DOES YOUR POTENTIAL CLIENT HAVE A NEED FOR YOUR SERVICE OR PRODUCT?

When cold calling or telemarketing, it is very important to establish whether or not your potential client has a need for your service or product and you may wonder how to do this?

If you are promoting your business over the telephone you must grab attention very quickly but you also need to find out if your product or service is required and you do this by asking an open ended question early on in the conversation. 

An open ended question starts with: Who? What? When? How? Where?

For example, let’s imagine you are selling ‘white goods’ for care homes and you have a list of care homes (which has been run through the TPS prior to calling, otherwise you would be breaking the law) and you make your first call:

You get through to the decision maker and you explain the reason for calling and at this point you ascertain the following:

Do you currently have laundry equipment on site?

The answer will no doubt be yes – you then go straight in with an open ended question so that they talk to you rather than you talk to them…

How many commercial machines do you have or do you only have domestic machines? Or

What kind of machines are you using? Commercial or domestic?

They then have to respond to you and this open ended question will normally lead to a more detailed answer rather than a simple yes or no. You are forcing them to respond in a conversational manner.

This allows you to ascertain very quickly whether or not this contact has a need for your product. You can now go ahead selling the features and benefits and know that what you are telling the client may be of interest.

So many telemarketers make the big mistake of sell, sell, sell but they don’t listen and they don’t ask the right questions.

It is very important to create a professional image on the phone and waffling, or selling to someone who does not have a need for your product or service wastes both your time and theirs. It is this type of call that irritates and creates barriers against telemarketing.

At Talkmarketing we run telemarketing 1-2-1 or group training sessions so if you need any help please do not hesitate to get in touch: 01424 576658