Your telemarketing pitch is your biggest resource when making outbound calls - so it's important to get it right.
The perfect pitch doesn’t just fall into your lap or roll off your tongue in the first call you make; it often takes a lot of tweaks and improvements based on feedback and how much progress you make on your calls.
To help you along the way, and skip part of the learning curve, we wanted to highlight three sure-fire ways to make your telemarketing or telesales pitch more compelling to your prospects.
#1 - Focus on their business, not yours.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your telemarketing pitch is focusing too much on your business.
When you first call a prospect out of the blue, are they really going to care about how many years you’ve been in business? Or how many awards you’ve won? No.
Rather than focusing on your business in the first instance, you should be focusing on their business. This means finding out what your prospects do, where their problem areas are, and how you can provide a solution.
For example, we’ve run dozens of lead generation campaigns for franchises of InXpress, the global shopping and courier service. When reaching out to their target audience, who more than likely already have a shipping/courier solution in place already, talking about InXpress’ experience and where they ship to, isn’t going to get us any results.
Instead, asking your prospects questions about their current shipping solutions is far more valuable.
For example, asking:
“How do you send out orders and parcels at the moment?”
“How many parcels do you typically send in a day?”
“How long have you been with your current courier service?”
"If there’s one thing you could change about your current courier, what would it be?”
"Do you send out just small orders or do you deal with freight as well?”
Asking questions like these won't just help in gathering market intelligence, but will also help you find the right angle to approach your prospects.
One prospect may find that their current courier is charging them a lot, and they’re looking for lower prices. So, you’ll focus on how much they could save by switching to you. Another prospect might tell you that their courier only deals with domestic shipping, but they're looking to go international. So, you’ll focus on all the countries that you ship to.
This brief fact-finding exercise where you focus on your prospect’s business rather than your own gives you the tools to tailor your pitch to the individual prospect’s pain points. It also shows that you care about solving a problem and bettering a customer’s experience, not just getting another sale through the door.
#2 - Objection Handling
As a telemarketing company in an ever-growing digital world, we know a little thing or two about handling objections.
When you pitch to your prospects, it will be extremely rare if they love your pitch and have zero questions or concerns to throw your way (if you find you get this regularly, then kudos, and what are you doing reading this article?).
On almost every single call, you’re going to face some sort of objection; a doubt or reason that the prospect might have that they could try to leverage to get off the phone. But it’s not the end of the world, you just need to plan for some of the most common objections you could see, so you know exactly how to counter them!
Don't flog a dead horse...
When handling an objection, don't just keep rehashing the same part of your pitch in the hopes that the prospect with say something different. You have to listen to what the prospect is saying and recapture their interest by finding something that they won't object to.
To put this into context, you don’t want to be doing this:
Prospect: “We already have a shipping and courier partner, and we’re happy with the price we pay.”
You: “Well we can beat them on price if you switch to us!”
In this example, you haven’t engaged with what the prospect has said, and you’re trying to gain traction in an area which they have told you isn’t one of their concerns.
Finding their pain points
Instead, after the initial objection you should acknowledge what they have said, and then you should try to dig deeper and find what their pain points actually are.
You: “Okay, so I understand that you’re happy with the current price that you’re paying, is there anything else you would change about the service you’re getting?”
This gives the prospect a moment to think about whether there is anything that isn’t quite up to scratch. Not everyone will be forthcoming with this information, but in a best-case scenario they could respond with:
Prospect: “Well the delivery times aren’t always accurate. We’ve had a few customers say to us that their parcels have arrived a few days late which is a bit frustrating.”
So, now that you’ve shown that you heard and understood what they said, and you’ve identified another problem area that you can focus on, the next step is to empathise with their problem. This is where you show that you share their frustration and the problems it can cause, and then follow up with a solution.
You: “I can imagine that is frustrating, especially when the fallout is on you rather than the courier. One thing that we actually pride ourselves on, is our promised delivery times. We have different tiers of delivery that you can choose from, including same-day delivery, or 24-hour tracked delivery, so you know your customers are getting their orders on or ahead of the specified delivery time. I understand you also said you are happy with your price at the moment, but if we could give you a better level of service, and beat the price you’re currently paying, is that something you would be interested in?”
Here, you have shown your understanding and empathy towards the prospect’s situation, then presented a solution to their problem by telling them about your service. Returning to the prospect’s initial objection and spinning it in a way that is likely to interest them at this stage in the conversation is also a good way to add a little more value to your proposition – because no one in their right mind is going to turn down saving money if it comes with better service.
This is just one example of how to handle a particular objection, but spend time doing some trial and error to see what common objections your prospects give, and what rebuttal you find is most effective at combatting them.
#3 - Ditch the stiff script
It’s long been a topic of debate; should you use telemarketing scripts or not?
While scripts are great for training purposes, having a script that dictates exactly what you should say is a thing of the past, as they can detract from your ability to keep your pitch flexible over the phone.
To make your pitch compelling, your tone and demeanour need to be as well. If you’re rigidly sticking to a script, it can come across in the tone of your voice and have an impact on the rapport you build over the phone.
To keep this from happening, ditch the script!
Instead, keep some notes in front of you that you can refer to, with questions you should ask, objections you might come across, and USPs to tell the prospect about.
Modern-day telemarketing is all about having real conversations with your prospects that you can tailor and adapt based on their needs and concerns.
Each conversation should be a little bit different which is why going script-less can give you the flexibility you to make your pitch more compelling for different prospects.