How to Prevent Missed Sales Opportunities
Missed sales opportunities can be detrimental to any business. Here is a surefire way you can drastically cut down on missing those valuable calls.
99% of people who call your business are either a potential sales opportunity or someone giving you the chance to provide excellent customer service. Sometimes both. What’s the first step in providing a stellar experience for those callers? Answer the phone!
It sounds so simple, but a shocking number of businesses are still relying on voicemail to handle the calls they aren’t able to answer. How many people are actually leaving a message if they get sent to voicemail? Maybe 20% at most. And that number is trending downward. If a potential customer calls your business, you don’t answer, and they go to voicemail, you can bet that most of the time they aren’t bothering to leave a message since you didn’t bother to answer. Instead, they are hanging up and dialing your competitor because they have wants/needs that must be fulfilled pronto.
So we have established that you must answer every call to prevent missed sales opportunities. Maybe that’s something you can handle on a normal day from 9-5 while you’re in the office. But what about a busy day when multiple calls are coming in at once? You’ve got to eat at some point, right? And answering the phone while in the bathroom is just poor form. Oh, and then there are those other 16 hours of the day that you aren’t working, but people could be calling. That’s a lot of phone to handle, but also a lot of potential sales that could be coming in.
This is where a professional business answering service comes in and works its magic. You can set one up to handle all your calls and act as an extension of your company after hours and on weekends. Flip your lines over to your answering service during the day when you have to step into a meeting. Have them set up customized routing so if you’re on the phone with someone all other calls get automatically forwarded to the service. All your messages will be instantly delivered to you so you can follow up with customers and pounce on those sales leads.
Want to take it even a step farther? A bilingual answering service prevents missed sales opportunities with Spanish speaking callers so you’ve got all your bases covered. Your answering service could even be doing appointment setting for you!
So what is a call worth to you? $20? $50? $100? $1000? Every call is money you could be bringing in with new sales. Don’t miss those opportunities. Make sure your phones are answered every time by a professional, friendly representative of your business.
You can even try our answering services free for a week and find out how many calls and sales you’ve been missing out on.
