Get More From Your Salespeople And Your Phone System.
The single greatest tool of a salesperson is a dial tone. The second greatest is a list of customers. This last weekend I was at a birthday bash talking to my friend Shawn. He just started a job as a salesperson for a IT company. They gave him a list of 40 customers to get him started. Unbeknownst to him the list was stale with most of list un-contacted in years.
How do you get a new salesperson started?
Change is expensive. Getting customers is expensive and starting new salespeople is expensive. I’m going to tell you how your phone system can save you money and time.
All phone systems in the last 30 years have collected call records showing who called in and answered the call and who was called and by whom. Until recently these records have been so difficult to access that they’ve been ignored. Current generation phones system have network jacks on them and are designed to share information with your computer network. Why not use this to drive more repeat business, and to get new sales people up to their quotas faster?
Now call lists have been around for a long time and having new salespeople phone past customers is old hat. The trouble is its not simple and it takes work to put together call lists – so much so that it doesn’t get done. The beauty of your phone system is it collects every phone number and every name of every call made or received and puts it all on your computer and at your finger tips. If you want, It will even dial the numbers for you.
My friend Dave is one of the best new home sales people in all of Edmonton. For the last decade his numbers have put him in the top 3 in all of Northern Alberta. How does he stays at the top? He maintains relationships with past customers that stretch back a decade.
We have a greeting card business that we encourage others to use for Christmas, birthdays and other occasions. Do you what the biggest barrier to sale is? Not having a list of past customers to start your mailing list with.
Here are some ideas to get more business from your sales people and your current phone system.
1) When new sales people start, give them a list of numbers the old salesperson was calling from your phone reports.
2) Automatically link phone calls to Facebook, Linked In and past sales to give them more control of the call.
3) Automatically schedule calls for past customers you haven’t spoken to in a while.
Call reporting and automation are very common on the newer generation of phone systems. We are trained and certified in most of the SMB systems including Aastra, Cisco, Snom as well as some 3rd party like 3CX, Trixbox Pro and SwitchVox. If you’d like to just chat about how to leverage your existing phone system and get more from what you have, please feel free to give us a call.
Serving Calgary’s Small and Medium Businesses
http://www.heliatech.ca/phones/
Dar Zuch
SMB Specialist
Helia Technologies
