My LinkedIn Answers #4

What is the most effective way to answer the phone?

Your phone rings. The call is unexpected. It is an inbound sales call. How do you answer the call to take control of the call and funnel the caller through your sales process rather than have to go through the callers process?
Clarification added 1 month ago:

By inbound sales call I mean the folks are prospects calling you to find out more about your products and services. Typically, they call in, express interest, collect information, and then you have to spend time chasing them down to find out if they want to do business with you. I am curious what techniques you use to get them out of that process and into your process - qualifying etc.

Interesting to find that people hang up on callers rather than grade their efforts though.

This is a common problem in a telesales organization.

How can we tell whether the caller has a genuine interest to do business with us? How can we not waste our time on these calls? Worst of all, how can we be sure it's not a 'mystery shopping' call where its sole purpose is to gather market intelligence from us?

An experienced tele-sales professional should have a proactive buy/sell process and exercise self-restraint not chasing down a blind alley when it becomes clear that the prospect is not qualified.

In fact, you've hinted in your question a way to deal with these calls. The problem that the sales person needs to face is qualifying the prospect as effective and timely as possible. He/she should:
- discover the real needs and motivation of the prospect;
- decide whether there's a mutual fit (not trying to convincing the prospecting to buy something from you);
- discuss with the prospect why it should make a decision to change (buyers are not really buying something, they're changing something to satisfy their needs).

In the end, you'll be able to qualify the prospect.

The goal of qualification is to find out whether there's better than 50 percent chance of closing the sale.