There are clear steps you can take to improve your telesales skills and positively impact your results, which makes selling over the phone a great opportunity.

 

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, discovered some of the things that you can focus on improving, and placed this knowledge into books that 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. Formal sales training is a structured format in which knowledge is transferred to you in many different forms. Some examples are free or low-cost webinars as well as formal in-person sales training seminars and workshops.

In-person training typically has a greater impact on your development than virtual training options. That said, webinars and web-based training can be less expensive and less time-consuming.

 

Learn From Others

Typically, when working a telesales job, you will have other people 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 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 to help you develop and move to the next level. Some examples include a manager or mentor at your company or an external sales coach who coaches professionally.

 

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.

 

Using a Cold Call Script

A key component of a cold call script is to teach how to use it. Some resources are actually very negative about cold call scripts, saying they make you look bad when you sound like you are reading from one.

The people who say this are actually 100% correct – you do sound bad when you read off a cold call script. As a result, the most important thing to do when you are working off a script is to be able to use it without sounding like you are reading from it.

There are a few things that will help with this:

  • Design your script as an outline. This will make it easier to memorize and more flexible to use when on a call.
  • Know the script well enough to use it as a guide, not something you must read directly from.
  • Role-play with yourself, a peer, or a manager to help you learn and memorize the script.

 

Dealing with Objections

Training for telesales resources should include a step on how to handle objections. Objections will come up on every call. You can easily help prepare your resources for anticipated objections by teaching them which response would work best to keep the call going.

 

How to Get Around the Gatekeeper

Your telesales resources could spend up to 50% of their call time talking to gatekeepers. Telesales training should definitely include tactics for turning gatekeepers from enemies into allies.

 

How to Build a Strong Inner Game

One step often skipped in sales training is discussing the mental aspects and the inner game. The outer game is what we say and do. The inner game is what we think and feel.

This is very important in telesales, as it can be a challenging job with highs and lows and rejection at every turn. Every telesales resource is human and can be vulnerable at some level. If you don’t help toughen the sales resource up a little, they may not have the stamina to weather the storm, which could negatively impact activity levels, production, and attrition.

There are clear topics that can be discussed during telesales training to help a resource build a stronger mental frame of mind. To do well with this piece, you can benefit from consistently providing a little training and coaching to the telesales resource on building and maintaining a strong inner game.

 

Reflect

Reflecting on calls after each call, 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.