Answering a call is pretty simple. Yet, in the corporate world, less than 30% of businesses score a passing grade in handling their inbound sales calls. When a prospect calls you, it means he has already made his research and is interested in doing business with you. But just because it is an inbound call, it doesn’t mean the deal will close. The outcome is determined by how well the call is handled by your sales representative. And failing to follow the best practices in this area is quite costly. After all, you have spent enough of your marketing dollars to get these inbound calls in the first place. And when a prospective customer calls you with an interest in buying, a failure in convincing him will give a reason to choose your competitor.

That’s the reason you need to do everything you can to put your best foot forward to close the deal on the call. And we call this technique as Inbound call optimization. Many startups and Internet marketing companies have employed trainers to implement this lead generation technique effectively. At first, the name may sound too complicated but the best practices to execute this is simple and straightforward. So without overstating anything, let’s get to the point and have a look at the best practices of better handling your inbound calls.

Build up your product knowledge:

It is advisable for sales representatives to use every available tool at their disposal to strengthen their knowledge about the product and services their company offers. Price points, features, benefits, and ROI of the product should be memorized so that when a prospective customer calls, you can highlight them when a customer asks for more information about a product.

Stay Prepared:

A prospective customer who is calling your sales team might have interacted your business through any other medium like social media or an email before which mean he has their basic information about your business. In such cases, even the name of the lead, location or their requirement can help a sales representative to stay prepared for the call. All this information is used to provide a personalized experience to the lead at the time he calls.

Record and analyze to learn better:

We know it takes time to master all the inbound skills for a sales representative. But the best part about this technique is that a person can recognize their mistakes and learn from them. One should record the call and later listen to it to figure out any mistakes made during the call and work on them to sharpen their inbound calling skills.

Develop a relationship with the lead:

Customers contact too many people for the services but they ultimately choose the one who shows a great interest and develops a personalized relationship with them. So a skilled sales representative always try to build a relationship with the prospect. To do this, he must have to listen and understand the issues of the lead so that they can offer them a solution.

Focus on pain points:

To successfully convert a prospect into a lead, one should always focus on the pain points of the customer rather than promoting your own products. This way sales representatives can present themselves as someone who is genuinely interested in helping people and not only after sales.

No matter what you do, create an authentic relationship with your customers through your content and calls to boost your conversion rates.