What Is Your Most Underutilized Sales Tool?

Summary:

• Despite being old-school, the phone remains vital for sales. You’ll need to make a lot of calls to connect with potential clients, so learning how to dial efficiently and having the right tools is a must.
• Tools like PhoneBurner's power dialer can quadruple call productivity and give you more opportunities to speak with prospects.
• Successful phone calls require an engaging opening, an understanding of the prospect's pain points, and asking powerful questions that drive meaningful conversations.
• Confidence, tonality, and continuous improvement through call monitoring and data analysis are critical skills for mastering phone sales.

The phone might feel old school—but it’s essential for sales success

Here’s something we’ve learned from decades of phone sales: most of the time you make an outbound call, you’re not going to end up speaking with the person you want.

No shocker there. Many outreach professionals report live answer rates in the mid single digits. PhoneBurner’s answer rates are markedly higher averaging above 10%, with ⅓ of our customers exceeding 20% answer rates.

So for every 6 calls you make, you might talk to 1 worthwhile prospect. Naturally, only a percentage of those conversations will lead to an appointment or opportunity.

The lesson here is that you have to do a lot of calling before you get to talk with anyone you might actually close a deal with. That’s why tools that make dialing easier and faster are essential for success—but it’s also why you need to get really good at using the phone for outreach. Here’s how.

Statistically speaking, only one of these reps is actually going to get a prospect live on the line

Why the phone is an underrated sales tool

Unfortunately, the tedium of manual dialing scares a lot of people away from using the phone. It typically takes about an hour and a half to make 36 outbound dials by hand.

Making those outbound calls is a grind. Anyone who tells you they like doing it either hasn’t done it enough or isn’t telling the truth.

But if you get really good at using the phone, you’ll find that you can grow your business through sheer persistence. The phone call is still the best way to reach people, and we’re surprised that more people in sales don’t make a habit of it.

How to dial more efficiently

The best piece of advice we can give you is to take the work out of dialing. Any tool that saves time and effort when you’re calling is going to make outreach significantly easier for your team.

PhoneBurner’s power dialer can help you and your reps make up to 4 times as many calls in a given period, not to mention improve the percentage of calls that result in a live answer. But that’s not all—with PhoneBurner, you also get:

• Better call deliverability via a tier-one network
• Automated follow-up sequences with custom rules based on call outcomes
• Lead distribution tools to make sure leads end up with the reps best suited to reach them

You can learn more about how PhoneBurner turns leads into live conversations if you’re not a user already. Now, let’s learn about how to get the best possible use out of your phone on every call.

Opening your phone call

Once you get someone on the phone, you have just a few seconds to get their attention. If you don’t do something to take their thought process away from what they were doing before you talked to them.

In our webinar Smoke the competition with your most underutilized sales tool, Sales trainer Steve Clark of New School Selling provides some fantastic advice on how to do this.

As he highlights, contacts aren’t waiting for you to call. You’re nothing more than a 30-second interruption in their lives. They’re thinking about when they have to pick the kids up from soccer practice, when they can get away from work, who’s on Dancing with the Stars. So you need a great opening, or they’re going to get rid of you very quickly.

Having a script helps—but you also need to know how to deliver it properly. Here’s an example of how you might do it:

You: “Henry, this is [Your Name]—my name probably doesn’t ring a bell.”

Then pause. Suddenly, the prospect is thinking about whether he’s ever met you.

Prospect: “No, it doesn’t.”

Now, in your best, most nurturing voice, say:

You: “That’s okay, I didn’t think it would. May I take 30 seconds and tell you why I called, and then you tell me whether you want to continue the conversation?”

That doesn’t sound like a telemarketer calling—but Steve has used this script for 23 years on outbound calls, and it has made him millions of dollars. All you’re trying to do is make sure you have their undivided attention for 30 seconds. Once you know you do, you can confidently roll into the rest of your script.

Learn More: 9 Openers to Improve Your Outbound Prospecting Calls

Discovering your prospect’s pain points

The next step is to discover what will motivate your prospect to move forward. This almost always has to do with their pain points. Here’s how you can find out what they are:

You: “Henry, I appreciate that. I work with business owners who are frustrated with [X], who are concerned about [Y], or downright angry about [Z]. I don’t suppose that’s an issue you’re having, are you?”

You’re fishing for the issues that keep your prospect up at night. If he grabs hold of one, then you can have a conversation.

To do this effectively, you have to understand your prospect’s industry and the challenges they face within it. Here’s how that might look if you’re selling solar panels, for example:

You: “I work with homeowners who are frustrated with high energy costs, upset because they don’t feel like they have alternatives, concerned about what the future holds, and downright angry about big businesses ripping them off. I don’t suppose any of those are concerns you share, are they?”

Chances are, something in there is going to get his attention. Any useful information you learn during the call can be recorded in your CRM so you can continue to develop this relationship.

Questions are just as vital as your pitch

Most people want to use the phone to pitch, but the phone isn’t a 1-way communication tool. The best way to use it is to uncover a problem for your prospect—then move them towards the next step in your sales process.

Good questions keep your prospect talking so you can learn more about them during the call—and leverage that information to move them towards a decision. The best questions are:

• Powerful: they resonate with your prospect in a meaningful way
• Piercing: they get to the heart of issues that your prospects may not make obvious from the outset
• Penetrating: they get people to open up and spill their guts to you voluntarily so you can move the conversation forward

Learn More: 6 Sales Prospecting Questions You Need to Ask

Developing the right mindset & skills for phone sales

How does a linebacker develop the mindset to tackle other players? Is it a learned skill, or natural aptitude?

Sales training can make a lot of difference—but it all starts with having sales reps who possess certain key qualities. You can teach people how to improve, but you can’t teach killer instinct.

There are a few skills you can develop with practice, though. Here are a few of the most important:

Confidence

Confidence is absolutely a skill you can learn, and studying enough conversations can help a lot with this. Listen to enough sales conversations and you’ll begin to develop a natural sense of where the opportunities are and how to take advantage of them.

If you’re selling on the phone, the best way to practice is by recording every call you make so you can go back afterwards and debrief them. It’s just like an NFL team watching their games on film afterwards so they can take notes and improve.

Monitoring your sales calls and tracking the outcomes is the best way to make sure you and your team are learning as much from calls as possible. PhoneBurner’s built-in reporting tools and call monitoring capabilities can help.

Tonality

This is the pace, rhythm, volume, and cadence of your speech on calls. Really good phone salespeople are great at mirroring and matching these elements in their prospect's speech—it requires you to be a good listener, but it’s worth it because it helps your prospect feel more comfortable during the conversation.

People like to talk to others who seem like them—so whatever your prospects are doing is what you want to be doing as well. Listen carefully to every prospect you reach and modulate your voice accordingly.

Learn More: Forget Scripts: How to Increase Sales Through Active Listening

Master the art of the phone call and sales will follow

Sure, you already use the phone for at least a portion of your selling—but are you really using it to its full potential?

Successful phone sales are about so much more than just the number of dials your reps make (although that certainly matters too). They’re also about preparation, practice, asking the right questions, being an active listener, and reviewing your results regularly so you can keep growing.

To recap:

• Know your prospect, their industry, and their pain points
• Have a script (or at least an opening) that starts conversations on the right foot
• Develop powerful questions that encourage prospects to open up
• Modulate the pace, rhythm, and volume of your speech
• Review data and recordings from all calls so you can see what works and what doesn’t

PhoneBurner can help with a power dialer that helps you place more calls in less time—plus CRM features and integrations to store vital prospect data, built-in recording and reporting tools, and more.

Not a PhoneBurner user yet? Start a free trial here.