Rocket Fuel - how to turn order takers into salespeople
Today I would like to talk about a question I'm asked by business owners of their sales teams, and that's “how do I turn my order takers into salespeople?”
Hi everybody, this is Julie, The Sales Ace, bringing you a sales tip to help you skyrocket your business.
So, today I would like to talk about a question I'm asked by business owners of their sales teams, and that's “how do I turn my order takers into salespeople?”
Now, one of the first courses of action I always take when I'm asked this question is to actually look at the call itself and analyze what has been said.
And what I tend to find is that they'll receive a call from a customer, greet them “Hello”, and, you know, the nice stuff. They'll take their order; that will be it; the phone will go down, end of.
That is typical of what we see with order takers. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you want to turn your order takers into salespeople, what we need to actually introduce is an element of questioning, opening up the conversation, and this is where we cut back to things I've said to you before about training them to ask open questions.
It's about training them to spot opportunities, and that comes from developing conversations with customers. It’s about introducing possibly new products that you know will link into the products that they have ordered. It's about getting them to maybe upsell. So there are a lot of things that can be done.
But fundamentally, what we need to address is the conversation: it is about getting your team feeling comfortable with starting those conversations about "What else can we help you with?" or "How’s the business going?"
All those sorts of things, but it's about introducing those open questions.
Now, that may need training. That may need you to sit down with your team and actually come up with open questions that they're comfortable asking clients.
It may be also needing to adjust their heads a little bit around about what sales actually is, and just reminding them: it’s about resolving people's problems, it’s about helping them, and that this isn't being intrusive (because that's something I do often find with internal sales teams - the fear of being pushy or intrusive).
So, how do we turn internal order takers into salespeople?
We need to look at the call. We need to introduce opening questions and give them opportunities to talk more and spot opportunities.
So that's it for this week. There's a little tip there for you to get those brains working about things that you can do internally.
If not, if you need to pick my brains, or any advice or anything give me a call. My email address is Julie@thesalesace.co.uk
Look forward to speaking to you soon. Take care!
