Telemarketing Software Featured Article

Many sales deals, particularly in the business-to-business arena, fall through simply because, ultimately, the prospect believes – whether correctly or erroneously – that the product or service is not right for their organization. This misunderstanding happens when the sales person isn’t prepared with the right pitch, the right sales enablement materials or the right knowledge about the customer. In a perfect world, sales people would know everything there is to know about a prospect before beginning the pitch. Unfortunately, it’s often not the case, and unexpected roadblocks crop up that derail the sale.

When it comes to gathering information and preparing to begin a sales pitch, a lack of consistency often prevents the salesperson from gaining the information he or she needs. To prevent this, scripting – whether light or heavy – can help salespeople gain the right information before they craft a sales pitch. There’s a danger with traditional scripts, however, that they can sound stilted and don’t adapt to what the prospect is telling the sales person. This is where logical branch scripting can be an enormous help, according to a recent blog post by Craig Rector writing for VanillaSoft.

“Logical-branch scripting provides segments of information to the salesperson and then adapts to the conversation based on how the prospect responds,” wrote Rector. “The salesperson can be presented with either specific messaging to be spoken verbatim, or provided with message guidance, such as bullet points, hints, suggestions, etc. that offer the salesperson more flexibility with what they say while still having guidance to help stay on point as the call progresses.”

The “qualifying” portion of the sales process is often carried out by internal salespeople in the contact center, many of whom may be relatively new and inexperienced. Using logical branch scripting, these rookies would be able to follow the script and the prospect’s replies, and then select options and responses based on the direction of the conversation that, when clicked, offers the next segment of the script.

Another enormous benefit to logical branch scripting is the data collection feature. Often, information shared by prospects gets lost, since the rep may not remember the information when he or she hangs up with a prospect. This is less than ideal for the sales process with that prospect, and it doesn’t help the company gain any insight into sales processes across the board.

“Logical-branch scripting allows for data to be collect[ed] in fields directly in the script or script screen,” wrote Rector. “This makes it much easier to collect information such as who the decision makers are, if they are using a competitor, budget and buying timeline, company information and demographics, or any custom data or comments that are important in their buying process.”

By automatically saving these comments into the software’s contacts section, other salespeople will know the history of the account if they reach out to the same customer again. Good logical branch scripting will make it easy for salespeople to collect comments and information, as it can be customized to each company (with drop-down menus to choose any competitors’ solutions the company may be using, for example).

“Utilizing the benefits of logical-branch scripting and data collection not only creates consistency in sales messaging, it enhances the natural sales skills of your sales reps by giving them the right information at the right time as they progress through their conversations with prospects,” wrote Rector.