How do you get your sales team solidly behind your telephone sales campaign and telephone sales goals?

Here are 5 Training Tips for Sales Managers:

1. Identify your goals

Identify the goal of your telephone sales campaign.

Identify the goal of every telephone call your team will make. (These may differ from your overall campaign goals.)

Know the difference between your campaign goals and your individual telephone call goals. (For example, if your team is making calls to set new business appointments, the goal of the call is the appointment. The goal of the overall campaign is to gain new customers.)

2. Communicate your goals

Make sure that your sales team understands your campaign goals.

Make sure that your sales team understands the goal of every individual call.

Make sure that your sales team knows and understands the difference between the campaign goals and the goals for individual telephone calls.

3. Plan your campaign and your calls

Plan out every potential sales scenario.

Develop an appropriate script for each scenario.

Make sure that your script includes answers to the objections your sales team is bound to hear.

Make sure that your scripts are well written and in spoken English.

Test and refine your scripts.

4. Report

Have a method in place ahead of time to track all calls.

Track all calls.

Make sure that your sales team reports all unusual or unexpected sales scenarios.

Analyze those unexpected scenarios and adjust your plan and scripts accordingly.

5. Trust your sales team

Once you have planned your campaign, communicated all of your goals and trained your sales team, give your team a voice and decision-making power in handling prospects and customers.

Trust that your sales team will handle calls appropriately and professionally.

Your trust will result in better morale, better effort and better results.

Wendy Weiss

Wendy Weiss, The Queen of Cold Calling & Selling Success, is a sales trainer, sales coach and author. She helps entrepreneurs, business owners and sales professionals gain confidence, reach more prospects, close more sales and make more money. Her clients include Avon Products, ADP, Sprint and thousands of entrepreneurs throughout the country.

Wendy has been featured in BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur Magazine, Selling Power, Sales & Marketing Management and various other business and sales publications. Wendy?s e-mail newsletter, Opening Doors & Closing Sales has an international readership and her columns are syndicated to 168 different print and Internet publications.

Wendy is the author of the recently released, self-study program, Cold Calling College, and the book, Cold Calling for Women.

She is also a former ballet dancer who believes that everything she knows in life she learned in ballet class.