Phone sales can be crucial for a company. Treating customers well over the phone adds value to the organization, and being able to close sales over the phone translates into commercial success. We’ll tell you which tools can help you with phone sales.
Telemarketing
Phone sales are a telemarketing communication strategy that aims to offer products or services to customers.
It’s an important strategy that can also help the company’s image.
If customers are treated well and the quality of the call is good, the company comes across as more professional. Many companies may not be getting the most out of this type of sales, so we’ll explain everything you need to take into account so you can guarantee the best possible phone service.
The right equipment
There’s a lot behind selling over the phone. In other words, selling over the phone involves many elements: good rapport with the customer, how the agent handles themselves… but there are also physical, objective aspects.
For example, being equipped in the best possible way so that calls are satisfying for the customer. If we lose the customer in the middle of a call or they can’t hear us clearly, it will create a poor perception of the company, and the customer will feel it lacks professionalism.
Therefore, a first key factor is having good equipment for efficient communication. Most companies simply have analog phones (which only allow one call per contracted line) or digital lines.
But there are tools that can help you get the most out of phone sales:
► Virtual PBX
A virtual PBX is the perfect tool for internal and external business communication.
That is, you’ll be able to keep track of everything that happens with your customers and communicate easily with your colleagues. A virtual PBX lets you manage and organize incoming calls, so you can, for example, route your customer to the extension of the agent best qualified to help them.
How? The PBX analyzes the call (for example, where it comes from or an option the customer has chosen) and redirects it to the corresponding extension. For example, if a customer from the United Kingdom calls your company and one of your agents can assist them in English, the call will go straight to that agent. Or if the customer chooses the “sales department” option, the call will be sent to one of the extensions that belong to that department.
This saves time for both the customer and the company, and it also spares the customer from being bounced around from the very first minute by constantly redirecting their call. First impressions matter and set the tone for the rest of the call.
► What other advantages does the virtual PBX offer you for phone sales?
With a virtual PBX built on WebRTC technology, everything happens in the cloud, which means, first of all, that employees can connect from anywhere and with any device connected to the internet. In addition, WebRTC ensures HD sound quality for your calls.
The PBX also offers a range of features that you can customize and adapt to whatever your company needs. You can opt for more basic features, such as call transfers, voice prompts, voicemail and caller ID. And there are also more advanced features, such as call queues, call recording or the statistics dashboard. The last two can be very useful for improving your phone sales service.
Call recording and the statistics dashboard will help you improve the service you offer, since you can analyze calls and see what works and what doesn’t, or which services get you the most purchases. It’s important to know how to handle calls, and this way you can take advantage of mistakes to learn from them and improve productivity.
And you can also add CRM integrations such as Zendesk or Zoho to the virtual PBX, which help you collect and manage all your customers’ information. These integrations are accessible to all employees.
So if a regular customer calls, even if the agent has never spoken to them, the agent can access all their information and all the interactions they’ve had with the other agents. This helps speed up any process with the customer and gives the company a good image. With these integrations you can keep track of the daily calls you receive or make, and you can organize your calls however you want.
Once you have the equipment that best suits your company and you’re sure it works properly, the calls begin. You already know you’ll have a call with good sound quality and that you can easily access your customers’ information.
You get the call moving along smoothly and your customer is ready to complete the purchase. Here we reach a decisive moment, because you can lose the chance of a sale if you don’t close it right away. Perhaps you tell the customer they have to go to a website to finish the purchase, or you ask for their bank details, and these options don’t inspire confidence.
That’s why business telephony is so important. And it’s also the reason why another important tool is the ability to take credit card payments over the phone.
► Credit card payments over the phone
Taking credit card payments over the phone is an automated system that allows the transaction to be carried out securely and without human intervention.
Instead of risking losing a customer, during the same call you can send them to this automated system, which will collect the necessary details while the agent stays on hold, without access to the call between the system and the customer.
Once the process has finished, the agent is notified that the payment went through successfully and then returns to the customer’s call. At no point does the agent have access to the bank account information.
In addition, the system is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so there’s no need to worry about the volume of payments to be processed.
This tool is completely secure because it complies with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which guarantees the security of every transaction carried out.
These are some of the tools that can help you when selling over the phone. With all of this covered, you can start calling your customers confident that your equipment won’t let you down, while also projecting professionalism. This kind of tool, and many more, can be found at Fonvirtual.
► Email marketing
What happens once the call has been successful and we’ve closed the sale? You’ve won a new customer, and you must keep treating them with professionalism and quality.
Usually, after a purchase that we’ve also closed over the phone, we need to send the customer official documentation (the invoice, the proof of purchase…), and this is where another form of communication comes in: email.
Any communication channel you use to contact a customer must be secure and professional. And any company that sells over the phone will have a large number of emails to send at the end of the day; in many cases it may be the same type of email for more than one customer.
And at this stage of the sale, bulk email software such as Mailrelay comes into play. This type of email marketing service gives you a simple way to send bulk emails, and it also includes a newsletter editor with pre-written templates. If you use this tool, you’re far more likely to keep your email from landing in spam, one of the leading causes of lost sales.
If an email from you never reaches your potential customer, they won’t get in touch again and won’t trust the company. You can choose a simpler or a more complete version, depending on what you want for your company.
Now you know everything about the tools you need to close sales over the phone! Once you have good equipment and secure applications, all you have to do is start calling and trust your equipment and your persuasion strategies. If you cover every communication channel to contact your customers, it will be almost impossible to lose them.
Whatever the channel, closing a sale rarely happens on the first contact: understanding the lead generation process will help you prepare your calls better, and if you combine the phone with email, how to write an irresistible sales email has more resources for you.
