Ninety-eight percent of "small businesses" are like this: Everyday, a fisherman and his son went out to sea in their tiny boat. Everyday, the old man would cast his net over the side of his boat and pull up a handful of scrawny fish. And, everyday the man said to his son, "Son, see that fleet of big fishing boats? That's where the fat fish are. Keep bailing the water so we don't sink and some day we'll have fleet that large". Do you think the man's dream would come true? Certainly not if he was casting his net while his son bailed water! That's a funny story but a similar situation happens every day in business: "Small businesses" dream of becoming large but fail to take the necessary steps to grow. Those businesses don't deserve to succeed. And statistics tell us that they likely won't live past 5 years.
Yes, they have the fundamentals in place: buy raw material, turn it into a product, sell it for a profit. When you do that, you're in business. But they lack one thing: Strong telemarketing. Small businesses, like the fisherman, can do the basics very well, but they'll never get beyond what they are. For your small business to be among the 2% that stay in business and grow, you need something else: you need to have the skills of a large business, and one of those crucial skills is the ability to cold call.
There's an old adage that mentors tell to their students who are hoping to climb the corporate ladder: "dress for the position you want, not the position you have". That means: you can look like everyone else does, or you can take action to set yourself apart.
"Small businesses" that want to grow and support that desire with training will be more likely to succeed. For the fisherman to get beyond subsistence fishing, what did he need to do? Catch more fish! He could catch more, and sell them, and earn enough money to buy a bigger boat, with which he could catch more fish! It seems obvious, but many businesses, if they were that fisherman, would look at buying a bigger bucket for their son to bail faster!
No, if you want to grow your small business you need more fish - that is, more sales. And that happens when you grow your prospect list and sell more effectively and more frequently to those prospects. And one of the best ways to do that is with "telesales". And the best way to effectively sell over the phone is with telemarketing sales.
Telemarketing sales training is one way to increase your effectiveness. Unfortunately, most businesses do it backwards, ignoring skill development for "just getting out there and doing it". What happens is a well-known story: pushy "telesales" bothering people. The business gets a bad name. The customers they generate resent them and do not respect them.
But with telemarketing sales training, "small businesses"earn to think and act like big businesses. They know the secrets of who to call, and when, and what to say when those people are on the phone. They know that cold calling is not about calling a thousand ice-cold prospects in the hopes that one will buy, it's about identifying 500 that are more likely to listen, and then calling and respecting the time and opinions of those people.
Telemarketing training leads to more sales. More sales leads to business growth.
If you're a small business and you want to grow, stop bailing and put down your bucket. If you are a "small business" and you have no desire to grow, you don't deserve to succeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment