essentially means to add a game-like dimension to a processes, providing a competitive angle for people to play against one another to win.

Website owners and online marketers are using this strategy en masse and it’s a great way to get people motivated and involved to your cause though encouraged competitive streaks. The same system can be used with your salespeople to generate healthy one-upmanship competition. Let’s take a look at how this works.

Leave Both the Carrot and the Stick at Home

Business owners and sales managers the world over concoct ever ingenious ways of using the carrot and stick method. You don’t need either. Let’s say you tell Robert he needs to make 20 phone calls within the day; you could even hint that there’s an ‘or else’ attached to your request. Your salesperson knows you want him to make these calls to improve the averages of him getting an appointment, or even a sale, and he’ll (hopefully) aim for 20 calls.

However, after receiving a points score update showing Robert his arch sales nemesis is ahead of him by 20 calls, you can bet he’ll be looking at the clock to figure out how soon he can fit in another 40.

This is the power of gamification. With your salespeople held accountable for their results, rather than seeing the Friday afternoon slump in sales activity, your team will be voluntarily pushing harder to get ahead of their peers in a last-minute dash to win the game.

Assigning a Points Value

Assigning a points value for sales activity will work differently for different companies and it will depend on your conversion rates and general sales processes, so experimentation may be needed. As an example, a possible points value may be as follows.

1. Phone call: 1 point

2. Appointment booked: 10 points

3. Face to face meeting attending: 30 points

4. Sale closed: 60 points

Many organisations say to their sales people they must make 100 phone calls in a day. However, spamming through phone calls to hit arbitrary targets can create activity without focus on results. If your salespeople are competing for points and they know they can get a significant competitive advantage by booking an appointment, later traveling to meet that client and pushing harder for a sale, you’re going to find your sales force engaging more of the kinds of activities which are closer to the closing a lead down.

Statistical Analysis

Gamifying your processes makes it easier to manage the averages and monitor ratios of sales activity produced to sales closed. If you have a salesperson who’s enthusiastically working his way through activities but not generating sales, you can identify places where more training may be needed and shore up the gaps, eliminating unnecessary spinning of his or her wheels.

The result is salespeople with more sales which means happier salespeople with more commission which means even more sales, thus compounding the effect.

You Need Real-time Scoring or It Won’t Work

Finally is a point on the points. You wouldn’t watch a football game or play a videogame without keeping at least half an eye on the scores. Scores of your sales game must be known in real-time for the process to be effective and there are several methods do it.

A team text message with up-to-date results is an idea method so send out points scored once or twice a day to provide milestones for your team to work towards. Best of luck.

The post How to Boost Your Sales Team with Gamification appeared first on CallProof.

As salespeople and business owners, we all know the pain of arriving in the morning and having to face the cold lead pile, a demotivating task we hope to face later rather than sooner. Inbound marketing costs to ensure your phone rings with fresh leads every day can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds every month so how much money has pile of cold cost you? Why does it have does it have to be like this? What makes a cold lead a cold lead, and what can be done to rectify this situation? Here are five tips to help thaw out the numbers in your favor.

1. A Point on passing Prejudice

The first question to ask is on how you’re categorizing your leads in the first place. Sure, not every prospect is hotter than the fires of blazing fury and just desperate to be closed, but arbitrarily categorizing your leads by size or value won’t do you any favors. Think hard and think creatively about how or even if you should categorize leads.

Good leads are like milk in the fridge. One minute, you’ve got delicious warm milk to enjoy with your honey and in the blink of an eye, it turns sour. Have a rethink about how you’re organising your leads to mitigate the damage.

2. Who or What has Turned Down the Temperature?

If a fresh lead comes through the website or phone, your salespeople will (hopefully) be fighting to get there first. A quick conversation ensues and all of a sudden a prospect is not interested in your product or service, allocating it to the cold for a chance call at a later date. Is the lead cold, or could more diligence have been exercised before cold-pile allocation?

What turned off the lead in the first place? Taking the time to answer this question can mean the difference in converting sub-zero temperature prospects into hot sales figures. Factors to consider might include:

● Was there a clash of personalities which another salesperson might be able to smooth over?

● Was there a price objection which could be managed to get the prospect interested?

3. Shuffling the Deck

Not every salesperson can sell every prospect. A primary tool in the salesperson’s box is the ability to convey his or her personality dynamically to mirror the prospect and create rapport, but some degree of matching is necessary.

It’s been proven that younger females have a tougher time selling to older females and, likewise, a 55-year-old CEO veteran of an engineering company won’t want to speak to a 17-year-old high school graduate scarcely able to contain his eagerness.

One morning each week, check over the lead piles, discover where there might be opportunities to personality match and then switch things up. Make this habitual and you’ll be amazed at the amount of so-called “cold” leads which warm up in front of your eyes.

4. Match People’s Schedules

If your prospect found time to contact you on a specific day around a specific time, it’s possible they’re setting aside a regular time each week to research that enquiry. If it was out of office hours, it’s likely they’re working on it after the end of play when colleagues have gone home and the phone stops ringing.

Take advantage. You’d be surprised the amount of time this simple technique works so reach out to prospects on their own terms. You’ll find a much warmer welcome.

5. If All Else Fails, Fall Back onto LinkedIn

Finally, if all of the above fails, it’s time for LinkedIn and, no, not to pester the prospect with direct contact. LinkedIn is one of the most powerful tools in the salesperson’s arsenal since the invention of the telephone, so make sure you use it.

Look up that prospect, think of ingenious ways to befriend their contacts. Reciprocation is a good tool here, and if the prospect is a decent one, it would be worth going the extra mile. Being a friend of a friend changes the game completely. Good luck.

The post 5 Ways to Activate Your Cold Leads appeared first on CallProof.

This article could be summed up in one sentence which would be: Failing to automate your field sales reporting is currently costing you a fortune in lost sales. Fortunately for the sake of this post, and especially coming from a field sales software blog, such bold statements require backing up with explanation so we’ll cover these points here. Firstly, let’s take a look at the difference between an inside sales team and field sales team. 

Inside Job or Missing in Action?

If you’re a sales manager looking after an inside sales team for a telesales firm, you’re afforded the following luxuries:

● Watching first-hand the work ethic of each individual team member

● Examining changes in those work ethics on a day to day and month-to-month basis

● Gauging an eye witness account of how different sales activities are divided

● Monitoring all aspects of sales techniques being applied, including frequency of closing

● Monitor language, enthusiasm, competitiveness and just about anything else going

With your field sales reps, you are affording precisely zero of these luxuries. Their office is their car and their activities are largely a mystery taken on good faith and checkable only by investigative work on your part. 

“I Trust My Sales Team”

Trust is important. In the business world though, it simply takes a backseat to hard data. Also, having an automated tracking program or software for your field sales representatives doesn’t necessarily represent a lack of trust.

Having a complete, reliable, software-generated field report to hand means you have everything you need without enquiring and hoping or even trusting the truth will be told. This results in higher quality time spent training, coaching and conversing in general with your sales team for more meaningful discussions which produce greater sales. 

How Much Time is Wasted Manually Creating “Accurate” Reports?

It’s estimated the average field salesperson spends about 40 mins each day writing reports on their activities. That’s 150 hours per year based on 5 days a week and 45 working weeks per year (just to be conservative). If your sales guys are on a $15/hr basic wage, that’s $2,250 a year. You’ve got 10 sales guys? That’s $22,500 a year on reports. Want to know the worst part?

You have no idea  whether or not the reports are even accurate.

You’re spending potentially tens of thousands of dollars to distract your sales people from spending more time with clients closing sales to instead generate 100% unreliable data.

Overperforming salespeople with little time will copy and paste reports just to get them filled in while, worse than that, underperforming sales people will spend way too much time on reports to justify their hourly wage. People often forget to enter the info and many managers won’t bother reading the reports as a result. 

A Summary of Automating the Process

With no effort on your part whatsoever, tracking your field sales team with automated software affords you extensive luxuries to improve effectiveness and sales. You’ll be able to:

● See which of your customers exactly are being called, when, and how often

● Track travelling data on a map between appointments attended

● Record all conversations of all phone calls to check sales technique

● Accurately determine how your field sales people divide up daily activities

● Check efficiency of travelling methods in between routes to maximize number of appointments made each day

By automating your tracking with software, you can increase the effectiveness of your field sales team with greater effect than you can manage your inside sales team, a complete game-changer paying off in a serious boost to your sales. And yes, it’s precisely this reason why CallProof is being adopted on such a large scale.

The post Why Automation is Crucial in Field Sales Reporting appeared first on CallProof.

While it may be slightly cliché to say, it’s certainly not untrue that a good sales manager is worth their weight in gold. But what makes a good sales manager in the first place? Whether you’re a business owner who wants a 24-carat right-hand person on your team or you’re a sales manager wanting to develop the Midas touch, there are good practice principles to follow for the best results.

1. Discovering How Your Team Members Learn

Everybody learns differently. Some learn better by reading instructions, others with a hands-on demonstration and many from a conversation. Some salespeople can be motivated more effectively to absorb information if you spend the next 10 minutes sitting down with them privately while others will do better if you explain things via email. In some cases, getting on the phone for a watchable demo or doing a role-play will really see a return on that minor extra time investment.

Suggestion: Watch closely and take note of how your team members respond to different methods of instruction.

2. What Gets Your Sales Guys Out of Bed in the Morning?

Just like people learn differently, everybody is motivated differently and understanding what gets your salespeople out of bed in the morning is key to making sure their enthusiasm stays hot. Do they want money? Do they just want to be top salesperson and beat everyone? Are they more excited about free prize incentives? Discover how people tick and capitalize it.

Suggestion: If somebody’s competitive, encourage them to beat the competition and spend time praising the good work of others so they try and out-do their rivals.

3. Hold Salespeople Accountable for Results

If you’re a sales manager and you take a day off work only to come in the following morning and see a slump in sales activity, you know you’ve got a problem and it’s important not to let this go unmentioned. By failing to pull up the team on measurable shortfalls, you’re indirectly encouraging this kind of behaviour to be the norm. That said, engaging in a shouting session won’t help either. Approach situations like this with tact.

Suggestion: Ask what’s wrong to have caused the results and what you can do to help turn it around.

4. Always be a Coach and Not a Parent

It doesn’t matter how old we get, nothing grinds us like our parents telling us what to do. Why would you try to motivate a sales person with the same tactics? Avoid becoming a parent at all costs and instead become a coach.

Students of coaches aspire to impress them and make them look good to win their respect. A good coach helps a student by seeking out weak points to improve their game with positive encouragement. A student is not afraid to take a difficulty or problem to a coach who helps them like they might be to a parent who reprimands them.

Suggestion: Always avoid reprimanding someone like a scolding parent. Instead identify a mistake as an area which needs attention and then help and encourage.

5. A Great Working Relationship

To finish up, and as a summary and extension to the above, form a great relationship with your team members. Many sales managers around the world (usually the ones making a fraction of the money the company is capable of) believe instilling fear in and bullying the salespeople will get sales. This is a false economy. It’s a short term game and one which sees diminishing returns and, as any good investor will tell you, you must look at the long game.

Suggestion: Do everything you can to work on the relationship and avoid using fear as a motivator unless it’s a last resort.

The post 5 Responsibilities of a Great Sales Manager appeared first on CallProof.

Today we’re highlighting points to consider when choosing the right mobile platform for your sales team. Do take note that we’re only narrowing down the choice to the two most popular OSes for your convenience.

Sales App Selections

There’s tons more sales related apps in Android than iOS. Although Apple will contend the quality of these apps, the reality is that a lot of these apps are not ported into iOS or iOS does not have a good counterpart with them due to restrictions in programming.

Software functions

There are software that don’t have the same kind of implementation in iOS and in Android. Some of the functions may be available in one platform, while it is not the same once you jump to another smartphone OS. A good example of this is CallProof. In Android, CallProof can access the call history and it makes CRM reporting activities on the Android Platform easier. If a software doesn’t have an app and they want to use a different phone than the one prescribed, then I personally wouldn’t allow that. Allowing things like that just complicates the process and the idea is to make the processes automated.

Turn-by-turn Direction Software

Talking about the default software for each platform, the turn by turn directions that you get from Google is far superior than any other software, specially when compared to iOS Maps. Fortunately Google Maps are available in iOS as well.
Cost

The cost on an iPhone is much higher specially we just had the release of the iPhone 5. Top Android contenders are much cheaper than this even without contract. So if budget is a concern, then getting a phone on contract or a refurbished phone can be an option.

Battery Replacement

If you’re a sales warrior and you’re pretty much out on the road all day, battery may become an issue for you specially when you use a non-replaceable battery. Points go to whoever has a replaceable battery (iPhone definitely loses on this, although Android handsets like Nexus 4 don’t have replaceable batteries either). Car chargers help out a lot in these situations.

Repair Options

Disregarding the protection plan or any sort of warranty, iPhone typically has lesser repair options. Depending on the manufacturer and the model of the phone, the cost still varies for repairs.

Screen size

Smartphone-wise, you can have a bigger screen with Android. Maybe you need to do product demos, Android will have the screen estate for visual aids. iPhone will either have to be on 3.5 inches or 4 inches. Nowadays, sales organizations use custom trackable links or URLs to sales managers can see if a field agent is using those for presentations and demos. Sometimes the impact on a smaller screen does not equate when you have a larger screen like in tablets, and it doesn’t matter if the links are getting tracked if the impact isn’t the same. It’s the same analogy why salespeople now use iPads instead of a presentation folder.

User-friendliness

People love the iPhone for being user-friendly. Most people consider it to be the best smartphone to non-tech savvy people. Android, being open-source, struggles when it comes to standardization and simplicity.

Email Client

The implementation of Gmail in Android, by far, gives the best user experience for email in a mobile. iOS does a good job with covering the basics and advanced options which are standard in all modern smartphones.

In the end, choosing a phone is a very emotional choice to make for any individual, and sales managers need to be careful to differentiate between the function and the superficial features that your team needs. Ultimately, for most business organizations, cost will be the main concern. The choice of apps will also be a major factor considering that some companies use their own systems and their choice of apps. You should also focus on what information you can receive from the device that will help you sell. How will it make your selling better? Make function the focus of your choice and you should have the best device your team needs.

The post iPhone or Android: What’s the best option for your sales team? appeared first on CallProof.

You may hold each of your sales team members accountable for their progress on a daily basis, but how does that translate into long-term objectives? A good sales team accountability plan not only holds reps accountable but it motivates them with group goals.

What is Sales Team Accountability?

Sales team accountability takes individual accountability a step further and holds a team accountable for group goals. In an organization, a sales manager typically tracks the number of calls, face to face visits, appointments ran and booked. But when you take a look at it, this is all historical data. Comparing this to a sales accountability plan that uses real-time data, you can find out when your agents made their first call for the day, the number of calls they made. You get to know in real time whether they’re busy or not; or whenever your team lacks the motivation and if the day is not yet over with – you could always get them back on track, re-engage and start selling again. Remember – the time you lose not correcting them or motivating them on the spot is time you can never get back.
One strategy that you can do (this will vary according to your organizational structure), is to formulate a grading system based on profitability, and send it through email or text message. What’s good about texting their stats is that you avoid the excuse that they didn’t have enough time to read through their emails or they did not have time to go through the stat board. Another plus is that they can check their progress easily in one text message thread. This way, you’re making your team accountable for doing a self-check and they can be aware without you checking up on them constantly.

That’s the key with sales team accountability – awareness! Some people know if they didn’t look at their stats, they could easily dismiss it as if it didn’t happen at all. And that’s when it becomes a big problem, when you aren’t constantly reviewing your sales data and your sales team don’t understand where they fall into place. So do you want to provide real-time motivation, or do you offer a stale motivation strategy?

No more “Off Days”

In order to make the best use of real-time data, the manager must act on it in real-time. For example, say a manager takes a few minutes at lunch to review his sales reps performance for that morning. From the data he can tell that one sales rep has made not nearly as many calls as the other sales reps that morning. With that data, he can chat with the sales rep to see if there are any problems and help them turn around an unproductive day if necessary. Traditionally if a sales rep had an off day, there was not much better sales manager could do without micromanaging. But by using real-time data effectively he can turn the situation around in a few minutes.

With real time analytics, the sales reps can see their current standings as well. They can use these to keep motivated and track their progress over time. Be careful not to fall into the trap of sending statistics through email or text message that never get read by your sales reps. One easy way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to just check in on specific stats with your reps on a regular basis.

Real-Time Sales Management NOT Micro-Management

Managing a team with real-time metrics is not the same as micromanaging your team. It’s important that you and your team know the difference. Always give them the benefit of the doubt when you approach them about a potential problem. That way it won’t feel like you are reprimanding rather than being there to help.

Your real-time metrics can provide a lot of insight but they don’t tell you everything. What might look like low productivity for a sales rep could actually be them taking extra care of a customer over the phone or solving a customer service issue with a high-priority client. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to patterns over time in addition to daily metrics.

Analyzing yesterday’s sales activity is like reading a history book. With real-time insights you don’t have to wait until it’s already happened to fix the problem.

The post Why You Need Real-Time Sales Accountability appeared first on CallProof.

I can get the same product somewhere else for less

This objection is a classic. And with the rapid growth of e-commerce it’s more important than ever to know exactly how you’ll counter it. So how do get out of the price war game?

Sell yourself. Sell the benefit of buying the product from you personally. Nobody can resist consistent customer support. Use that to your commitment and say something like this: “I’ve heard of others say that in the past, but typically most of our customers like to do business with us because they know we are going to take real good care of them. And that’s really what I specialize with here at XYZ Co, I really specialize on making all of our customers happy. In fact, that’s the whole company’s focus”.

You could even go as far as introducing one of your long time customers and if they’re willing, they could vouch for the excellent customer service you’ve been constantly delivering to them. It takes away the doubt by offering an insight through another customer who already enjoys your services and undoubtedly will come back to you every time they need your services.

More than ever, consumers have been more aggressive in negotiating. Sometimes when you agree with them and then provide proof why it’s more valuable to do business with you, they will choose you because you offer more than their money’s worth in customer satisfaction.

I’m not ready to buy right now

Another typical objection is that potential customers think that it’s not a good time to buy. But in reality, its a great opportunity for them. It’s difficult to rationalize this since it does appear like you’re pressuring customers to buy from you. Although if you really analyze their situation, they really just have doubt or uncertainty about your product. Help them make an informed decision.

One of the best ways to help them is by being proactive and telling them you can answer their questions on the spot. If they need to talk to their spouse (or any other person they need to consult first), do just that and get them to decide ASAP. The faster they come to a decision, the faster that you resolve a pain point for them.

We’re satisfied with who/what we have

A lot of times, as you throw your sales pitch to the customer, you get this sinking feeling that you’re trying to sell them something that they have no use for. This situation isn’t completely alien to most salespeople and they find that waving the white flag is the best thing to do. However, you don’t completely close the door in these instances. Get their contact information and ask them when their contract runs out and be there when they will need your services.

With these tips, you should be able to handle more common objections. However they’re designed to help you with these objections, but not a foolproof way of securing a sale. Remember, salespeople with strategy will always have the upper hand in tight situations like these and you want to be prepared as you can be.

The post 3 Common Sales Objections and How To Overcome Them appeared first on CallProof.