LEADERSHIP COACHING
What Team Members Need to Know About Your Ideal Customer
Industry Content Supporter:
Marc Carriere
Managing Director
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marccarriere/
Customers are the lifeblood of any business. If you’re not serving customers effectively your business has no purpose and will eventually cease to exist. That’s glaring obvious, isn’t it?
Yet, one of the biggest mistakes many businesses make when training their call center team members is not explaining who their Ideal Customer is and what problems are keeping them up at night, and how your business solves these problems for them.
At the end of this article you’ll know the key areas about your Ideal Customer that need to be shared with your team members, so they have a crystal clear idea of who your Ideal Customer is, and how they can best relate and communicate with them.
Making sure your team members have a crystal clear idea of your Ideal Customer is crucial because in many cases team members are the first human contact or have the majority of interactions with your Ideal Customer.
Not to mention that effective engagement with your existing customers or prospective customers is the corner stone of achieving higher contact and conversion rates to drive growth and lower sales costs!
And, the key to more effective engagement – knowing everything you can about the person you’ll be speaking with so you can really understand who they are, how best speak with them and quickly find common interests you both share.
Because of this, team members need to know who your Ideal Customer is and what problems they’re trying to solve; those things that are keeping them up at night!
How they like to be communicated with, so team members can really empathize with your Ideal Customers or prospects and relate to them as individuals to engage with them in a way that is both meaningful and appreciated by your Ideal Customer.
An obvious starting point is sharing your Customer Avatar, or what some people call the Buyer Persona, which your sales and marketing departments have likely created.
This not only includes Demographic Information like:
∙Gender
∙Age group
∙Where they live
∙Whether they’re married or have a life partner or if they’re single
∙If they have children, and if so, how many and their ages
∙Types of professions and jobs they do
∙Their job title
∙Education level
∙Annual income
But also Psychographic Information that applies to your Ideal Customer like, for instance:
∙Types of books, magazines and newspapers they enjoy and read
∙Types of movies and Television shows do they watch
∙Hobbies or interests they have
∙Where they like to hang out online and offline
∙What they like to do for fun.
Team members also need to know what your Ideal Customers goals and value are; what their challenges and pain points are, and what they really want, and how your products and services help them solve their problems.
And, if you have different Customer Avatars for other products and services you provide that your team members are involved with, you need to follow the same process for each of these.
I promise you, provided you’ve shared everything about your Ideal Customer with your team members they will have a very clear understanding about who they’re dealing with and with this understanding be better placed to more effectively engage with them while positioning your brand in its most positive
light.
Simple Tips For Coaching Your Sales Funnel
Industry Content Supporter:
Marc Carriere
Managing Director
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marccarriere/
Far too many businesses are missing a key link in their sales funnels by not coaching team members on where they sit in the sales chain and the importance of their role. And, because of this sales quality and targets can really suffer!
Whether your team members are making outbound calls to generate leads, making sales, or taking inbound sales calls they need to understand your sales funnel so they can help you hit your sales targets.
The first thing they need to be coached on is who you’re targeting, so they’ll better understand the people they’ll be speaking with and be better prepared to engage with them.
Team members need to know basic demographic and psychographic information of those you’re targeting, and especially what problems these people are trying to solve and how your products or services can help them solve their problem.
You should also cover what happens in your sales funnel just prior to your team member’s engagement with your target audience.
For example, if your team is generating leads for the sales team to follow up or making outbound sales calls, they should know relevant information about the lists they’re calling, specifically how the list was
generated.
Quite often in the beginning of outbound calls, team members hear something along those lines of:
Where’d you get my number? How your team members handle this question is very critical.
If they don’t know or seem unsure when they respond to that question, it comes across in their voice and creates uncertainty in the prospect’s mind about whether they can trust them or not. And, without trust there is no way you can develop rapport to generate a good lead or make a sale!
If they’re handling inbound sales calls, obviously they need to see any ads or offers prospects have seen that motivated them to call. They also need to understand the strategy behind the Ad to be clear about the key elements they need to be aware of and cover with callers.
The last thing you should coach team members about is what happens in the sales funnel immediately after their part.
In the case of lead generation, team members need to understand how the lead will be used and how
best to position the lead up for a sale. Maybe, the lead will be sent an email or sales letter, or receive a sales call. Regardless of what happens to the lead next, they need to set things up properly for that activity to get the best sales outcomes.
This can be done really simply by briefing them on any emails or letters that will be sent, or by listening to a few sales calls on the leads they generate. Now when you do this, you will need to be careful to make sure team members are very clear not to preempt any follow up activity by using any sales bullets the sales team need in their engagement with the lead.
Team members are only human and when they feel under pressure often can jump ahead in the sales chain sharing information they shouldn’t because they’re afraid they’ll lose the lead.
If team members are making outbound calls or taking inbound sales calls, they need to know what happens after they’ve made a sale, so they can properly manage customers’ expectations. This might involve product delivery timelines or follow up calls from other departments.
Regardless of what happens after the sale has been made, the sales process isn’t finished until the customer is happy with what they bought.
If the product or service was delivered when it was supposed to be and helps them the way they thought it should, you’ll have a happy customer who will be open to buying from you again and referring you to their family and friends.
3 Coaching Steps For Focusing On Product Benefits
Industry Content Supporter:
Marc Carriere
Managing Director
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marccarriere/
One of biggest reasons team members aren’t as successful as they could be when engaging with customers is they focus on describing the features of your products, rather than focusing on how these features Actually Solve the problems that are keeping your customers up at night.
This happens because team members aren’t effectively coached in describing how the benefits of your products deliver what customers are really interested in and want to know about.
We’re all customers and when we’re looking to buy something it’s because we have a problem we want to solve as quickly as possible. We’re time poor and have lots of things we need to get done every day.
The last thing we want is to hear someone drone and on about all the features of a product or service that doesn’t interest us. And, we don’t care so much about what a product or service does… what we really want to know is how well it can solve one of our problems, right?
It’s the same for the customers and prospects your team members speak with every day.
This is a really simple process I’ve used all over the world running marketing departments and call centers, consulting with businesses coaching and mentoring their call center managers and team leaders.
It’s so simple and should be used when training new hires and continuously coached to your team especially under performers.
Now assuming your team member has done a really good Discovery in their call and understand what the customer’s problems are and the solutions they’re looking for.
When they move into the Presentation phase of the call and start describing the features of your product or service, the first thing they need to do is only focus on those features that can solve the customer’s problems or features the customer expressed interest in.
Most team members tend to run through their Call Guide without really listening to the customer during the Discovery phase and then plow on through all the product features instead of only zeroing in on
those features that solve the customer’s problems.
The first thing you need to coach them on is really listening to the customers answers in the Discovery phase to clearly understand what customers want, and only focus on those features in the Presentation phase that can help solve their problems.
Team members can do this by sticking to the relevant features and saying something like:
From what you’ve shared with me one of the key things our (product or service) does is… and then describe the feature.
Immediately after they’ve described the feature have your team members silently say to themselves:
So What!… which triggers them to say:
So what this does for you is help you do X because it will do Y for you.
Then get them to Tie Down the benefit by saying something like: That would be a really good way of helping you fix your problem, wouldn’t it? And, then wait for agreement.
It’s a really simple process you can easily
coach:
∙Learn what problem is that the customer wants solved then focus on the key benefits of what the relevant features delivers to solve that problem, and then get agreement that it does.
INDUSTRY SERVICE TIPS
1. Define your contact center’s leadership needs. What does leadership mean in your contact center? Be specific. Vagueness breeds more vagueness. Build a program around the specific needs.
2. Practice. When managers are away let leadership development trainees step in and get some practice. These hands-on experiences will prove to be invaluable with lessons learned.
NEXT STEPS
To sustain a viable pipeline of managers, contact centers want to invest in a Leadership Development Program. Companies prefer to hire from within but many times don’t have the right leadership talent available internally, which forces companies to look outside. Implementing an LDP can change that scenario. Leaders are developed over time with the proper structure, leadership and direction.
The best LDP programs include real-world work, education, training and coaching guided by a structured curriculum with tests or accountability checkpoints along the way. Providing Leadership Development Trainees with the opportunity to learn all aspects of the business backfills their experience. The program should include self-study as well as group training and discussion. Assign the trainee with a project; something they can call their own and are responsible for managing and reporting the results.
Developing a Leadership Development Program is a wise investment for long-term staffing and growth. Well-led organizations tend to attract quality applicants, produce satisfied employees, incur less unwanted turnover, cultivate loyal customers, and yield impressive financial returns. Sounds like a tall order but it is possible with a well thought-out program that is committed to its people.
Coachable Call Structure
Industry Content Supporter:
Marc Carriere
Managing Director
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marccarriere/
Are too many of your team members (especially new hires) taking way too long to become productive?
Are your Team Leaders having trouble coaching the best way to conduct calls, whether they’re sales calls, booking appointments or handling customer service calls?
If you’re said yes to either of these questions, then you need to create an easy-to-learn Call Structure that crystallises each step of a call that your team members need to follow and is really easy to coach!
At the end of this article you’ll discover a Coachable Call Structure I created about 26 years ago and have used training tons of team members, Team Leaders and Call Center Managers all over the world.
You can use this call structure for any call type, and I’ll be showing you an example of a call structure I created for inbound and outbound sales calls for a client in the leisure travel industry who (prior to COVID) was making over $150M in inbound and outbound phone sales every year.
They’ve been using this Call Structure for years and their Team Leaders religiously coach it to every new hire and underperformer!
When you talk with sales underperformers in your call center and ask them where they need the most help, pretty much all of them will tell you they need help in closing the sale.
And, when you listen to a few of their calls you find they’re losing people way back in the beginning of the call – usually, not long after hello and they’re oblivious to it!
You hear them rushing through calls, jumping all over the place and not even finding out if there is anything about what they’re selling that actually interests the prospect.
Team members need an easy-to-understand Call Structure they can follow for every call, and I’m not talking about a Calling Script or Call Guide.
In fact, before you create any Call Guide or Script, you should create a Coachable Call Structure first, and follow its structure when creating your script or call guide. A structure that sets out all the key steps, in the proper sequence, that team members need to follow to achieve the positive outcomes you want from their calls.
VIDEO FROM OUR EXPERTS
INDUSTRY EXPERTS
MARKETING TACTICS
Established in 2009 to provide consulting services to businesses involved in B2B and B2C lead generation and telemarketing activities.
With 30 years of direct marketing experience as a call centre proprietor, senior marketing executive and consultant Marc has been employed or provided consulting services to a wide variety of businesses involved in B2B and B2C activities in such diverse markets as Australia, Canada, Fiji, México, The Bahamas, United Kingdom and United States of America.
Companies out team has worked with – Accor Vacation Club, Club Noosa Resort, Diamond Resorts International, Elkhorn Resorts, GeoHoliday Club, Groupo Costamex, Holiday Resort Properties, Interval Property Management LTD, Resort Hotels of Australia, Shell Vacations LLC, Telstra Australia and the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra among others.
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