7 Ways to Grow Your Business with a Telephone Answering Service

Here are seven ways that a phone answering service can help you close more sales.

Capture More Leads 24/7

What happens to your calls when you don’t answer them? If you send them to voicemail this is bad. Most callers will just hang up. Though some might call back, not all will. A clunky answering machine is even worse. But the gravest mistake is just letting the phone ring.

Some of your customers may accept this unfriendly approach as how you do business, but not all will. And a prospect never will. If you don’t have a real person answering their call, they won’t call back. They’ll call your competitor. Not only have you lost a lead, but you gave one to your competition. Never do that.

Instead tap the services of a professional phone answering service to handle your calls around-the-clock. If you’re in the office, they’ll back you up. If you’re out of the office, they’ll take the lead, answering your calls with speed and precision.

This means they will capture more leads for you. This means more leads for your sales funnel. And more leads in your sales funnel means more sales that you will close. Yes, a phone answering service can do that for you.

Respond Faster with Real-Time Notifications

Your phone answering service can also triage your leads. Following your guidelines, they can hold leads from the tire kickers until the next business day. Yet for the hot leads, the urgent ones that need a quick response, your live answering service can alert your team immediately and pass key information on to them.

The result is that your staff could be following up with your prospect before they even have a chance to think about calling someone else. And when you respond that fast, they’ll have little reason to call someone else.

This is the ideal situation, which a full-service telephone answering service makes possible when they handle your sales inquiries for you.

Add a Friendly Voice for Callers

Would you rather try to talk to a computer or a real person? This isn’t a trick question, because the answer is obvious. People want to talk to people. If so, why do so many businesses force automation upon their customers and even their prospects?

While automation may save a few pennies per call, it serves as one of the fastest ways possible to lose business. Which is better, cut expenses a few dollars a month or dramatically increase your sales?

The personal touch of a live answering service can make all the difference. For a comparatively low cost, they’ll provide your prospects with the personal touch they expect and will appreciate. And when you do this for your prospects, they’ll reward you by buying from you.

Exhibit Professionalism

Coupled with the personal touch is professionalism. Hiring the right phone answering service can do both. Yes, today’s leading telephone answering services invest much in staff training, giving their staff the tools they need to be both personal and professional.

Your prospects benefit from this professional treatment, which they’ll transfer to your sales reps and your company. As the saying goes, you never have a second chance to make a great first impression. Yet your live answering service can do exactly this for you 24/7, creating great first impressions on every call.

Gather Essential Information

Most all answering services will get a name, number, and short message from your callers. Yet the good ones can go beyond this by getting the essential information you need to move the prospect forward in your sales funnel.

What you consider essential for your business and your industry varies. However, regardless of what is essential for you to know about your prospects, just tell your phone answering service, and they’ll do their best to collect the information you need on every call.

Of course, if a prospect doesn’t want to answer some of your questions, your service won’t push and run the risk of alienating them, but they can be most effective in getting what your sales team needs so they can move forward fast.

Pre-qualify Leads

Coupled with gathering essential information about your prospects, is pre-qualifying leads. Again, this varies from one business to the next, but a common example is asking the prospect’s timeline. If they’re in the information gathering phase and don’t plan on making a purchase decision for six months, there’s no pressing reason to call them back immediately. Those inquiries can wait until the next business day.

However, if their need is immediate, this warrants the answering service passing on the information to your salesperson right away. If you wish, your phone answering service can even connect the prospect to your salesperson. This provides the opportunity to close a sale on the first call.

Close More Sales Faster

As you integrate your phone answering service into your sales and marketing strategy, they will do much to help you facilitate the sales process. As a result of them capturing more leads for you and making a great first impression, you’ll get more leads in your sales funnel, which will trickle out to closing more sales. This will delight you, delight your sales team, and most importantly, delight your prospects—many who are now your customers.

Summary

When you hire a professional phone answering service to handle your calls for you when you can’t, you’ve added an essential resource to your sales and marketing department. You can’t overstate the benefits.

Your telephone answering service will help you capture more leads and respond quicker. This keeps your prospects from seeking other options. Your live answering service will also provide the personal touch, along with the professional response that your prospects expect. As a bonus, your telephone answering service will get the essential information you need from your prospects, pre-qualify those leads, and help you close more sales faster.

These are some amazing outcomes that a professional phone answering service can provide for you and your sales department. But what does it cost? For all the outcomes an answering service can provide, the expense is surprisingly small, but don’t think of it as a cost. It’s an investment.

The small monthly fee of hiring a live answering service will have a huge return on investment (ROI). Not only will they help you close more sales month after month, but you will also realize the lifetime value of each new customer.

If you’re considering hiring an answering service to help increase sales, it’s time to move forward. And once you experience what the right phone answering service can do for you, you’ll wish you had hired them sooner.

For more information, check out this free, no-obligation resource, “How to Select an Answering Service