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.

So far we have gone over how to increase the lifetime value of each customer by increasing the number of purchases (part 1) and then we discussed increasing the value of each sale (part 2)

Part 1 and 2 focused on great cost effective ways to leverage your existing business to increase your profits and I hope you got some great ideas already, but more importantly, I hope you have taken action on what you have learned so far.

Part 3 will be looking at leveraging existing lead generation sources such as advertising or referrals, direct marketing etc (don’t worry, well discuss those in part 4) and increasing the number of sales you get from existing leads.

You may have wondered previously why generating more leads has been the last section we discuss and the simple reason behind this is that generating new leads and prospects is the most expensive and time consuming activity in your marketing plan.

Additionally there is much less value in generating new leads if you have no back end sales funnel to generate additional sales from these new customers, no sale value increasing strategies in place to maximize the value of each sale, and lastly, no optimized sales process to maximize the percentage of new leads which convert to sales.

You see, once you have the first 3 steps implemented & optimized you will have much more leverage and power when it comes to lead generation, since you will be able to spend much more on advertising and other lead sources simply because you now make much more revenue per new customer than ever before!

So, let’s begin with your incoming call script.