Telephone Sales Skills to Get You More Appointments

This telephone sales skills training is designed to get you more meetings with prospects by disguising your sales appointment calls and giving them a new angle.

As soon as a prospect thinks your contact is a sales call, and you are a sales person, they can start to back off, raise barriers, and put objections in your way.

This can stop you achieving your goal of a sales appointment with them. 

What I want to do on this page is show you a set of skills that people in a range of industries have used to disguise why they want to meet with the buyer. 

You can then take these skills and adapt them for your products and services and get more appointments with potential customers.

Telephone Sales Skills to Change
the Angle of Your Calls

These telephone sales skills, and the examples below, will show you how to change the angle of your appointment calls:

From: I want to meet with you to pitch my offer to you.

To: I would like to offer you something of benefit and value, free of charge, and if you like what you see you may want to know more.

We make the change in the Introduction Stage of your appointment call at the point where you give your reason for calling. 

The first step to putting this sales training into action is to select a benefit of value that you can give to your potential customers, free of charge, as a reason for them to have an appointment with you.

You have several objectives when you do this:

1. The free benefit will disguise the fact that you want a sales appointment.
2. You want to be seen as something other than a sales person wanting to make a pitch.
3. The prospect sees the value of the benefit and this encourages them to agree to meet you.
4. The benefit you offer will later make closing the sale easier.
   
   

Understanding This Sales Training

Just to make sure I’ve explained the telephone sales skills in a way that you’ve understood.

This technique is not the same as offering something free as you try to close the sale.

It’s not like offering free fitting on a carpet to close the deal.

It’s offering a free survey and floor plan, that the prospect can use to price up carpets at any time, as a way of getting into the house to start the sales process.  

Once you’ve decided on the benefit you are going to offer as a way of getting to meet the buyer you need to write this into your sales appointment script.

Before we do that take a look at some of the examples below to get a full understanding of these telephone sales skills.

Examples of Telephone Sales Skills to Gain Appointments

Here are some examples of where telephone sales skills training has been used to create reasons for calling to arrange meetings that don’t sound like sales appointments.

Let’s start with an ethical, up front, and honest reason for calling, could you use a version of this on your calls?

Example 1.
The Honest Reason for Calling

An example of an honest and upfront reason for calling: 

‘I would like to come and shampoo your carpet, free of charge, so you can see how good our new carpet shampoo system is. Then if you are ever considering buying a carpet cleaning system, now or in the future, you’ll know exactly what ours can do for you.’  

No catch, no trickery, you’re simply saying to the prospect, here’s a win-win situation. I get to demonstrate my product and in return for your time you get your carpet cleaned. 

You will have achieved your objective of setting a sales appointment and getting through the door to demonstrate your product.

Example 2.
Not a Sales Appointment – A Free Trial

Continuing with our theme of giving your prospects something of benefit and value in order to get in front of them and into a position to sell, this technique can make a real difference to results. 

When you make contact with a prospect don’t ask for a sales appointment, ask if you can meet with the buyer to discuss offering them a free trial of your services. 

Let them see how good it is.

Let them get used to having it.

Let them come to depend upon it. 

And then turn up after the trial period to take it away from them unless they become a customer.

This used to be called ‘Let them hold the puppy.’ No one wants to give a puppy back once they’ve held it.

You can use the upfront and honest approach from example 1 at the same time. You simply add to your appointment call script that you want to give the prospect the opportunity to use and test your service. 

You can offer it free of charge if that’s workable, or let them try the service at a cost without signing a time-bound contract.

Example 3.
Offer a Free Survey not an Appointment

I’ve seen this used for many different home improvement products and services.

Sellers have also used their telephone sales skills to adapt the technique for a massive range of other markets, including non-tangible markets such as finance products.   

Instead of cold calling to make a sales appointment you contact prospects to offer a free survey or assessment of the current condition of the existing situation that your sales offer will fix or improve.

To start writing your appointment script, consider how you would survey the current condition or effectiveness of the thing your product or service will fix or improve.

Now, using your telephone sales skills, create a cold call script that you will use to contact prospects to offer them a free survey.  

Want free sales training on how to create a call, open a new window on Sales Appointment Scripts...

Ideas for Example 3 

Do you fix cars, offer a free assessment of the parts that you fix.

Offer a service to businesses? Assess how their current service is working.

Medical treatments, offer a free health check.

Websites or marketing, assessment of the current cost and effectiveness. 

And, if you are in any type of domestic building services or home improvements this technique is perfect for you. 

Remember, your call should offer to survey, report back, and then present your solution. 

When you use this example of telephone sales skills there is no mention of a sales appointment. You are offering a survey that could spot potential problems, give a valuable report back to the prospect, and offer solutions. 

Start creating your call script and put this idea into action, it has already been proven to work for many other people just like you. 

How My Teams Create Sales
Appointment Call Scripts

You can now quickly create appointment call scripts that will get you in front of buyers.

This is the course I use to train my sales teams and appointment setters.

The course works for any product in any marketplace.

It has been used successfully by large corporate organisations, in many different industries, to train their teams of sales people and appointment setters.

You can now use this same proven training course. To see more click the image or go to Sales Appointment Course...

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