Some tops tips for Inbound Sales Teams
Inbound sales teams have two functions
- order capture
- taking initial enquiries from customers often triggered by a marketing or digital campaign
Inbound sales tips; improve your sales figures
and your customer experience with these key areas of focus for departments that take inbound orders from their business customers. This might be lead or order capture, but get the call handling skills right, and you have a happy customer, who gets the right products, on the right day at the right price.
Get it wrong and you have unhappy customers, returns, invoice queries, extra admin and the cost of putting the order right.
It’s essential that you look after those people who want to order from you. How you take an order does make a difference.
Inbound sales tips – customer care matters
The conversations you have with your customers matter. They represent your brand.
Make it easy for people and companies who do want to do business with you to spend their money with you.
Return their phone calls, thank them for their order, make a follow up call to make sure they were happy with your product or service. Think life time value of the sale not just the value of the one off purchase.
Inbound sales tips – increase your average order values
Increase your average order values where possible. On every order, try to cross sell other products which would help the customer. This doesn’t have to be a pushy hard sell.
Think of it from the customers point of view.
Imagine you had just bought a new cooker, and had taken the afternoon off work to have it fitted. When the cooker and the fitter arrives, you haven’t ordered the connecting pack. You didn’t even know there would be a connecting pack, why didn’t someone ask you whether you wanted it – that wouldn’t have been selling that would have been helpful.
Know the products that go with other products. If someone orders a stapler – “would you like staples with that?”. Draw up a list of products that go together, have it to hand, and ask ask ask.
Inbound sales tips – make the most of your enquiries
Pay attention to every customer contact – when someone telephones for details of your products or services do you make the most of that conversation, or do you just see that as a request for information and send a brochure?
What’s the reason behind the customer’s enquiry? How can you help? Do you spend time qualifying the enquiry so that you can spend time with the enquiries that are right for you and your sales processs?
Here is a staggering statistic from the Aberdeen Group – on average 69% of leads get no follow up.
Think about that, how many people in your company are out knocking on doors, fencing with gatekeepers, phoning decision makers, and yet while that activity is going on, there will be great leads; real opportunities sitting in your system that aren’t being followed up.
A review of your inbound enquiries system can really help increase your sales. Make the most of the opportunities you have. If you’d like an independent view of things, get in touch with us for an informal conversation.
Inbound sales tips – get the details right
Repeat back the order details, dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
The more invoice queries that customers have the longer your company is likely to have to wait for payment. And when times are tough cashflow is essential to your business.
In fact we know that on one of our call handling programmes we reduced invoice queries to such a degree that cashflow improved by 65% and cashflow is the lifeblood of any business.
To understand more about inbound sales, call us now on 0845 450 0988
