Qualify New Leads Faster With A Call Center For Small Business

By Author: supriyo banerjee
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When people think of a call center for small business, they typically think of operators answering phones and taking orders for products, taking messages or dealing with customer issues. But today’s call centers are much more than just order-takers and customer service answering services. Today’s call centers can be excellent lead qualifiers for your sales business.

When a sales force lacks the staff to properly generate and qualify leads, it can turn to a call center for small business that has trained personnel who can work from your own prospect list and turn names into qualified leads. This same call center, as noted earlier, will probably offer a customer service answering service, so once your prospects become customers, it can help you with customer service issues, too.

The range of services call centers for small business provide is very large. In addition to lead qualification and customer service answering services, most do some or all of the following and more:

Customer surveys and profiling
Closing sales
Development of prospect lists and databases
...
... Marketing of its clients products and services
Creating innovative strategies for sales and marketing campaigns
E-mail messaging and live chat
Relaying of incoming calls

Lead qualification, offered by some call centers for small business, truly supports a company’s sales team. Qualifying prospects can be tedious and take salespeople away from their most important job: selling. When you contract with a customer service answering service to handle this job, more sales can be made and more profits generated.

New salespeople, in particular, often have trouble qualifying prospects. This is because they’re eager, and when a prospect bites, they’re ready to close. Better to let a call center for small business do that job so that the young salesperson can get on with the business of selling. A good customer service answering service will help the beginner and experienced salesperson avoid the burnout that can come from problematic prospect qualification.

The key to the qualification process is to ask targeted questions of the prospect. A call center for small business might have a list of three, five, or seven specific questions its staff will work from. Since these customer service answering service employees gain nothing personally if the prospect is qualified, they can simply and easily go through the questions, and when any of them are answered with a “wrong” answer, they can move on to the next prospect. No stress, and no time wasted by the center’s client.

To sum up, call centers for small business save their sales clients time and money by doing the often tedious prospect-qualification work for them. The leads they turn over are now ready and waiting to become customers.

Janet Livingston is President of Customer Contact Services, a Minnesota-based call center for small business. Interested in finding out more about call answering services and USA call centers? Visit our website today for more information.