Sales Tip #3: How Important is Following Up? "Being a Pest, or Being the Best?"

There is a fine line between being a pest and being the best!

Did you know that the average close of a sale takes place after at least five meetings or conversations with the prospect? Most sales advisers only make one or two attempts to close a prospect. Those who do follow up more often make the mistake of guessing how long to wait before calling on the prospect again. If you persevere by continually following up with your prospects in a professional manner, you will be much more successful than those who throw in the towel after one or two attempts, or those who make their prospect cringe when they see their number show up everyday on their caller ID.

Here are a few tips that may help you in following up with your prospects. 

1. Ask permission to follow up
 Nothing disarms your prospect like asking permission to call on them again. It also allows you keep your relationship alive and lets you know that the prospect is still somewhat interested in building a relationship with you and your company. If you make a lot of phone calls to prospects, put a sticky note on your monitor, "ASK FOR FOLLOW UP"

2. Ask for a specific day and time to follow up 
Asking for a date and time takes the pressure off you as to guessing when it is appropriate to contact them. Nothing is worse than trying to guess how long to wait before calling on someone again. The line between being a pest and being the best is a fine one.

3. Have new material to share when you do follow up
Always try and have some new material available when you do follow up. This is easier said than done. We all have the tendency to spill all of our beans when we have the first opportunity to do so. We are so excited that someone is interested in speaking to us that we can exhaust everything we have at one time. Start off with an enticing introduction to get the prospect's interest, and then add more detailed material as you go.

4. Build up your relationship with each follow up
Don't be the sales guy who just talks about yourself and your product. With every follow up opportunity you have, you have an opportunity to build rapport with them.

5. Don't be afraid to ask for the sale
At the end of the day, your follow ups are not going to be of any use unless your willing to ask your prospect for their business. Although building a relationship is important, you are not calling your prospect once a week or once every few weeks to only chat about the Yankees. Don't be afraid to ask them what barriers are keeping them from doing business with you, so you can address them and hopefully close the deal! Good luck!

A Softphone Integrates Your Business Into Your Smartphone!

Cell phones have revolutionized the way we communicate. There are few people who do not have a cell phone, and many have completely replaced their home land lines with cell phones. While businesses do not have the luxury on doing away with their premise based phones, cell smartphones do have their place in the business world. Although you can ordinarily forward your business phone to your cell phone, there is a limited capacity to use your cell phone with your business phone system. A softphone alleviates these limitations and allows your cell phone to have a higher integration with your business system, provided it is an IP system.

A softphone is a software app that you can run on your smartphone, laptop or tablet which allows you to use Internet access to make and receive phone calls off of your business VoIP system. There are some things you should know about using your cell phone as a softphone. When calling from a softphone on your cell phone there are some pros and cons. The pros surely outweigh the cons, but knowing some of the limitations will be helpful in getting the most user friendly experience with your new softphone

Pros
1. A softphone works as an extension off your VoIP system which gives off the caller ID of your business rather than your personal cell number. As you know, there are times when you would rather not have your personal phone number being broadcast when making business calls. It is also beneficial to broadcast your business caller ID so your customers can call back the appropriate number. This makes your cell phone a transparent component of your business phone system.

2. When you have your softphone registered on the VoIP PBX you can also put that extension into groups which can allow cell phone users to answer calls in groups while being mobile. You can also transfer calls just like you would if you were in the office. You also have the ability to put callers on hold with hold music.

3. By using the softphone in conjunctions with WiFi, you do not use your personal minutes up while talking, nor do you use packets your data plan.

Cons
1. Softphones are known for wearing down your battery on your cell, so have an extra battery available, or your charger. Make sure you can completely disable your softphone so it will not drain your battery when you are not using it. Check out the reviews for various softphones. Some of the free ones are not easy to disable and can kill your battery quickly.

2. Do not completely rely on your 3G or 4G data to make calls on your softphone. Always try and use a WiFi hotspot for reliable bandwidth. Voice is very susceptible to packet loss. Slow or inconsistent data speeds will present you with delayed or choppy voice or no voice at all. I have made calls while driving around in Sarasota utilizing 4G on my Metro PCS plan, and my calls did stay up, but the call quality is not quite as good as a normal cell call, and there are times when I had a little delay causing me to talk over the other person.

Summary
Softphones on your cell phone allows you to stay connected to your business VoIP system while traveling. For those sitting in an airport this can be very helpful for conducting business before and after flights. Your softphone gives you superior integration with your business and you will enjoy some of the benefits of your VoIP PBX while you travel. As far as recommendations go, I can say personally that I have Sipdroid on my LG-MS840 Android smartphone and it works pretty good. It was easy to install and setup and works well on WiFi and I can make calls on 4G while driving, with occasional quality issues. When you are not using the app, make sure to go into your settings and turn off the 3G feature so you can use your cell to make normal calls Some apps are easier to navigate than others so be sure to try a few to see which works best for you. There are a variety of free and paid softphones out there such as Counterpath, Zoiper and Sipdroid to name a few. Have fun with your new softphone!

Saving Money With SIP Redundancy

In today's market nothing is more important than a company's ability to communicate. There are various ways for businesses to build disaster recovery into their communications platform. One of the most overlooked methods is not an expensive proposal, and in fact can put money back into your pocket every month! For those businesses who have moved into the VoIP era, their premise based VoIP system can utilize multiple trunking types and multiple service providers to prevent business interruption by the loss of communications.

The SIP service provider market has been growing exponentially over the past few years. It is
an excellent way to provide redundancy for your business as well as save you money every month. Many businesses are still running on POTS (traditional) lines, which can cost over 50 dollars per line, per month. A SIP line which runs over your internet into your VoIP system can cut this cost in half per line, and also provide you with competitive long distance plans. Many companies have gone completely to SIP trunking for this reason. There can be a benefit to having a combination of trunking. This a blind spot for those who have chosen to subscribe to a hosted cloud solution. When the internet goes down, your business will experience catastrophic business disruption. Even if your hosted provider can set up call forwarding to mobile phones or voice mail, it is still a major disruption to your business continuity. Not so with a premise based VoIP solution that has combined trunking. With combined trunking, an Internet outage forwards calls to your traditional phone lines automatically with no disruption in service. The same thing if your analogue lines should fail, the SIP service is available for all calls. In most cases, using the combined provider scenario actually reduces phone costs. What could be better; disaster recovery, business continuity and reduced telecom expenses?

To improve business, rather than discarding all of your old traditional phone lines, you can choose to keep some of them, and replace some of them with SIP trunking. Premised based VoIP systems such as the IPitomy allows you to easily set up outgoing and incoming routes based on your diversified trunking configuration. For example, your long distance may route out on your SIP trunks, while your main number may remain on your POTS lines. You can build priorities on your trunking allowing you to fail over to another in case one provider fails. This can also work with companies who have a PRI. It can be combined with SIP trunking to add additional redundancy to your system. If the internet goes down, you would still be able to fail over to your POTS lines or PRI. If your POTS service or PRI service fails, you can fail over to your SIP trunks, which operate over your internet provider.

Being creative with your premise based VoIP system trunking is not only beneficial to keeping your communications alive in times of outages, but it can also put real dollars back into your pocket every month. Examine your phone and internet bill and then implement a plan that will integrate SIP trunking into your premised based VoIP communications platform, so that you can have the best of both worlds; disaster recovery and monthly savings!

Matthew J. Bellisario 2013