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Newsletter: Volume 2, Issue 1
The average time to read this newsletter is 4 minutes. Enjoy!
Outside Sales Reps
How do we identify needs? How do we find out what prospects and customers’ needs are? We don’t walk up to someone on the street and say, “What are your needs?” or, give them suggestions such as, “You need to shave” or “You need to lose weight.”
One of the ways to best determine people’s needs is to ask questions. Because prospects and customers don’t like salespeople selling (or telling) them, it’s better to ask good questions, rather than instruct them on what to do.
Questions come in many shapes and sizes. They are often broken down into either closed probes or open probes. An open probe a car salesman might use is “What are you looking for?” A closed probe would come later in the sales interview and might be something like “Do you have a color in mind?” Closed probes give the respondent a choice between or among alternatives. Open probes allow people to respond freely. I’ve heard open probes and closed probes referred to as Sigmund Freud questions (e.g., “Tell me about that”) and Joe Friday (“just the facts, maam”) questions, respectively.
For more information on questioning techniques, I highly recommend Secrets of Question-Based Selling by Tom Freese. By the way, Neil Rackham, in Spin Selling, says that the most important part of the sales process in large sales is NOT the close, it’s the investigative stage.
Telephone Sales Reps
Some people think cold calling is dead. It’s not. It’s just that a lot of people wish it were.
The truth is, a lot of people are inundated with email these days. It can take an inordinate amount of time to respond to an email, when often a phone call could “git-er-done” a lot faster (and more accurately). And uncertainty would be reduced by listening to one’s tone of voice rather than having to read between the lines and go back and forth replying to email.
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled “Cold Calls Have Yet to Breathe Their Last Gasp,” Chuck Van Groniger of A.G. Edwards said, “It certainly isn’t anybody’s favorite activity of the day. But it really can and does work.”
I often ask people “How many emails did you get today? Replies range from 15 to 200. Then I ask them “How many of them did you answer?” They often say something like “about 3.” Then I ask them “How many phone calls did you get today?” and often get “around 3”. Then “How many of them did you answer?” “All of them” is the reply I usually get. The truth is, a lot of people have stopped calling. Yet the response rate is much better than it is via email!
The competition really thins out in the cold calling arena. I tell people “Cold calling is like performing Shakespeare. It’s brutal. But, when it’s done well, it’s a thing of beauty.”
Customer Service Reps
Some companies are using Emotion Detection, which tracks volume and pitch of a caller’s voice. It tells people who monitor calls (when they do so), the anxiety level of the caller and is used randomly. It has grown out of voice verification technology.
For example, FedEx Corp is able to search calls from customers for the word “Wow” to glean really good, as well as really bad customer experiences.
Wisconsin Physician Service, a health insurance provider, searched calls for the word “Medicare” and “confused” to find callers who were having trouble understanding the new Medicare prescription plans.
Some programs combine word searches with emotion detection. Nice Systems, Ltd., spent tens of millions of dollars developing algorithms that measure a baseline of emotion at the opening of a call. If the customer’s voice deviates from that baseline, a supervisor is alerted.
One simple way speech analytics can help consumers is by making it easier for companies to figure out if a complaint is isolated or part of a systemic problem. For example, if a company starts getting a lot of calls about a defective product, the company knows it has a problem.
Posted by frank on March 7th, 2007 under Newsletter
