What does it take to become a successful sales rep in a telecommunications role? Start by building a process with actionable steps (plus giving yourself an edge that others can’t match!)
There are plenty of online ads that promise to teach you to become a successful sales rep. Much of it is vague, like “be organized” and “understand your customer” or even “establish KPI’s that matter.” And yet none of that helps a salesperson nail down an actionable process.
There are two primary characteristics of a successful sales rep; they are:
- Working harder than anyone else.
- Working smarter than anyone else.
Standing out in a sales position means that you’ve got a process down. It means you’ve worked hard. In telecommunications, much of the sales process happens over the phone or digitally through email, chat, or social media, so you must understand how to integrate your process into each of those methods and perform well.
Asking the right person the right questions (and giving the right answers)
If you take any effective sales process and break it down into parts, you’ll see common denominators. Four, to be exact:
- Talk to the decision-maker
- Time your engagements to her benefit
- Know what questions to ask and when to ask them
- Prepare yourself with answers and solutions to her problem
The salesperson who nails down these four components with consistency will succeed. No gimmicks. No special training. Just an old-fashioned, one-on-one dialogue that builds trust with a prospect.
You can be the most highly-trained salesperson in your company, but if you can’t establish trust, you won’t get far. Trust is the foundation of sales success.
And to build trust with your prospect, you must:
- Speak to her directly so that you can answer her concerns without any loss of communication or clarity via a third party.
- Reach out at a time that’s easy and manageable, so you can speak without interruption and fully engage with her questions.
- Prepare yourself with questions that uncover her pain points, anxieties, priorities, and desired outcomes by working with you.
- Give answers that show you understand her situation and how your product or service can provide a solution.
Knowing your product is a given, but can you position it as a solution to specific objectives?
Run-of-the-mill sales advice alert! Now is when the savvy blog post writer tells you, “know your product inside and out.”
Well, yeah. You should do that.
But there is such a thing as “the curse of knowledge” for salespeople. It’s the point where you’ve learned everything there is to know about your product, but you can’t relay that information to your prospect without making her feel overwhelmed.
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Knowing how to position your products as solutions to specific problems is the real key. That’s the end goal. Know enough so that you can be flexible and communicate how the product will benefit the customer in some specific way.
The more you position the product as a solution to his or her unique problem, the more confident your prospect will feel about purchasing.
Give yourself an edge that others can’t match
Being a successful sales rep in telecommunications requires an aptitude for outbound and inbound calls. You have to know how to sell over the phone. And there are a million pieces of advice out there, from cold calling to controlling the tone of your voice.
But how can you give yourself a real edge? Like tripling the number of calls, you make per day, without extra effort?
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The one sales trick you need to land more deals without much effort
One thing you see over and over again with new salespeople in telecommunications: no referral strategy.
If you position yourself as a trusted advisor to your customers, not just another salesperson, they will happily refer business to you. But only if you ask at the right time. And you make it easy to send a referral. Also, a valuable incentive never hurts!
A successful sales rep builds different channels for new business: referrals, social media, ads, and networking. He lets his hard work pay off while he’s sleeping, so the leads come in automatically.
Set up a clear and defined referral strategy for each customer. Follow-up after a certain amount of days, ask about their experience and re-enter them into the sales funnel.
If you’re serious about phone sales and want to triple the number of sales calls you make in an hour, give Call Logic a try. Sign up for our free trial now!