How to convert a hot prospect into a customer over the phone?

At Eureos, it happens more and more often that we receive inbound calls for Webmecanik. After 2 years of pivoting like crazy to finally distill the right offering with the right business model, it’s a bit like when Indiana Jones discovers the Holy Grail. A kind of apotheosis.

And yet, everything starts here. In particular with basics like knowing how to answer the phone properly.

Indeed, the entire Eureos team has spent a great deal of energy being present and visible online, and we are active at many events such as webinars, trade shows, breakfasts. But do we really know how to properly welcome a piping hot prospect who calls us on a good old telephone to get information about our Marketing Automation solutions? How many times can we be caught off guard by inbound prospect calls and fail to focus on the natural sales opportunities they represent?

When we are busy, answering the phone tends to become a lower priority and sometimes results in missed opportunities. There are simple ways to maximize our time. And it is easy potential that we must know how to seize.

Answering the phone

How many times do we let inbound calls land in voicemail? Of course, we can always call them back, but beyond the loss of time, it also means taking the risk of losing an opportunity when a potential customer is interested and ready to make a decision.

Even though we have set up a telephone answering service with our partner Lunyk, we try to take as many inbound calls as possible in order to capitalize on our caller’s momentum.

Be enthusiastic!

That may seem trivial, but after a long, hard day, it is sometimes difficult to get into the right frame of mind to take a call. While actors and singers are masters of getting themselves in the zone, I am not—not yet—a studio actor. We need to speak enthusiastically to our prospect, clearly state our questions and answers. We also need to choose our words carefully while trying to empathically visualize the issue raised. This is the ideal time to get to know our contact: they are available and willing! We just need to make sure we keep their interest on the phone and make it a wonderful welcome experience.

Qualify

Ultimately, the goal is still for the prospect to buy our solutions from us one day. They must therefore meet the following minimum criteria:

Demonstrate a need or want to buy our solutions
Have the power to buy what we sell
Have a budget to purchase our products and services

If these criteria are met, my prospect on the other end of the line offers good prospects. If this simple test is not conclusive, then there is no point spending more time on it live and this prospect will join our segmented lists for automated nurturing.

Gather information

The information we need to know is standard. But be careful, this is not about subjecting our interlocutor to a police interrogation. This information is to be gathered opportunistically and tactfully in the flow of the conversation:

Who they are, including the correct spelling of names,
How to contact them (phone, email),
Details about current wants or needs,
Timeline (choice, decision, implementation)
Budgets (get an order of magnitude: one thousand, fifty thousand, 1 million?)
How the caller discovered our company / solution,
Solutions and services they are primarily interested in,
Competitors consulted and their opinion of them.

Prepare a mental script

Although every call is different, from experience I find it particularly effective to prepare a general framework within which I bring our qualification and sales pitch. It prepares me to answer most questions, obtain important details and ensures that I give the caller the information they need to make a decision.

Ask follow-up questions

There is no point waiting for the caller to volunteer the reason for their call and the details of what they need. From the very start of the conversation, the person must feel professionally guided toward the solution to their explicit and, above all, implicit questions. I ask questions right from the start of the call to help them move forward smoothly and begin to build a relationship in which my interlocutor will determine whether we are the right people to work with them.

Empathy and memory

Asking questions just to fill the silence is alas a classic flaw. The rule is to listen carefully and remember what we have learned. I listen carefully to what the caller says and react accordingly.

Describe the next steps

I often ask a colleague after a call that seems very promising what the next step is. If the question of budget often poses a problem for our Judeo-Christian brain (“money is bad”), the one that will commit our interlocutor also often causes difficulty.
Before ending each call, discussing what will happen next is an important step that makes you look professional by leaving no room for confusion. What’s more, I hate feeling that I have wasted time on the phone because of a lack of follow-up.

Summarize the call

Here again, summarizing the call is a key point.

our interlocutor already has a good impression of how we can later manage their project methodically,
I share my understanding in writing and give my caller the opportunity to react and add to it,
we put our reports on Basecamp, so I share the information with my colleagues who will subsequently work on this project and with my partners whom I involve upstream.

In conclusion, with a bit of method, every call can be handled effectively. That is to say, we will provide the right information to our interlocutor and save everyone time. Whatever my role and whatever I am busy with at the time, I must be able to convert a hot prospect into a customer.

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