Pre-call planning is a critical aspect to closing business and is often overlooked and/or taken for granted in the sales process. Before calling prospects, research must be completed to understand your new customer to be. Winging it is not a strategy for a sales call. You are going to want to be familiar with your prospect and understand who they are before you even pick up the phone. Being able to ask the right questions and drive insightful thoughts positions you for a more effective overall discovery process. It’s important to instate in-depth pre-call planning for better sales calls in your business.
Sales Call Planning
Just picking up the phone and calling the next phone number on your list isn’t a great plan if you are looking to close more sales. Before your sales team dives into their list of leads, they need to do some research into who each potential client or customer is and execute some sales pre-call planning for better sales calls.
It doesn’t have to be extensive research, but with so many valuable options available skipping this step seems careless. They do not need to spend hours to evaluate the prospect and their business, but the sales team members should get familiar with a few things during their sales call planning:
- What their business is about.
- What goals and plans do they have?
- What are they trying to accomplish?
- What are they facing in their industry and in their business?
- How is the state of their business now and what direction are they going in?
- How can your product or service help them get there?
Sales Call Strategy
You can find so much information online about a business. Taking the time, in the beginning, will put your sales team ahead of the rest. Many still do not take the time to analyze and develop an understanding of their future customers. Make sure your team does the preliminary sales call research to not only have better and more productive sales calls but to also close more sales deals.
There are many places your sales team can look to find your research answers:
- Search On Browser/google
- Prospect’s Website
- Hunter.io – A favorite of ours that not only allows for email exploration but can help find company sites for the industry you are interested in.
Elements of Sales Call Planning
From your research, you want your sales team to make sure they write out a sales script. It doesn’t necessarily need to be an entire call planned and written out, but some beginning topics and key points highlighted to refer to can go a long way to connecting with any prospect.
Review the questions mentioned above, and any other you might think are important and tie them into your product. How can your product or service assist your prospect and turn them into a client? A bit of structure and guidance will make any call run smoother.
Practice. Your sales team should practice their sales scripts. Practice with each other, practice in a mirror, practice in the car. After some time and many sales calls under their belt, practicing will probably go quickly. But, in the beginning, your sales group will only be better with a bit of trial and error. And, over time, their confidence and their skills will build as you guide them to be great salespeople.
Ready To Up Your Sales Game?!
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