The moment of truth of any sales services is when the agent has to make the final question and ask for confirmation to close the deal. But it is also a loaded moment for most of the agents that may experience what we call: fear of closing. Experience tells us that we can only influence around a 50 to 55% of the persons we contact during our workday. Although we would like that all these individuals accepted our offer or product, we know that this is not at realistic target.
Furthermore, we have to be aware that our customer’s refusal in most cases is due to a set of variables as the price, their economic situation, bad previous experience etc. All these factors have nothing to do with our agents’ performance. When facing a challenging customer, the agent tends to conclude that person is not interested. This negative mindset generates itself a negative response. Therefore, to minimize the risk of a negative answer we must be mentally positive and not let our attitude impact the outcome of the call.
At Transcom, we continuously invest in our agents’ training and spend many hours on product training, telemarketing techniques, techniques for dealing with conflict situations, teaching agents how to handle objections, etc...But do we invest enough time to teach agents how to introduce the “closing question”, are we investing enough effort to prepare them for a refusal, and eliminating their psychological barrier to the customer’s negative answer? In order to prepare our agents to overcome the apprehension they may have to face in a call we must work through training and role play, practicing different situations that we will find in our daily work life. We are convinced that the success of a good education and training depends on several factors:
- Adequate knowledge of our products so that every agent properly can explain the benefits in case the person decides to close the deal during the call.
- Empathize with our customers to create a trusting environment that results in an acceptance of the call as a valid sales channel.
- Eliminate fears to solve any query or objection posted by our customers, learning to turn those weaknesses into strengths that customers can appreciate.
- Overcoming fear of rejection, which causes insecurity, and therefore a call lengthening when making the final closing question.
By training our agents in all the mentioned points above we will be able to perform a graceful closing call and to achieve a positive resolution in a higher success rate for our clients. If we want to improve our customer experience, we must be able to empathize with customers and make them feel comfortable during the call. In each interaction we must ensure that our customer feels that the decision is theirs. Only working with these principles we will be able to consolidate new customers, improve our customer’s satisfaction index and, possibly, increase the rate of persistence by achieving a greater sense of affiliation between the customer and our partner.