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The Coolest Closings Begin with the Happiest Agents

TMCnews Featured Article


April 28, 2006

The Coolest Closings Begin with the Happiest Agents

By Special Guest
C. Sorensn, Marketing Manager, OPC-Marketing


Every industry has its own particular common objections to overcome. You can teach anyone how to sell successfully if they have, or learn, the basic instincts of salesmanship. One of the greatest industries for researching and handling objections remains the Life Insurance industry. Once you have your Certified Life Underwriter (CLU) designation, it’s like having a PhD in handling objections.
 
Good Call Center Management begins by introducing the product and the company being sold. Give them information on how the product or service is made, distributed, and used. Technical data need not be stressed, but do provide answers to all of their questions, and keep the technical particulars available should they need them.
 
If, during a phone call, salespeople get a technical question they cannot answer, train your people to admit they don't know the answer, but will get it and call back with the correct answer, being sure to let the customer understand when to expect a callback. This approach is much better than answering incorrectly or making something up-when in reality the customer is actually testing the Agents knowledge.
 
Obvious problems in the product or service should be pointed out to the sales crew. Inform salespeople of the methods your company recommends using to overcome anticipated objections. Beyond the obvious, don't go further than this in discussing how to overcome objections until the salesperson has had a chance to personally work the product on the phone. Every day you will test your approach, everyday you will learn something new.
 
There are rarely more than 10 reasons why a person won't buy a product or service. Those reasons may be phrased in a million different ways-- by thousands of different personalities-- but the number will seldom, if ever exceed 10.
 
You'll find the reasons to be: it is too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry-- too cheap or too expensive, "I'm overloaded", "I don't have any money" and so forth. The reasons may change with the product or service, but the number is limited and each one can be reduced to its basic type of objection.
 
During those first days of testing and working on a new product or service, have the salespeople list on a yellow legal pad each reason they find that motivates a person to buy.
 
Also list and take notes for each objection to buying. When the same reason or objection is repeated by different prospects, put a checkmark beside their original notation. By the end of the second or third day, have a sales meeting.
 
This is where the teaching really begins. Everybody reads his or her list and gives a suggestion on how to handle each situation. Explain what worked and what did not work. When a salesperson has encountered an objection that couldn't be overcome, ask for suggestions from his or her peers. After the fourth or fifth person has spoken, everyone will realize that the objections are similar from one person to the next. The greatest Call Centers admit they don’t know everything-- they learn, modify and update with their Agents feedback. Agents are our greatest asset.
 
By the time the sales meeting is completed, the salespeople have become fine tuned machines. They know the reasons motivating a prospect to buy. They know all the objections any prospect is likely to make, and they have six, eight, or ten different answers to overcome each one. Now your salespeople are ready to sell.
 
Sometimes in raising an objection, your prospect will simply be flat out wrong, or the objection will be so ludicrous that nothing you say will be able to overcome it. You can't agree with the prospect, and although you know there are exceptions to every selling rule, you know better than to say he or she is wrong and start an argument. The best thing to do is to take his or her temperature—find out if the objection is real or simply a diversionary tactic.
 
 
OPC’s SpitFire Predictive or AutoDialer allows the call center to set custom dispositions for each type of call to be recorded back to the main database. Your System administrator Labels the buttons depending on the Campaign. Hot Cold, Blue, Green whatever makes the most sense to you.
 
When an objection does not make any sense, you have to find out what the prospect is really thinking, because until you do, you have no logical way to answer it. Even if you dream something up, you will not know what the objection is. It's the odd-ball, unreal objections appearing from nowhere that are the hardest to overcome. But, until the prospect's objection is answered, he or she will feel uncomfortable buying from you.







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