Clear business.

Selling over the telephone is reliant upon your voice and how you talk. Your prospect doesn’t care what you look like so it’s irrelevant if you happen to be wearing a £10,000 Rolex, a Gieves & Hawkes suit and drove to your office in a Bentley. For all they care you roller skated to work in a tornado red thong, because if your voice isn’t up to scratch you may as well go home.

One of the biggest mistakes that sales people make when speaking to clients is talking too fast. We all speak faster when we are under pressure, and there is normally an element of pressure on sales people when they are talking to clients. So it just makes sense that as a professional sales person, you would want to be perpetually aware of the speed that you are speaking at.

However, I very rarely meet a salesperson that is aware of their own W.P.M. (words per minute) rate. I have found that the most exceptional speech rate needs to be around 180 W.P.M. and this is really a very comfortable rate of speech to listen to and to also talk at. I find that most people selling on the telephone utilise a rate of about 220 to 250 W.P.M. This is too fast for you prospect to comfortably process everything that you are saying. Also, when you are talking quite fast you have a tendency not to listen too well to what your prospect is saying.  

In order to ascertain what your W.P.M. rate is you will need to time yourself reading. If you have your regular telephone sales pitch to hand that would be ideal, but you can just use a book or a newspaper article. All you need to do is time yourself reading aloud. It really is essential that you do this in the same style and speed that you would use when selling to a client over the phone.

Read aloud and time yourself for just 60 seconds. Once you have read for 1 minute stop and count how many words you read aloud at that will give you your W.P.M. rate. So for example, if you read 218 words in 60 seconds, your W.P.M. rate will be 218 W.P.M.

To perfect your 180 W.P.M. rate you need to find yourself, or write yourself a paragraph that is 180 words in length and just practice reading it and completing it in 60 seconds. Once you can nail talking to clients under pressure at the rate of 180 W.P.M. then you will find that your sales closing ratio will sky rocket.

Let me warn you that this is not an easy thing to do as our natural default setting is to speed up when stressed. You must practise this skill and also monitor it regularly. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll never lose it and it will make you a better salesperson, conversationalist and all rounder nicer person because will enjoy talking to you more.

I have almost 20 years experience in the sales arena. I now own and run a company called Fat Cat Ideas which provides Telesales Training, Copywriting and Lead Generation advice. www.fatcatideas.com

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Fantastic Telesales Secrets – Voice speed