Sales Advice By Market

Selling to Answering and Referral Services

Good news! There are still inroads for emerging entrepreneurs to enter the B2B answering and referral service market. If your company has a history of sitting on the sidelines, maybe it's time to start selling to answering and referral services.

Penetrating the world of answering and referral services can require complex sales and marketing strategies.

For B2B professionals that sell to these companies, the industry's positive growth outlook makes the solid execution of fundamental sales principles more important than ever.

Sales Incentives

Ideally, you want your sales force to be self-motivated to perform at a high level. But to encourage constant improvement, consider offering sales incentives to sales reps that exceed answering and referral service sales targets.

Incentives don't have to break your budget -- sometimes just recognizing an employee's worth to the organization is more valuable than an expensive incentive that lacks recognition or prestige.

Cost Analysis of Your Selling Tactics

Every part of your sales strategy should be targeted for cost analysis. Business owners sometimes overlook cost considerations and instead, choose to invest in sales strategies that fall short of ROI expectations.

For example, even though it might seem logical to increase the size of your sales force to expand your base of answering and referral service customers, the additional labor overhead may be an inefficient decision from a cost analysis perspective.

Direct Marketing Strategies

Direct marketing is an effective way to sell to answering and referral services. The benefit of direct marketing is that it is an efficient method reaching qualified prospects with targeted messaging. From a sales perspective, direct marketing establishes a platform for relationships with answering and referral services that can benefit from your products or services.

The tricky part about direct marketing is lead generation. Since finding leads is time-consuming and difficult, we recommend using lead lists supplied by established third-party vendors. Over the years we've found that Experian is one of the best in the business with a reputation for supplying consistently reliable lists of answering and referral services that produce high conversion rates.

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