Phone Sales Training: 8 Skills Every Sales Rep Should Master (2023)

Sales, sales, sales. At the end of the day, no business can prosper without sales! And just as every business is different, so there are many different kinds of sales.

Perhaps the most challenging sales environment is internal or phone sales. Still, this market can also be among the most profitable for those who can master its mysterious ways. That’s why your team needs the best phone sales techniques.

How do they acquire those techniques? Simple: phone sales training.

Phone sales training can provide your team members with the specialized skill set they need for selling on the phone. Skills like building rapport with potentials, message delivery and knowing when to call.

After all, these and other skills form the foundation of knowing how to sell over the phone. Phone sales training will give your sales reps the practice they need. As the saying goes, “practice makes perfect!”

How Can I Practice Phone Sales?

An important part of any sales training program, including phone sales training, is practice. But how should your employees practice? Here are some helpful tips for practicing phone sales:

• Role play. Phone sales training doesn’t have to be all work and no play, after all. Have your team members role play calls with each other. This will give everyone a chance to share sales tips while also boosting confidence.
• Record each other’s pitches for later. Allow your team members to record themselves making their sales pitches to imaginary potentials. Afterward, have them play back the recordings. In this way, your sales reps can learn about tone of voice and clarity. Listening to these recordings also gives experienced sellers a chance to share their phone sales tips with newer team members.
• Personas. This practice tool is not only fun, it’s also a great way of training for sales in any field. Have your team members assume different personas like “uninterested”, “too busy” or even “broke”. As your employees practice overcoming these common resistance methods, everyone will learn more about projecting confidence while earning trust. That kind of phone sales training is simply priceless.

What is the Most Important Part of Opening A Sales Call?

Arguably the most important aspect of any sales training is learning how to open the call. The best sales training preparation will teach your sales team members to open their sales calls with confidence and candor.

Telemarketing training courses have always taught that the opening is the most important part of the sales pitch. This is where the entire mood of the conversation will be set. Your team members should be affable, confident and engaging.

Effective phone sales training will also teach them to be discerning. All the phone sales tips and tricks in the world won’t help if your sales rep can’t read their customer from the beginning.

Therefore, the most important part of opening any sales call could be called impression. Effective sales representatives open sales calls by giving the customer a good impression while also sizing up that customer immediately.

This skill, when mastered through phone sales training, will combine building rapport with qualification. Read on to learn more about these and other crucial skills no sales training course should ever be without.

The 8 Crucial Phone Skills Every Sales Rep Should Master

Sales classes have been around just about as long as people have been selling goods and services to one another. Everyone wants to find a way to have a winning edge over their competitors, thus ensuring success.

Investing in your sales team members’ phone sales training is a critical piece in that puzzle. After all, you don’t want a team of sales novices wasting time and money on dudd phone calls. You want a team of sales masters who can close the deal and exceed expectations every time.

To meet that goal, we’ve listed some crucial phone skills below that every effective sales training program should include.

Building Rapport

One of the foundational sales training ideas you’ll hear is that a sales rep never sells a product or service. No, a salesperson’s first goal is to sell themself. You see, a customer will never buy from a seller they don’t like.

That’s why building rapport with your customers is so crucial, right from the get go. Phone sales training can teach your team members how to establish rapport and affability with clients naturally.

When your potential clients feel like they know you and like you, then they’ll begin to trust you. And once you have earned their trust, closing sales deals will become almost automatic.

Tone of Voice

Every sales representative worth their salt knows that to be successful they have to first perfect their tone of voice. Tone of voice can be seen as the vehicle on which all the information your team member offers is conveyed. It should be clear and confident, authoritative, yet personable.

You wouldn’t deliver your product in a dirty, damaged package, after all. Neither should your sales reps be communicating in timid, halting sentences. Phone sales training can teach anyone to speak in a way that sells, no matter who their audience is.

Products and Services Expertise

Part of projecting an authoritative tone of voice is demonstrating expertise on the services or products you’re selling. Your potential clients won’t be swayed to buy from an amateur reading from note cards.

No, they’re expecting someone who can explain the product to them in a way they can understand. Effective phone sales reps leave customers feeling like they know everything about the service or product they’re being offered.

This familiarity builds trust, both in the seller and in the product. And what does trust lead to? Sales.

Qualifying a Prospect

We touched on qualification earlier as one of the most important elements of opening any sales call. Effective phone sales training can help your sales reps size up potential clients quickly, saving both time and money.

Experienced sellers know that qualifying a potential goes hand in glove with establishing rapport. By asking subtle questions and actively listening to customer responses, your team members can learn a lot quickly.

Is this potential someone who will benefit from the product or service? Do they appear to have the resources to invest in what you’re selling? Are they open to discussion or resistant to what you’re offering?

Being able to answer these questions quickly means being able to avoid wasting time on dead-end calls. It also means being better able to craft your message delivery, the next step in successful phone sales.

Message Delivery

Message delivery is related to product expertise and tone of voice. To effectively deliver the message of value your products or services offer, your rep needs the right tone of voice. They also need to be an expert on the product or service being offered.

With those two skills in hand, they can now engage in effective message delivery. The key here is to be able to see the offer through the customer’s eyes. To see the value not from the position of the seller, but as a buyer. This kind of empathy in sales is something phone sales training can provide.

It’s not always about being quick in your presentation or doing all the talking. Sometimes effective message delivery means speaking the customer’s language (figuratively, or literally) by using concepts they’re familiar with. Are you more likely to listen to someone you like and relate to or a stranger who rubs you wrong?

To get your message across in a meaningful way that closes the deal, you need to know the best methods. Phone sales training can provide that insight to both you and every member of your team.

The Best Time to Call

Knowing when the best time is to call a potential is a bit more art than science. After all, not everyone lives by the same schedule–or in the same time zone. All the same, there are some basic rules of thumb that can be learned in sales training.

Look, nobody wants their phone going off while they’re trying to sleep in on a Saturday morning. They certainly don’t want a salesperson calling them up during dinner with the family either.

So when is the best time to call? Maybe we can switch that question around and ask you. When would you prefer to be called? Chances are the answer would be something like, “when I’m not too busy…or tired”. And we’d agree!

Experts suggest calling around mid-morning, when most folks are at their best. After lunch, everyone’s fighting afternoon fatigue and thinking about quitting time. And once they’re off the clock, their minds and checkbooks are too.

But is this a hard rule? Not exactly. That’s why you need to know your customer. Remember the whole qualifying thing we described earlier? Funny how sales training seems to build upon itself like that.

Time Management

An important skill that any sales training worth your investment will teach is time management. Time management is one of those general skills which apply to every area of a business.

Somebody once said, “time is money,” and that’s certainly true in sales. Some customers require a little more time to close the deal. Others will gladly take all of your time and leave you with nothing.

The trick is having sales reps who know how to arrange calls by priority/potential, and then execute those deals efficiently.

Follow-up Calls

Think about the last time you had good service at a restaurant. Did the server ask about appetizers or aperitifs? Did they come back a few minutes later to see if you’d decided? That’s called a follow-up. Your chances of buying an appetizer are a lot lower if the server doesn’t follow up.

The same concept exists in phone sales. Once your rep has made contact with a lead, qualified them and established rapport, it’s time to build a relationship. Follow-up calls are essential to successful phone sales and absolutely critical to repeat sales through relationship-building.

When you stay fresh in your customer’s mind, they’re more likely to turn to you for future needs. Refining the art of follow-up calls is something anyone can learn. It just takes a little instruction. The kind of instruction your team will receive when you invest in phone sales training.

Get over telemarketing hangups with phone sales training!

Anyone can make a phone call, and anyone can make a sale–with the right training. So it serves to reason that anyone can succeed at phone sales as well. All that’s needed is the right phone sales training!

At Selling Revolution, our true calling is helping businesses just like yours make the calls that end in profit. Our success is your success.

Our phone sales training courses are fully customizable because we know that your needs are as unique as your customers.

So why not book a call with Selling Revolution today? Your success in phone sales is only a phone call away, after all.