Selling is not an easy job. Your call center employees not only need to say the right things, but they need to be also persuasive to close as many sales opportunities as possible.
As a business owner, do you wish that you can do more to build up their confidence in selling?
Here are four training techniques that will help your call center employees to be better salespeople.
Improving their knowledge of your company’s offerings
One of the biggest mistakes in sales training is how product knowledge seems to be under-estimated.
The truth is, your call center employees need to be the experts in your company’s offerings so they can answer any possible questions your customers will ask.
Thus, your training techniques must include ample time in making them learn the ins and outs of your products and services. In turn, they will gain more confidence in carrying a sales conversation.
Sell the benefits rather than the features
Product knowledge is just half of the story.
To become better salespeople, your call center employees must learn how to position features of your products or services in a way that encourages purchasing interest. In short, they need to know how to sell the benefits of what you offer.
That’s what is called features versus benefits.
While a feature describes what your offering can do, a benefit is about connecting with the need of your buyers.
For example, instead of saying that a camera has X amount of gigabytes of memory, sell instead that it can store over a thousand pictures of their most important memories.
In your training then, encourage them to come up with a benefit for each of the features of your offerings.
Handling objections
Many call center employees, especially those without any sales experience, would not like selling because of rejection. However, rejection is part of the game. Not every pitch can convert into a sale. Therefore, train them to have a positive, winning mindset.
Additionally, teach them how to deal with people turning down their offer by learning how to handle objections.
You can do this by listing down all possible scenarios that customer will decline the offer and write down good rebuttals to persuade them to change their mind.
Assumptively close the sale
Another effective training technique in helping your call center employees to be better salespeople is learning how to assumptively close.
Assumptive close means that you assume your buyer is about to make a purchase. Rather than ask, “Are you interested in our products?”, inquire instead, “How many units would you want us to ship to your address?”
The assumptive close encourages buying signal and creates a sense of urgency in the sales pitch.
Wrapping it all up
You can bring all the above sales training techniques together through role-plays.
Through role-playing, you allow them to practice different sales scenarios as well as use new and suggested spiels so they can work on how to speak persuasively. You can also provide valuable tips and give helpful feedback.
By giving them the chance to practice, you are ensuring that they can apply what they learned and become better salespeople when they go back taking calls.