Sales and customer service training on a budget. Many companies are facing challenges at the moment as economic conditions across the world worsen.

There is still the need to develop your staff and teams of course. But there is little money available to pay for it. Sound familiar?

Is this your training budget?

Many companies are in this situation and therefore many managers and company owners want to motivate their teams and help them develop new skills in both customer service and sales, but on limited or non-existent budgets. Many companies are forced to do some form of training, but using in-house staff and materials. However if the training is to be effective it is important to gather new ideas from other sources. Gleaned from the experts. The type of people who’ve been there, bought the t-shirt etc.

We can help, honestly. We provide a range of easily affordable audio CDs packed with top tips, years of experience and plain old good common sense. Our CDs and tips booklets are based around a number of key growth areas ;

• Customer Service
• Telephone sales
• Self-development

With prices starting from £34.99 for one audio CD, and packages of 3 for less than £70, you wouldn’t need many good ideas to make it self-financing would you?

All our products are supplied with a full money back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with the product. If you’re in the UK, simply return the  product for a refund of your purchase price. http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/products.asp is the link that will take you straight to our products page. You can buy all our products online, with payment by credit card or directly through PayPal.

Associated Learning Systems is a UK, Midlands based company specialising in products for the development of customer service, telesales and telemarketing skills.

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 by 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.

Customers are the most likely future customers. There are many studies that show this to be true. They are cheaper to acquire than new customers, and this is partly because they are easier to influence. After all they are already in the habit of buying from you.

We came across an article by Karl Bryan the American trainer who covers this area. This is some of what he says on the subject ;

“….. many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers.  These are people you already know to be a good sales potential. They’ve already bought from you!”

So it is important to take the time to market and sell new products to your existing and lapsed customers. Spend less time trying to sell old products to new customers, and you will see improvements in sales, customer quality and brand position. Karl Bryan offers this useful list with some added notes from us to make sure you retain your current customers ;

1. Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, and in person. Keep them posted on what you are doing : new products and services etc.

2. Post-Purchase Relationship Building: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel  you have a genuine interest in them and their experiences with your product or service.  How many times do sales people lose interest the minute they get the order. Something as simple as a Thank
You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining a great customer.

3. Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business and help them to get the best deals and advice. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option if their spend warrants it. It’s about making them feel special, valued. It all helps.

4. Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of half-hearted rubbish sales people. So the more they can trust you to do waht you say when you say you’ll do it, the more the relationship will build, and the more they will trust you.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:
. Quality product/service
. Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer
. Offer subjects your customers find interesting

Use this approach of educating your customers and offer them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success. Don’t waste all your time on new prospects while your current customers become someone else’s new accounts.

As the well known motivational speaker Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and divert some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers.”

Good words Jay.

Upsell, cross sell and switch sell. This new audio CD has become one of our top selling products since it’s release in the Autumn. It seems it strikes a chord with businesses keen to get the most value out of every phone call. 

More skills for internal sales teams

 This is a product aimed at those of you who have a team of people or individuals who deal with incoming calls, but who are nevertheless expected to sell. If you want to raise your skills, or build up your selling skills this product could help http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=31

Every phone call coming in represents an opportunity. OK, it may not always look like it – “Oh, I’m just phoning round looking for prices” or “I want to know where my goods are !” But within whatever the customer is saying there is always the seed of an opportunity.

Increasing the average order value by upselling, or switchselling the customer on to a different product if the one they want is out of stock are all important ways of ensuring you lock their business in, and don’t lose it to your competition.

 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.

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 !

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. 

Whenever a customer or prospect turns down your offer – always remember to ask why. This will display self-confidence and will tell you many important things.

Understanding what motivates customers to make certain choices is really important. They’ll respect you for the fact that you’re not taking the easy option and turning on your heel. 

You must then start the process of building the relationship for the next time – the next order. There are 3 audio CDs available on the sales process. Simply follow this link to find out more http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=16

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The Associated Learning Systems site is about promoting ways of learning that can be done remotely, privately and with limited funds. I think books fall into this category perfectly. For just a few pounds you can tap into some fantastic bits of wisdom written by some very entertaining people.

One of the best books I’ve read over the last couple of years that has an impact on selling is a book called Influence : Science and Practice written by an American psychologist Robert Cialdini. He supports all the theories he puts down on the page with some well documented experiments.

If you’re involved in selling I strongly recommend it. You can go straight to it on Amazon by following this link http://www.amazon.co.uk/Influence-Practice-Robert-B-Cialdini/dp/0321011473/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227621443&sr=1-5. It gives an insight into how people behave and how you can persuade them of things. How much use could that be ?! For instance he shows that if you ask for a commitment from someone, when you’ve already given them something previously – no strings attached, they will more readily agree. They are naturally seeking to redress the balance, they feel they owe you one. This is known as the law of reciprocity.

Similarly if you advise a customer not to go for the most expensive option (thereby proving your credentials as an honest broker) they are much more likely to take your advice in the future – no questions asked.

Think how these 2 devices could help you in your selling !