The Adventures of Michel and Santeena...a tale of Co-op work at Tri-County Copiers Plus - Xerox

Welcome back to our blog! Last week, we learned the basics of making phone calls and improving our cold-calls. We had a special guest come into the office for two days, Shannon Russell.who is a Sales Development Coach for Xerox. She worked directly with us and gave us feedback on how we were doing throughout this introduction to the formal Xerox selling process.

Our first official Xerox training session

Earlier this past week, we both had the chance to work one-on-one with Shannon and as a team and we began creating a script for phone calls. It was revised and revised again until it sounded just right! In order to learn, practice is the best way to do it. We started off making phone calls, taking turns, and receiving feedback from Shannon. She noted that the person on the other side of the phone will react depending on our tone. Once we completed a few phone calls, we went out into specific areas in Windsor with Shannon. The face-to-face cold calls we made were about scheduling meetings with the business decision makers. By this time next week, we will have completed 2 steps of the sales process (initial contact and initial meeting). Both of us have scheduled meetings to complete next week. We hope these meetings lead to potential customers or Market Research Study applicants.

Here are a few rules when it comes to making phone calls:

1. Be prepared - As an advantage, you should write down the phone number, person to talk to and type of business you are calling.
2. Be direct - Get to the point, keep it short and don't waste the other person's time.
3. Be respectful - Make sure your tone of voice is friendly and courteous. The person on the other end can't see your face, therefore, your voice is the only thing they can judge.

The Meetings

With the meetings that we have scheduled for this week, our main goals are to remain professional and potentially look forward to a closing deal. We ultimately want to try and schedule meetings with businesses that are located nearby each other so that we don't waste time. These meetings are to be completed in 15-20 minutes. We must respect both parties' time. Understanding the potential customer's needs is apart of this process. We want to start the meetings off by gathering information in regards to their current equipment, satisfaction, ways to help them save money and increase their productivity.

Word of the Week 

Enthusiasm!

Cold calling on the phone is a whole different experience than in person. In a regular cold call, we can express yourself through our body language and the tone of our voice. Cold calling on the phone is another challenge, since you are only equipped with your voice to persuade organization to schedule a meeting. A few courses in school we completed, such as,  a mandatory Communications class, taught us everything we need to know about tone and language. Shannon taught us everything we need to know in 2 short days. The minute you pick up the phone and start speaking to someone, your body language does not exist. The tone of our voices plays a key role in presenting our message and projecting ourselves over the phone. The key to accomplishing this  is to have enthusiasm while speaking over the  phone, in order to show that you are interested in the person and conversation. Enthusiasm is the tool  that allows us to come across as a telemarketer who enjoys their job. After practicing and memorizing the script that we created for phone calls, we began to read it out loud and as enthusiastically as we could. One exercise that we did was to recite the script on the phone, while we were both standing up. This exercise allowed us to project our voices more clearly, and most importantly more enthusiastically.

Vertical Attack Packs

Recently we were introduced to the Vertical Market Attack Packs. Xerox knows that each type of business is different and then will have different challenges that they face on a daily basis. As a result, a customized marketing program has been put together to work directly with these different types of organizations. The seven different types organizations that are targeted by the attack packs include Accounting, Religion, Insurance, Financial, Graphic Communications, Real Estate, and Legal. The goal of this strategy is to identify which of the challenges each organization may be facing and to let them know that they are not alone - other organizations might be facing the same challenges. The attack packs contain solutions that Xerox products will provide to support the organizations in achieving their objectives. Xerox is able to target specific industries where they'd like to grow their market share and this provides them with the ability to grow and maintain relationships with those types of organizations. The products and solutions that Xerox offers are vast, and putting them in perspective for a specific organization can help understand the benefits they provide.

Thanks for reading our blog!
Michel & Santeena