Exposing the 6 Myths of Call Center Sales: The Training Myth

Congrats, you made it! Welcome to the sixth, and final, installment of our series: Exposing the 6 Myths of Call Center Training. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the previous posts, you can start with the first post in this series, or download the full series for free here. 

Myth #6: If you deliver a call center sales training program, your CSRs will learn the skills needed to sell over the phone.

Sure, training is essential. However, traditional sales training won’t get the job done because it’s almost always built on and adapted from field sales strategies. Such training doesn’t address the unique competencies required in a customer support environment that’s conducted over the phone. In situations like this, the customer is a stranger; there’s no face-to-face dialog, time is limited, and the focus is on service. This type of sales relationship calls for 12 unique competencies to encourage lead generation:

1. Transitioning from a service call to a sales call (learning to gain a leadership position when the customer calls with their agenda)
2. Neutralizing an emotional, unreceptive customer over the phone
3. Delivering an appropriate meta-message (the underlying message conveyed by your tone of voice)
4. Assessing and responding to the customer’s meta-message
5. Creating an environment where the customer feels comfortable and relaxed, even though the customer was expecting a confrontation (dropping the rope instead of getting into a tug-of-war)
6. Discerning how the customer prefers to relate and adjusting your approach to fit that style (recognizing the difference between task-oriented callers and relational callers)
7. Knowing how to pick up on the subtleties of each customer’s preferences and meet their greatest emotional need — the need to be treated as someone special and unique
8. Expanding the customer’s comfort zone during the discovery phase of the call to make sure that the customer will reveal needs honestly and openly
9. Building value without any additional visual props and ensuring the customer not only believes in the benefits presented but emotionally embraces the recommendations
10. Delivering a scripted, memorized message in a non-scripted and natural way
11. Picking up on the customer’s verbal clues (or drawing them out) to identify concerns or barriers
12. Bridging from a typical service call to a discovery of the customer’s additional needs

Only ASLAN® Training is specifically designed to equip your team with these 12 competencies. Instead of trying to adapt outside sales methods to inside sales realities, ASLAN call center sales programs were built from the ground up to address the unique needs and opportunities of call centers.

So, How Do We Know All This About Call Center Sales? We Learned It the Hard Way.

ASLAN Training was one of the first organizations to specialize in sales training for companies engaged in prospecting and selling over the phone. We have successfully trained tens of thousands of reps and consulted with hundreds of call centers. It’s how we came to be recognized as the thought leader in this industry. And it’s why so many other industry leaders and Fortune 500 companies turn to us for help as they transition their call centers into profit centers.

If you’re interested in learning how ASLAN can help your customer support teams become the new lead generation center in your organization,

Tom Stanfill

As Co-founder and CEO, Tom’s primary role is to create content that helps people live, sell, and serve more effectively. Find him on LinkedIn