Account management on the telephone is becoming increasingly important. Selling costs are going up and in many markets there are fewer customers. Consequently it is important to focus your time on where you are likely to get the best return.

Telephone account management - growing business area

As one of our latest batch of audio products, we have a CD that guides you through all the things you need to know to add more customers and clients and equally importantly – keep the ones you’ve currently got.  How often do sales business models focus and reward exclusively new business accounts. You can find the audio training CD buy following this link http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=32

It guides you through understanding what the function of account management is, how to do the key parts of the job effectively, and how you are the single biggest factor in determining outcomes !

Interestingly, 5 out of the last 7 people who have bought this audio CD, also bought the audio CD on time management too. Running your customer portfolio is partly about being well organised yourself of course too. Find more details here http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=24 All CDs are currently £34.99 + VAT and payment is easy through PayPal. You can use your credit card too.

 Training audio CDs for United States despatch.

Unsurprisingly most of our enquiries, orders and websites come from the English speaking world. The United States is our second biggest market. As a result and in order to make it easier for our American customers to work out the prices in dollars you will see we’ve added a click through currency converter against each of the products here.

Training CDs - ready to ship to United States

So if you’re in California,Wisconsin, New York state, Florida, Ohio, Washington, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, or Canada or any of the 50 U.S. states and you’re after some best practice advice from the U.K. on customer service, telesales or general telephone communication skills, try us out. A few clicks and the products are on their way to you.

Customer Service training is undoubtedly very important to all organisations – all the more so currently. Globally people have less available to spend on the products and services they need. With the rise of the internet, you can get almost anything from anywhere. Research shows that 80% of buying decisions are based on the service.

Improving customer service will put you ahead of the competition

The customer service module takes around 3 hours on a standard 2 day To Market customer service and telephone communications training course. Here we’ve had it distilled down into around 45 minutes of the key extracts and tips. Some of the top customer service tips here have been collected from the customer service personnel (agents) who have attended the courses. And they are the professionals of course – so they should know.

In this customer service audio CD you will hear why exceptional customer service matters to the progress of any organisation, the 4 point customer development mantra – the 4 key fundamental cornerstones why in the long run professional customer service is a MUST HAVE. Andrew Seaward will guide you through some commercial realities to customer service. Then he finishes with the 15 key points which make up effective customer service – and give your customers the service they deserve. And that’s without having to go the extra mile.   Click here   http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=27 to find out more about the CD and with a couple of clicks it is easy to buy through PayPal or by using your credit card.

Developing in-house training material for customer service and telesales is important for you and your company if you still have restricted training budgets at the moment. The temptation is to cut costs and look for increasing ways of being self-sufficient.

You recognise that training is important – perhaps MORE important than it’s ever been, but you’ve not got money to throw at it. Perhaps you’re reading this looking for some new ideas and new material.

Telesales training CDs are available for free – well sort of.

The training company To Market runs training courses for telesales and telemarketing teams. We have on offer at Associated Learning Systems a range of telesales and telemarketing related training CDs as part of our audio training programme. These include our best selling line the 3 CDs on telephone selling. We also have a CD on benefits titled “sell the sizzle, not the bacon.” There will be other CDs added soon on upselling, cross selling and switch selling plus highly effective account management.  

You may be thinking the CDs are unlikely to be completely free – well here’s the deal. For every one of the Sales training CDs available on our site that you buy, you can have a complete refund of what you’ve spent against any in-house training you commission To Market to run for you before the 30th September 2009.

Our telesales training products and material here contain advice and tips on sales techniques, including how to open the sales call, identifying needs, spotting buying signals, questioning techniques, probing customer needs, and dealing with objections.

So have a browse around the site, press a few buttons and these CDs could be with you tomorrow, or maybe the next day. Payment is easy and secure through PayPal, you can make payment with your credit card.

So big Phil has gone ! And Chelsea FC are going to make do with a part-time manager who doesn’t even work in this country the rest of the time. So is that really better than having a World Cup winning manager full-time ?! I don’t see how it can be.

So is Phil a bad manager ? Probably not. Did he lead the team well ? Seems not – judging by the stories of disharmony in the camp. But let’s just consider his management credentials for a moment. He led Brazil to a World Cup win (possibly not the most difficult feat in football admittedly – with so much abundant talent), but you’ve still got to be the ‘chosen one’. He was also the man who regularly put one over on Sven when it mattered - sending us out of 2 key tournaments. So much so, that not so long ago he was supposedly the man for the England job. “If you can’t beat him, let him join.”

So what happened at Chelsea then ? Did all those skills desert him ? And what of his predecessor Avram Grant ? His team finished a close second in the league on the final day (by 2 points) and were just one kick of a ball away from being European Champions. Sounds fairly impressive. But not good enough it seems. “So let’s stir it all up and start again.”  

Perhaps the problem is with the organisation ! Huh – oh no, can’t be ! To produce a winning organisation first you must have stability and continuity. Clearly if someone is a muppet and falls short of the their goals then they have to go but look at your goal setting. Is it realistic ? Is world domination a justifiable aim ? No-one has yet managed that in any field.

Also it is important to recognise that just throwing money at a problem will not solve it. Whether it is Abramovich at Chelsea or the American government in the Middle East, achievement of our goals in life will involve some graft and dedication, and putting our shoulder to the wheel. It may be a slog but it must be done. Just hoping that money will help achieve everything we want doesn’t work.

But yes I’ll leave you to tell that to Mr Abramovich !

Make your goal setting challenging but realistic, and remember to set SMART goals. In these testing times setting personal goals and self-development becomes even more important. There are audio products available on the subject of personal self-development. Click here to follow the link http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_list.asp?Section=SELF%20DEVELOPMENT

A book I bought for holiday last year, which I thoroughly recommend is Predictable Irrationality by Dan Ariely.

It is not intended as a sales manual, but is more an insight into patterns of human (and therefore by extension customer) behaviour. As the title suggests, it explains that although we as buyers do extraordinary things and apparently act irrationally, much of it in fact is entirely predictable. How much would this benefit you as a sales person do you think ?

One tip I learned is the example of giving people 3 options. Set out 3 options and people will naturally drift towards the middle option. This gives you the opportunity to present the product or service you want them to go for (and which is realistic) as the middle option. Good stuff eh ?!

He also covers an example of comparing 3 items when two of them are similar (a luxury weekend in Paris, a ‘value’ weekend in Paris or a luxury weekend in Rome.) He talks about why a person will be likely to choose one of the Parisien weekends. But I’ll let you discover that one for yourself.

You will be able to buy this at all good bookstores, I got mine at Smiths, you can follow this link http://www.whsmith.co.uk/CatalogAndSearch/ProductDetails-Predictably+Irrational+-9780007256525.html

But happy reading and let’s make 2009 an informed year ! Knowledge is the new power !

One of the top tips that customer service personnel come up with as being highly important is the need to be focused.

it is really important to stay with the customer for all the time you’re dealing with them. So if you deal with your customers face to face, remember to make eye contact with them. Also let you face show expression – there’s nothing worse than someone who deals with you with a fixed stony expression.

If you deal with people over the telephone, stay focused on what they are saying and write things down – this will also help you stay concentrating on the job at hand. Our 3 customer service CDs contain the 10 top things that customer service personnel themselves identify as the top customer service tips. You can find out more at http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=8.

We’d welcome any top tips that you have about customer service too. So add some comments to this post and let us know what you think.

How easy is it to give up on a business account because you feel you’re getting nowhere ? Sometimes you feel it is impossible to build rapport with the key decision-maker.

Sometimes even sales people following up a quotation or proposal will try the contact once, but then give up if they don’t get through.

If you’ve decided an account is worth pursuing because it meets the necessary criteria, then it is worth pursuing! This means a structured, thought through communication plan. And no this doesn’t mean you need to contact them every day or every week – it has to be what is approriate. Contact them too much and they’ll start to get irritated. So that is clearly counterproductive.

Instead try to build up knowledge about all accounts you’re working with so that you understand what they do, how they do it and why they do it. There will be an audio CD available in early 2009 on the subject of account management. The working title is ‘highly effective account management (how to get more from your customer base)’ and you will be able to find it in the telesales skills section, follow the link http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_list.asp?Section=TELESALES%20SKILLS 

If somebody leaves (whether good news or bad news for you personally) it changes everything ! So it is vitally important to build good relationships with as many interested parties as you can at all times

You may run a team which deals mainly with incoming sales enquiries and calls. So this doesn’t involve cold calling or even making outbound calls but it does involve persuading the callers to spend their money with  you, and maybe you’re also looking to get them to buy more than they called for.

As a result of many of these requests To Market www.tomarket.co.uk has recorded a new audio CD on these 3 interrelated sales topics upselling,cross selling and switch selling. It will be available soon within the telesales skills section of this website, the other sales related CDs can be seen at http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_list.asp?Section=TELESALES%20SKILLS

It is important to understand how each of these 3 parts of the sales process can work for you, and how you can get more out of our your customers. If you are interested in particular elements of this, add your comments to this post and we’ll add some specific future posts in response.