The Twelve Steps to Successful Telemarketing – Step Eight: Getting Reaction

By Kathy Sisk

Once you have completed Step Seven: Selling, you’ll want to encourage a positive response. This is accomplished in Step Eight: Get Reaction. This serves to test whether you have successfully satisfied your prospects’ needs. Did you tell them what they wanted to hear? Your prospects’ responses enable you to encourage and motivate them to respond positively to the benefits. This positive response will help you confidently move on to your next step, the Trial Close (Step Nine).

Getting a positive response in Step Eight assists you later on should your prospect offer any resistance (raise objections). Because you will gain a positive response now, if the prospect resists later, you can refer to the positive things your prospect agreed to in this step. This technique is called “keep selling.” Getting your prospect to agree with you now is crucial to successfully completing your presentation.

In Step Eight you must not ask for a commitment, since that would likely result in a negative response. For a positive response, here are some examples of good “get-reaction” questions:

“With what I’ve shared with you so far, how important is this information?”

“Understanding all the benefits you are entitled to, how valuable is this to you?”

These examples are generalized; you will need to create your own questions that are relevant to the product or service you are selling. When doing so, it is critical to keep the get-reaction questions open-ended and nonthreatening. Don’t push your prospect. You can have confidence that your prospects will put themselves in a position to sell themselves, provided you have fulfilled their needs in Step Seven by telling them what they want to hear.

How do you know what your prospects’ needs are? Go back two more steps. In Step Five, the Probing Step, you established their wants and created a need. By successfully performing Step Five, you were able to continue with your presentation. (If you hadn’t accomplished getting positive responses during Step Five, you wouldn’t have been able to get this far.)

The open-ended question in Step Eight is designed to elicit the positive response you need to get to continue on to the next step, the Trial Close. A positive response now will lessen the chances of receiving an objection during your trial close.

If you should get a negative response in Step Eight, refer to the “reflect method” in Step Ten: Objection Handling. This method will teach you how to effectively overcome a negative response. Whenever you receive a negative response in Step Eight – such as, “No, it’s not important” – this is an indicator that you did not create a need during the probing step. Instead, you chose to continue with your presentation with a prospect that really wasn’t interested.

However, if you felt you did create a need, then perhaps you made no impact during the selling step. You may need to work on your voice inflection, strategic pausing, your variable speeds, and your selection of emotionally charged words.

Otherwise, assuming you have gained a positive response during Step Eight, you’re now ready to proceed to the next step, the Trial Close, which I will cover in the next issue.

Kathy Sisk is CEO of Kathy Sisk Enterprises Inc.

[Read more of the series “The 12 Steps to Successful Telemarketing”: the prior article  or next article.]

[From Connection Magazine Jul/Aug 2012]

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