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Using A Mirror To Improve Phone Skills

Posted by Admin under Business

By Richard Brody Richard Brody
Level: Platinum

Richard Brody has over 30 years experience and expertise in consultative marketing and sales, management, organizational, and hotel conference and convention organization, management and negotiation. …

For over thirty years, I have both personally transacted business on the telephone and trained telemarketers, customer service people, and both inbound and outbound phone sale people, as well as organizational leaders, on how to obtain optimal results using a telephone. I have discovered many interesting things about phone selling, not the least of which is that one can be great on the phone and awful face to face, and vice versa. Selling and transmitting business on the telephone takes specific skills and actions, and is something that nearly anyone willing to be trained, can be taught to do.

I am a major proponents of using two small tricks to help with phone success. The first is to employ the phone’s mute function, and to only disengage the mute when you are prepared to speak. That keeps you from blurting out something without due consideration, or interrupting the other person. However, while many people use the mute function, the employment of a small table mirror is even more helpful.

Studies show that many people can sense the mood or attitude of the person on the other end of the phone, either by their voice, their attitude, their tone of voice, or factors such as politeness and patience. Since we often do not hear ourselves as others do, I suggest that someone place a small table mirror directly in front of them while they are on the phone. Look in the mirror at yourself as you are communicating on the telephone. What is your facial expression? Are you smiling, “smerking,” or moping? Do you look like you are enjoying yourself? Do you appear as if you are getting angry (turning red or changing facial expression) based on what is happening on the call? Do you look like someone who doesn’t want to be there? Do you have the same expression on your face as you would if you knew the other person could see you, as in the face to face scenario? How about your posture? Are you sitting up rigidly, or sitting comfortable? Are you sitting erect or slouching into your chair? Are you focused on what is being said to you?

Only by knowing what you have been doing mostly subconsciously, will you be able to address it. Using a mirror is an easy aid, and a helpful one. I have seen telemarketers increase their closing ratios on the telephone exponentially just by paying attention to these details. Similarly, I’ve observed businesses Customer Service satisfaction rate rise dramatically when these unconscious negative acts stop bringing down the perceived sincerity level. In many cases, when I have done Leadership Training for leaders of organizations, I have gotten the feedback that they were far more able to motivate their members when they addressed their own personal telephone body language.

Even in today’s digital and electronic age, there is an important need to be professional and caring on the telephone. Simply by thinking about how we look in the mirror and addressing those things, we can enhance our performance significantly.

Richard Brody has over 30 years consultative sales, marketing, training, managerial, and operations experience. He has trained sales and marketing people in numerous industries, given hundreds of seminars, appeared as a company spokesperson on over 200 radio and television programs, and regularly blogs on real estate, politics, economics, management, leadership, negotiations, conferences and conventions, etc. Richard has negotiated, arranged and/ or organized hundreds of conferences and conventions. Richard is a Senior Consultant with RGB Consultation Services, an Ecobroker, a Licensed Buyers Agent (LBA) and Licensed Salesperson in NYS, in real estate.
Richard Brody has owned businesses, been a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Executive Officer, and a Director of Development, as well as a consultant. Richard has a Consulting Website ( http://tinyurl.com/rgbcons ); a blog ( http://tinyurl.com/rgbstake ); and can be followed on Twitter.

A Few Good Words: You Want A Script? You Can’t Handle A Script!

Posted by Admin under Business

I can see it now…

Jack Nicholson in his prime is a gritty, in-the-trenches, senior marketing consultant, whose selling and servicing techniques have become embedded in the DNA of billions of business conversations, every year.

For the ten-thousandth time, he is asked to write a telephone script that will instantly build sales or elevate customer satisfaction ratings.

Looking over the request, he bellows with equal measures of contempt and vituperation:

“You Want A Script? You Can’t Handle A Script!”

The film will be titled, A Few Good Words, and believe me, it will be a spellbinder!

What makes a great drama, I’m told, is conflict. And there is plenty of that whenever we tinker with the words our associates use to sell and to serve.

Here are the top 5 reasons most sellers and supporters can’t “handle” scripts:

(1) People are notorious for spurning verbal templates, no matter how effective they are. I introduced an utterly simple line into conversations that helped a major electronics firm to overcome customer anger and up-sell in a single breath. It succeeded in reducing rage while ringing the cash register a whopping 50% of the time, but a certain cohort of workers refused to use it because they either “Didn’t like the idea of a script” (consisting of one phrase!) or thought it was “Too manipulative.”

(2) Even if we succeed with a script, we get bored. It’s too easy to win. So, we place pebbles in our mouths by inserting random words that diminish, and often reverse the effectiveness of the planned patter.

(3) “I don’t talk like that!” is something you can expect to hear about expert-scripts crafted by gurus. This is precisely the point. May I remind everyone, at a certain stage of life none of us talked; we babbled and gurgled. We had to become CIVILIZED by our parents, who along with televisions, patiently taught us what we know. Using a script involves an equivalent “Ordeal of Civility,” to borrow a phrase from a brilliant historian. We have to adjust ourselves to the words, to be more effective-not the other way around.

(4) Most companies don’t invest in understanding WHY certain scripts work while others fail. They constantly tinker, which frustrates workers. There is very little genuine SCRIPTING EXPERTISE loose in the world. Just as every waiter in Hollywood thinks he can write an Oscar-winning film, nearly every phone hack thinks he can breeze through composing a money-making and customer thrilling dandy.

(5) Scripts have to be closely monitored, measured, and managed. Testing and refinements need to occur. Like a split-test in an email campaign, there needs to be a “control” document against which a new script is being compared, for its relative effectiveness.

In fairness, I may have overstated the rejection of scripts, by reps. Some workers go to the other extreme: they become script-changing junkies.

Just as they beg managers for new calling lists, that will magically change their sales luck, scripts can be modified way to often. Like Swiss cheese, you start with a solid block and poke holes in it. If you get carried away, pretty soon you’ll poke your way to having no cheese.

In other words, change scripts often enough and you’ll create the equivalent of a non-scripted situation.

A script isn’t a villain or a savior. Done well, introduced and managed properly, it can become nothing less than a Money Machine, a communication ATM that dispenses profits whenever you want.

But you won’t be able to tap it for more than what you put into it.

Dr. Gary S. Goodman has helped countless people and companies to prosper, through his books, seminars, and consulting. His telephone sales and customer service books are classics.

He is the creator of “Best Practices in Negotiation,” a top-rated course that he conducts at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA Extension, and on a custom basis, for corporations and organizations, worldwide. The best-selling author of more than a dozen books, his newest title is: DR. GARY S. GOODMAN’S 77 BEST PRACTICES IN NEGOTIATION, available online at: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?fListingClass=0&fSearch=dr.+gary+s+goodman%27s+77+best+practices+in+negotiation.

An internationally applauded thought leader and practitioner in sales, telemarketing, negotiation, and customer satisfaction, Gary’s training programs have been sponsored by 40 universities, major trade and professional associations, and by Fortune 1000 corporations. He can be contacted about professional speaking and consulting engagements at: gary@customersatisfaction.com