A person we can just seemingly never avoid when we make a call to a prospect company is the gatekeeper. Since we’re trying to get in touch with our target decision makers, we can almost never escape the fact that the first person we’ll be talking to will be their secretaries/gatekeepers. If you have a good team of telemarketers working for you, then you won’t really have a problem with getting through. But what happens when your team is inexperienced and fresh off the block? Well, you can’t expect to get the best results from a department filled with newbies. And that is the reason why a lot of people choose to hire B2B telemarketing firms: expertise, experience, and better penetration rates.
However, the question still remains: how do you get past gatekeepers? Well, to be honest, there is no technology that can help you out in this department. In fact, the best way to get through a gatekeeper is to just be human. Don’t get me wrong; us telemarketers don’t have some magic trick we hide under a top hat. It’s really all about being…
… Polite – When performing sales/business related calls, the one thing you must never forget to practice is to be polite with no matter who you are talking to. Even if it isn’t the decision maker your talking to, that doesn’t make it an excuse as to why you couldn’t be more watchful with your words and dialogue. Who do you think you’re talking to? Is it a gatekeeper? Don’t forget that these people are the ones you need to get past so essentially you will need to be quite curt with these members of staff if you really want to get through them. It’s not about sucking up to them so that they put you through, no, it’s more about the initial impression they have of you which will in turn reflect upon your company. Aside from that, how would you feel if you were the one picking up the phone and you kind of knew that the other person on the line only wanted to get through to your CEO and was not practicing professional behavior in speaking to you? You wouldn’t want to connect that person, would you? So don’t ever forget to be polite! Not just for your sake, but for the good name of your company as well.
… Professional – “We are a professional group of telemarketers” is a common phrase among telemarketing firms; it’s one that is most used and is usually part of how they market themselves. Then entirety of it is not a lie, it’s just that you can’t expect ALL of their members of staff to be actually professional when it comes to their duties. This point pretty much relates to the first point we gave. If you want to get past a gatekeeper, you’re going to have to be professional in your approach. Aside from being polite, being and sounding professional gives off an impression that the purpose of your call has some higher form of significance, one that needs to be attended to by their respective decision makers and C-level executives. Want to get through to your target DM? Be professional!
… Composed – The one thing that you should always be when performing lead generation and teleprospecting tasks is cool and collected. If you lose your temper, then that will surely reflect not just upon you but your entire company as well. Professionalism and politeness would all be for nothing if a telemarketer couldn’t help but blow up in a prospect’s ear when they’re having a bad day or have their offer rejected. Much more than to a decision maker, what do you think this could mean if it happened to a telemarketer talking to a gatekeeper? If I was a GK and I someone didn’t keep themselves in check while talking to me, I’d never put them through, much more when they call back.
Getting through a gatekeeper isn’t some sort of secret art. It’s all about being human and knowing how to respect who you are talking to no matter who they may be.
