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Richard Rosen, FastCall411 founder and CEO, is an expert in the calling applications industry and its relationship to local search. With more than 20 years of direct marketing experience, Rosen served as Vice President, Business Development, at both Jambo and CallSource, each a pioneering firm in the pay-per-call and call measurement spaces, respectively.

At Jambo, Rosen led business development, marketing, sales, public relations and product development. During his tenure, he helped define Jambo's pay-per-call and phone-centric product initiatives, and created and launched JAN, the Jambo Advertising Network, as a vehicle to communicate the company's value proposition to local advertisers and publishers. At CallSource, he spearheaded initiatives to provide call tracking to AutoTrader.com, Cars.com, Verizon Yellow Pages, AOL, Google, Switchboard, ReachLocal, Perform Local, and Citysearch, among others. Rosen writes frequently on pay-per-call and call tracking issues, and is a frequent speaker at industry events.

Rosen founded FastCall411 ( www.fastcall411.com) to improve the experience for consumers in need of local service providers. FastCall411 will deliver better local advertising results to merchants seeking new business while offering a superior partnership model and improved economic yields for partners. Over time, FastCall411 will extend its model to mobile search, directory assistance and other input devices.

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Turning Lead(s) into Gold: How to Prevent Your New Campaign’s Leads from Flying Away

Written on
August 9th 2006
Author
by Richard Rosen  |
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You’ve done your homework, selected performance-based advertising (pay-per-click, pay-per-call), created your ads, and your marketing campaigns have begun. The performance marketing concept is solid, and the call-to-action is creative and inviting. With increasingly advanced performance-based advertising on your side, new customers are just a phone call away.

Your goal is to maximize those calls and turn them into sales and revenue. Knowing and understanding phone protocol — and preparing your staff — can mean the difference between ringing phones that lead to sales and those that don’t.

Preparation is Everything

Here’s how to maximize the profit from telephone leads: the key to success is in the details — even down to how many rings you’ll accept before a call is answered.

Prepare a cheat sheet for your telephone personnel that includes a script (one for the conversation itself, and another for leaving voice mail messages), synopsis of the campaign, questions they can expect, the answers, and how to follow through when an issue arises that they can’t solve. Each telephone sales representatives should have a book at his or her desk with order forms, pricing, talking points, etc.

Since this will often be your first — and possibly only — chance to connect with a new customer, take every opportunity to show you care about your customers:

• Make sure you ask for names and take care to pronounce them correctly. Ask how to spell a name if you are unsure.
• You want to follow through on all your promises - so be sure to get the contact info: email, fax, address. Ask clients how they prefer to be contacted. Some prefer a phone call back, others prefer email.

• Create a template of the critical information you want your team to collect and use that to take notes. If you have a customer relationship management (CRM) application, customize the fields to make this easier for your sales team.

• Remember the three Ts of sales: training, training, training. If members of your sales team are knowledgeable, they will be confident and will build credibility with your prospects. Always say “thank you.” Be grateful for each sale rather expecting it.

• Finally, listen. You are selling trust as well as your product. The best salespeople know that selling comes down to relationship-building and doing it very quickly.



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