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Close More Sales: Use pre-printed telephone inquiry pads

by Roger Brooksbank

Picture the scene. It is late Friday afternoon and the telephone rings. A prospective customer is telephoning for further information about your product or service. Let’s say the caller requests that you send them an information-pack. Busy with a multitude of other things to clear up by 5.30 p.m., you hurriedly take the caller’s details and promise you’ll pop the information in the post later on that same afternoon. As soon as you get around to it, however, you immediately realise that you forgot to write down their name (or some other piece of vital contact information). How unprofessional! Yet with the best will in the world, this kind of situation can and does happen all too easily.

One simple solution is to keep a pre-printed telephone inquiry pad next to your office telephone. Get the pads printed with a series of questions to ask, so that you will never again forget to ask all the right questions – not only questions relating to those vital details such as the caller’s name and address, but also any other key questions such as: ‘How did you hear about us?’

There are a number of benefits to using telephone inquiry pads. Quite apart from ensuring that you always come across as highly professional whenever answering the telephone to a new prospective customer, over time it provides a source of information that is crucial to your ability to evaluate the effectiveness of your promotional activities. For example, by analysing the answers given to the question, ‘How did you hear about us?’ you can quickly build up a picture of which promotional methods are working best. As time goes by, you can then compare the effectiveness of one promotional method against another and make more informed decisions about how to maximise the returns from your promotional expenditure.



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