One of the most difficult things to get right when starting a new business is knowing how to market your new venture. Unfortunately it’s an area often overlooked. Efforts can vary from large and expensive magazine advertisements to doing absolutely nothing at all. Often both approaches bring the same result. Nothing happens.
Why is marketing so important?
Having a successful marketing strategy for your business is like having a powerful train driving customers through your doors. Once these customers are through your doors, you can then work on selling them your goods and services. All too often businesses concentrate their efforts on the sales function without really bothering about marketing, which results in poor sales because customers aren’t coming to buy.
Learning from larger businesses
Before we look at marketing techniques, I want to tell you about an excellent, free way of getting up-to-the-minute telesales training. Every year big businesses invest millions of pounds training their telesales staff in the latest techniques for telemarketing. As soon as you open your business, you will get bombarded with all sorts of people trying to sell you something. Personally, I never buy anything over the phone; even if it’s something that I’m interested in I will only decide if and when I see written information including terms and conditions
How to approach a cold sales telephone call
You’ll learn a lot from how they work the call so as to get through to the decision maker. Obviously the last thing they want to do is waste their time selling advertising space to someone who is not a decision maker
How to overcome common objections
The reason I urge you to tell them you’re not interested is because then you’ll learn how to handle initial objections. The most important thing when handling any objection is to keep dialogue going and build up a relationship because people find it more difficult to say no to someone they like.
Coping with rejection
Whatever business you’re planning to start you’re going to have to learn to handle rejection as you’re going to get it. Often in truck loads. When a professional telesales executive calls you and you make it clear you don’t want whatever it is they’re selling you, they won’t take it personally. ‘Well thank you very much for your time this morning, Mr Power, I appreciate how busy you are, but if you ever do change your mind…
Professionals will be unfailingly polite, respectful of your time and also will try to leave the door open by saying something like, ‘Would you mind if I give you a call, let’s say in a couple of months, to see if your situation has changed?’ If they sound nice and reasonable the chances are you’ll probably say yes. From their point of view they’ve succeed in one goal at least – keeping the door open.
