Telemarketing Tips for Beginners

Let’s say you’re a new telemarketer and, while you may be a good one, you want to become a great one. You may not be one just yet, but that’s no fault of your own! You have a lot to learn, and nobody becomes great overnight. Below, read on for a comprehensive list of some great telemarketing tips for beginners.

Lean how to sound natural

The fact is that being a telemarketer requires as much acting talent as it does sales talent. You need to learn how to sound natural and relaxed on the phone, since nobody likes talking to the robotic, rehearsed patter of the stereotypical telemarketer.

Stock intros bore people, and even worse are the intros that the telemarketer does not listen to (“How are you doing today?” “I’m cooking dinner.” “Great! I wanted to talk to you about…”). Record yourself and listen to your own recordings to see how you sound on the phone. Even better, take a voiceover class or two.

Build resilience

As unfortunate as it sounds, as a telemarketer, you are going to be rejected a lot. You will experience the indignities of being hung up on, yelled at, and lied to, and you will probably encounter blue words on a daily basis. But, even after the worst phone call imaginable, you will need to soldier on, because you do not become great by giving up.

You have to build personal resilience in order to make it as a telemarketer. How do you do that? First, you need to have a sense of humor. There is no way to succeed in telemarketing without having a few laughs along the way. Second, make connections. You will find that having a supportive peer group in your workplace will help you commiserate, and share strategies for success as you move ahead.

Third, you will become more successful if you keep focused on who your work is helping in the here and now. If you are in sales, what is the product that you are selling, and how is that product helping people? When somebody calls you with a question, how will you answering that question help them?

Keeping yourself focused on these big picture questions will help you overcome the daily drudgery that every call center worker has to contend with.

Play the numbers game (but be smart about it)

Sales, like many other fields, abides by the 20/80 rule. That means that twenty percent of your leads are going to generate eighty percent of your sales, and eighty percent of your leads are going to generate twenty percent of your sales. This means that you need to call often, and call a wide range of people. With advances in technology, many telemarketers can easily surpass 100 calls a day, though the number may vary if you are having lots of engaged conversations.

If you really want to push your telemarketing game to the next level, you should look into software, because a predictive dialer cost is often reasonable. What is that, you may ask? Like the name suggests, a predictive dialer automatically calls telephone numbers and connects anybody who answers straight to an agent.

This way, the agent doesn’t have to waste time dialing numbers that won’t pick up, and they’ll have a new caller waiting as soon as they finish their current call. Predictive dialers are not free, but they save money by saving you time. And it’s cheaper than the cost of spending all day cold-calling clients that won’t pick up.