The telephone offers you an excellent way of establishing and deepening good relationships with employers, which over time, will lead to business. But does your team really have the skills to engage employers by phone? And of they do are they using them to best advantage?
Providers are often encouraged to attract new businesses/employers, yet over the phone the word ‘engagement’ is overlooked.
When I say overlooked what I mean is I’m still surprised at the number of individuals who ring employers and fail to establish a need by aiming to have a two way conversation that uncovers real needs and wants.
When you fail to engage employers properly you lessen the chance of ‘standing out from the crowd’ and the employer then has difficulty in seeing the benefit of becoming a customer of your college.
Here are 3 tried and tested ideas of how you can improve engaging businesses over the phone
- Aim to follow the 75%/25% ratio. 75% of the time the employer should be talking the rest of the time it should be you. After you’ve introduced yourself start your next sentence to the employer ‘just out of interest, what do you do in terms of….’, or ‘I’m interested in finding out…, using this technique will encourage you to ask a question. Ideally an open ended one, which starts with What, Where, Who, When, How.
- Within 8-10 seconds, tell them who you are, the reason your calling and the benefit to them. If you don’t include a benefit you’ll lose their interest, they’ll switch off and before you know it you’ll hear the words ‘We’re not interested’…
- Be real. What I mean by this is sometimes it pays to be honest. ‘Mr Smith I’m aware we’ve not done business with you before/we’ve not started a relationship with you before and that’s more the reason I’m interested in finding out (ask your first question to start the engagement process)
Implementing just one of these steps will make a real difference to the quality of the conversations you’re having with employers over the phone.