Pre-Sales Customer Service - Engage Prospects and Build an Income Pipeline - Workface: The Career Academy Sydney

Build a list of potential income sources by helping people.

When a prospect picks up the phone to call you or enters your online chat, it’s safe to say that they already have an interest in your product or service. They may have browsed your website and gathered extensive information, or they may have simply clicked a link out of curiosity. Either way, you can be sure that they will have some questions.

In this article we’ll share our tips for successfully engaging prospective customers and helping them to find the products and services that best meet their needs. We’ll also cover methods for capturing their contact information so that you can re-target them at different stages of the buying process and guide them towards an eventual purchase.

From Service To Sales

As a pre-sales customer service representative, there are a number of steps you can take to ensure that you are providing helpful information to your prospects while maximising the sales potential of the enquiry.

Know your products and services and be able to predict commonly asked questions.
Qualify your prospects by asking the right kind of questions to establish their needs.
Increase engagement by providing solutions that solve the customer’s problems.
Gather information so that you can follow up with them later.

What Is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of collecting contact details from prospects. Prospects are people who are interested in the products and services you offer.

By targeting your marketing messages to your ideal customer profile, you will increase your enquiry rate and ultimately your sales conversion rate.

There are several different methods that are used to collect prospect details and it is a very important part of the sales and marketing funnel, or as well call it, your Income Funnel.

Common sources of sales leads can include:

Contact Us page on your website
Referrals
In-line lead capture forms (so that you know how the prospect found you and what they are interested in)
Online chat (prospects provide their contact details)
Blog and newsletter subscriptions
Competition entry forms
Promotions and special offers (when contact information is required in order to redeem them)

Understand Your Products and Services

Many prospect questions can be anticipated in advance. By targeting your marketing messages to your ideal customer, you will be able to create a list of frequently asked questions based on their common business goals and challenges.

Your prospect will typically want to know:

That you are qualified to answer their questions
That the product package will solve their problem
That they are getting value for money
That they will have access to after sales support

By understanding your product and service offerings, you will be able to match prospects to the appropriate package that best meets their needs.

If you are starting out with a new organisation and they have an FAQ’s page at their website, study that page until you understand everything on it. The FAQ’s page at ComputerTrainingOnline.com.au answers most students questions about the courses on offer.

Use that page as your resource as well as a place to direct prospects to answer their questions. If the FAQ’s page doesn’t include an in-line enquiry form to help them take the next steps towards a purchase, then recommend it to your employer.

In short, know everything that is at your company website!

Qualify Your Prospects

Different prospects will be at varying stages of the buying process. As a pre-sales customer service representative you have a responsibility to engage with prospects to help them get to the end of the sales and marketing funnel – ideally as a customer.

Even if a prospect doesn’t become a customer it is important to know that for certain and to understand why.

Spending too much time with prospects who are not the right fit for your products and services will only make you come across as ‘pushy’ and drain your energy.

Ask questions that help you to determine whether or not your products and services will meet the needs of the prospect. This process can also be used to build rapport and create trust in your knowledge and expertise. Ideally you should be asking questions that establish the prospect’s:

Goals
Desires
Budget
Timeframe

Increase Engagement

After you have answered your prospect’s questions to their satisfaction and qualified them as a potential customer, you are in a position to recommend solutions and guide them to the next stage of the sales funnel.

Ask your prospect to take action, for example:

fill out an online form
book a consultation
request a quote
subscribe to your blog
follow you on social media

Having the prospect’s contact details and some basic knowledge about their business allows you to re-target them at a later stage with marketing messages and resources that add value and keep them engaged.

Follow Up

Once you have established your prospect’s needs and obtained their contact information, you should confirm the next steps so that they know what to expect next. Ideally you should provide a timeframe for when they can expect a call or email, or a reply to their question.

It’s also good practice to ask if they have any further questions before you end the call, and thank them for getting in touch.

Summary

When you operate in a pre-sales customer facing environment you’ll get asked a lot of different things about the business, the products and how to get support after a sale is made. This means that you have to help people quickly by responding to their questions and qualifying them with a few questions of your own.

By understanding the needs of your ideal customer and matching them with a solution from one of your product and service packages, you will be able to grow your income pipeline with the right prospects and significantly improve your conversion rate of enquiries to sales.

If you find that the products and services that your company offer are not quite matching competitors then let your manager know. This is important to the marketing people and forms part of their market research and helps them design better product and service packages.