How to sell over the phone
- Define your purpose: What do you want to achieve?
- Prepare questions: What do you need to ask?
- Prepare answers: Summarize answers to likely questions.
- Practice: Use a voice recorder to hear how you come across.
- Visualize: Put up a picture of your caller or another person. Imagine you are talking to a person rather than a disembodied voice.
If you’re not comfortable on the phone, sales probably isn't the career for you. Learning how to capture and keep someone's attention without physically being in their presence is a skill all salespeople need. It’s also a skill that demands constant practice and improvement.
This guide covers everything from pre-call preparation to sales script tips. More of a visual learner? Scroll down, or click here, to see a detailed infographic from The Gap Partnership.
Phone Sales Tips
Make Sure You’re Comfortable on the Phone
There are a few basic characteristics everyone needs in a phone-centric career like sales. Don't have the characteristics outlined below? Either practice until you do or look for another gig.
- Enthusiasm: Be eager to discuss your client’s background, pain points, and goals. Your prospect can sense when you sound bored or uninterested and will be less willing to open up. So, ramp up your enthusiasm until you're both excited to find a solution for their use case.
- Patience: Be ready to listen. Don’t rush your prospect through the conversation, because you never know when a tangent might lead to valuable insights that will help you close. Be firm in guiding the conversation, but allow enough time for the prospect to share openly.
- Passion: If you don’t love what you’re talking about, how can you expect anyone else to? Passion is critical to selling. Of course, very few of us are “passionate” about selling software, cars, or service packages, so we have to find an angle that does make us excited. If your software helps users get promoted or frees up time they can spend with their families that’s something to get passionate about. Tell yourself a story that motivates and inspires you, and you’ll have the same effect on others.
- Confidence: Be comfortable sharing your views. Everyone -- including prospects -- wants honesty. If you think a prospect might not be a good fit for your product/service, tell them. If you don’t have a feature your prospect wants, be honest about it and propose solutions or product roadmaps that prove you’re proactively thinking about ways forward. Your confidence sets the tone of the call, so be authoritative and proactive.
- Sense of Humor: Don’t take yourself or your sales call too seriously. Have a little fun and help your prospect relax. You might try a trusty joke ("Want to hear a joke about a piece of paper? Never mind... it's tearable.") or self-deprecating humor, but break the ice and it’ll be much easier when you press for next steps.