Next, move on to how you achieve the benefits. This should be no more than two sentences - brief but effective. So, for my telemarketing company, after I've said "we help our clients increase their sales" as the key benefit of our service, I'd go onto how we do that by saying "...by telephoning prospects in their target market, creating interest in their product or service, and making a face to face sales meeting for them". Make it short and snappy as you want to get them talking by asking questions.

Open questions

Try to get the prospective customer talking by asking some open questions. One of our favourite open questions is "how do you create new business for your company?" This gets the person talking and they can't tell you to bog off whilst they're talking! More importantly their answers will inform you of their business needs and build up a rapport between yourselves.

Open questions involve the words who, what, when, why and how - they are questions that can't easily be answered yes or no. If you are an IT services company, you may ask a question like "how do you minimise the risk to your business of your IT systems going down?" Listen for key pieces of information in the prospects answer. You can then ask further questions, related to what you've heard, to establish where your product or service will provide maximum benefit to the prospect.

Pitching

Finally, you should briefly pitch your product, matching the features of your product or service to the needs of the prospect that you've unearthed in the questioning. The open questions should have uncovered some information which you can use in your pitch to match what you do, with the prospect customer's needs. For instance, when pitching my telemarketing service I may say "we work with clients like PWC, RBS and BMW making sales ready appointments for their sales people, enabling them to maximise their revenues and grow their sales. We've been doing this for ten years, so we know a thing or two about telemarketing, and we've won several business awards along the way including the National Business Award for Customer Focus".

Again, don't give too much away on the phone. The objective of your call is to book a sales meeting - not to try and sell your product or service over the telephone.

Follow this by booking an appointment that is convenient firstly with the customer, and then with you. Using a phrase such as "next Tuesday or Thursday is good for me, which is best for you?" is inviting and respectful of the customer's time.

Phoning again (and again)

The amount of times you phone a potential customer is really one where you have to use judgment, to decide whether or not to call yet again. One of my telemarketers once called to speak to the boss of one of the utility companies 45 times! She built up a great relationship with his PA and finally got the appointment for our client. When the client turned up for the meeting, the boss said: "If you're half as tenacious as your PA (our telemarketer) then I need to be doing business with you".

There are some prospects that you just have to go after time and time again, and finally get what you want. Others will feel hounded if you call them twice. There's no real rule on this one so try to use your gut feeling.