Is fear of the phone holding you back and killing opportunities for your staff and their customers?
My experience of training advisers within the Welfare to Work sector has lead me to understand that picking up the telephone to enhance and develop relationships with prospective employers is a stumbling block for many. This results in phone fear and lost opportunities.
Every time you fail to pick up the phone, you also fail to help find an opportunity that could be ideal for your customers and their employment prospects.
Securing Employer Engagement is a major part of ensuring customers have access to “genuine, real opportunities” when seeking to gain employment.
We work with customers who might have a barrier to getting into work, yet in many instances, our not using the phone has become our barrier to identifying that elusive job for customers.
When we are working especially with customers who are disadvantaged in some way, how we feel about Employer Engagement has a huge impact on our ability to help those customers. In my opinion, we have aresponsibility to help our customer find the right job with the right employer or training organisation and yes, that means sometimes we have to overcome our fear and change what we do.
Cold calling: Does it get Results?
The answer bluntly is YES,YES and YES!
So should we be cold calling? Of course we should! And I’m sure you’d expect me to say that, because I’m passionate about it. But I haven’t always been this way. When I was a personal adviser getting long term unemployed people into work, my success was down to my ability to connect with both customers and employers and more importantly, embracing cold calling.
Cold calling doesn’t have to be as we fear it. Picking up the phone might be to find out more about a specific industry that your customer wants to work in, or checking what training opportunities there are for your customer or ringing an employer to find out where they advertise their vacancies. Any cold call should simply be seen as the first step in ‘warming up’ a contact you don’t yet know well.
Avoiding these five mistakes can improve your results.
I run a number of webinars and courses on cold calling and thought I’d share some of the common mistakes people make. Any of these tips when put into action will improve your success rate.
- Stop giving too much away to the receptionist. He/she is not the decision maker so don’t reel off your full presentation to them. Do this and you’ll encourage the dreaded “We’re not interested”, “Can you send it in the post”. Get straight to the point and speak with confidence. Avoid phrases like “Is it possible to speak to….” and instead say “Good Morning Sarah Wilson please. Sound as if you know the person!
- Don’t ignore objections when you hear them. Focus on building your company’s credibility by overcoming them. Stop and ask the employer a question when they make the objection to ensure you understand why they’ve raised it.
- Don’t be put off with some vague promise. If you want to ring back, get some commitment from the employer by asking, “When might be a good time to call you back for some feedback” Or “What is a good time to review your current arrangements?”. .Avoid suggesting to an employer “I’ll give you a call in a few days/weeks”. This means nothing, and if you call back in a few weeks you could easily have lost the opportunity.
- Make sure you have your contact’s name before you speak to them. Find out from the gatekeeper and ask them to spell it if you’re unsure about it. Nothing is worse than the employer hearing you say at the end of the call “I’m sorry I didn’t get your name, what was it!”. Get the name first and continue to build rapport by using it.
- Don’t ask for decisions before you’re clear about the employer’s needs. If you want to ask for a decision about an appointment, job interview or training opportunity do you understand their current needs, challenges or fears? Are your questions all closed ones resulting in a YES/NO answer or are you engaging them by giving them the opportunity to talk? Spend time preparing good questions to establish a genuine need.
I trust you’ve found this information useful. Do visit our RESOURCES page as we have some resources that can help you on some of the issues we’ve mentioned here.
Audrey Bodman
7 Responses to Strategies for better Employer Engagement by phone
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