There are clear things that can be done to improve your telesales skills and create a positive impact on your results, which makes selling over the phone a great thing.

 

Read Sales Books

Purchasing and reading books that have been written on how to improve phone skills is one of the simplest, most economical, and most effective ways to improve your knowledge and skills. The good news is there are a lot of people who have done the same thing and have discovered some of the things that you can focus on improving and have placed this knowledge into books which you can read and learn from.

Attempting to do it on your own and reinventing the wheel are not recommended. Use the valuable information in sales books from others who have been in the same situations and mastered it. Do be careful as there are many different sales books available. Some books are better than others. Most sales books provide you with a few key points that you can adapt and incorporate to see a positive impact on your phone skills.

 

Go Through Formal Training

Attending formal sales training is another step to developing telesales skills. A structured format in which knowledge is transferred to you in many different forms is formal sales training. Some examples are free or low-cost webinars as well as formal in-person sales training seminars and workshops.

The in-person training will typically have a bigger impact on your development versus the virtual training options. With that said, webinars and web-based training can be less expensive and less intrusive from a time commitment standpoint.

 

Learn From Others

Typically, when working a telesales job position, you will have other people working around you doing the same job. Watching others around you is one way to learn and develop your phone skills.

Most likely, there are people who are doing well as well as others who aren’t doing as well. Learning what to do from those performing well and what not to do from those who aren’t is something to take from watching and learning from both.

 

Work With a Coach

Working with a sales coach is a way to improve your telesales skills. A sales coach would be someone you work with on a one-on-one basis and help you in developing and moving up to the next level. Some examples would be a manager or mentor at your company or an external sales coach who does coaching as a profession.

 

Role-Play

Finding someone to sales role-play with can be a very powerful exercise to help you to develop telesales skills regardless of whether you’re working with a coach or not. Role-play is practicing various sales situations with someone else.

 

Reflect

Reflecting back after different calls while working to determine what just happened is a powerful habit to adopt. Do this to think about how things went, what went well, and how it could have gone better. Pinpoint which objections the prospect may have had and how your responses impacted the call, which will greatly improve your phone skills.

SalesScripter provides a sales script tool to help sales pros develop telesales skills.