I still thought it wise to touch on this point just to make sure you give this some thought and make sure you have taken advantage of this opportunity as much as possible in your business.

In almost any business, you should always attempt to offer incentives to any employee that has any sort of contact with a customer.

It’s obviously standard practice to offer incentives or commissions to sales persons who are responsible for generating sales in your business, but it doesn’t stop there.

You need to understand that every customer contact point is always an opportunity to generate more business and you need to take advantage of every customer contact point you have.

Its certainly not only sales people that have regular contact with customers. You could have financial people, receptionists, technicians, service providers and many other types of employees who have regular contact with customers.

Taking advantage of as many of these as possible can have incredible impact on your business, and not only from a sales point of view.

A customer contact point can be used for all of the following:

1. Provide details on additional products or services that may offer additional value to your customers.
2. Request feedback on your quality of service, eg. Get a testimonial, complete a customer survey.
3. Request feedback on additional services your customer would like to see you provide, or changes to your service that would provide them increased value.

All of these can be of value to your business, from generating additional sales, to getting valuable feedback on your quality of service or additional services you can offer.

By offering all employee types incentives for performing certain actions when in contact with the customer, you gain the benefit of the customer responding to the action (accepts offer, provides feedback etc) and the employee gains whatever incentives you have defined.

Some examples:

1. A receptionist mentions a special offer you may have running at that point in time and tells visitors or callers if they want to take advantage of this they should email, call etc Mr Salesman and use coupon code XXXX. A unique coupon number per employee allows you track who generated the lead or action.
2. A fitness trainer staff member can make recommendations for specific health products that will further benefit the customer, and all they need to do is visit XXX website address or call XXX number and quote that unique coupon code to take advantage.
3. An accounts receivable employee can be given the power to offer customers increased payment terms on outstanding invoices if they take advantage of XXX offer right now. Or if they take advantage of offer XXX, they will receive a 10% discount on a previous outstanding invoice.

Every employee is a potential salesperson. Empower them to make offers, recommendations or receive feedback from customers, for a little incentive and you have a powerful additional sales force that can really have a big impact on your future sales.

This strategy also makes for very happy and productive employees who will go above and beyond in their job because now they have the incentive to do so. You get the business benefit, and at the same time, a very happy employee base, who will think twice about moving over to your competitors who don’t offer any types of incentives in their business.

If you already have an existing business that is not entirely internet based, then this is almost always the case.

The incoming call is your first contact point with a new prospective customer and is extremely critical in obtaining the desired result.

In most cases, a sale is not made over the phone, but every business has a desired action they would like the customer to make, as a result of the conversation. Eg. Go to the physical store, got to the web address, fax an order form here, request a brochure etc).

This means your conversation needs to be scripted to maximize the number of customers that take your desired action.

A call conversation is just as critical as your advertising, or any other marketing materials you may have. There is no point in getting leads if you can get them to take your action once they have made the call.

If you are not already aware, copywriters who write advertising, as well as advertising firms get paid a lot. This is because ad writing is a skill, a unique talent that not everybody has.

Good advertising makes business big money, and that’s why business pay them big money in return.

The reason why I stress this is because you need to think of your incoming call as an opportunity to leverage a well written conversation script that gets the caller to take your action.

You need to think of it as a very valuable marketing contact point, and you should invest in it as such, exactly like you would with any advertising or marketing materials.

Its very common for a 2 page incoming call script to be sold to companies for up to R50k, simply because the ROI is worth it.

Now of course you may not be in a position to buy a custom script, or have one professionally written, but it was important for me to stress the importance of your call script, and the massive impact it can have on your sales.

Now, I’m not a copywriter myself or a professional salesman, so I won’t presume to tell you how to put together a good sales script. For now I will simply provide some resources where you can get once written specifically for your business.