How to be the most knowledgable telemarketer

You would think the best approach to being a highly knowledgeable prospector or sales person would be to study diligently and immerse yourself in all the details about your service or product.

But you'd just be deceiving yourself. It's impossible to know all the answers to every question a prospect might throw at you. Most likely they have years of expertise in their field and you will always lack their level of knowledge...so don't even try to impress them, you'll just look silly.

But you can sound intelligent and prepared by remembering one key point: the person asking the questions ALWAYS controls the conversation.

It's simple, but difficult to do in practice. The key thing you need is not more knowledge, but the ability to answer with a question.

Some question versions which work well are: "That sounds like an important issue to you; can you tell me why?", or "I'll check into that, but can you tell me how you've handled it in the past?", or "That's a great question; how would you be using that feature?"

Always remember, you are the sales expert, not the product expert!

A secret prospecting opportunity

For a number of years I've followed prospecting results to see if there was a pattern to timing. You know what I mean...everyone says don't call Monday morning or Friday afternoon (bunk!), or don't call the day before a holiday. Is it really true, or is it just folklore so we can all squeeze in a long weekend?

Turns out it's not true. Regularly, we have some of our best results on Mondays and Fridays. More surprising is the consistently strong prospecting results we get between Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

Sound strange? Maybe. But think about it...after Thanksgiving business travel and meetings slow down, budgets are set, new initiatives are waiting until January.

This all means your prospects are more available, which is exactly what you want when making a prospecting call. You don't want them to make a decision or even necessarily meet with you...you just want them to take your call and have an initial conversation to see if the topic is worth pursuing for a future in-person meeting.

So don't ignore Mondays and Friday, but especially don't ignore the two weeks after Thanksgiving. It will set you up for a very strong January!