Should I take Voice Lessons to improve my Phone Effectiveness?

Pretty elaborate. Ultimately unnecessary, in my opinion.

The fact that you're aware of where you are starting out is the important thing. Keep working with what you've got--the key is to make the calls, not worry about "fancying them up".

I have met / seen / worked with people that had
a stutter. speech impediments, thick accents.

They all made money using the phone.

I don't particularly have a good voice. I have learned to control it a bit over the years.
But ... I don't really need to in order to sell.

I do it more for vanity purposes. I also spent 9 months on the radio 4 times a week.
In that position, your voice DOES count. In sales, not so much.

To hammer this point home i will tell you, that my frenimy and i would
pick cartoon characters out of a hat, THAT is the voice we had to use
the entire pitch. and yes we sold.

That might sound a bit childish.. and it was... but i learned a lot from that.

I also lost a bet once .. and had to pitch an entire week with a really bad stutter.
I made a tad more then my average.

again. the way you sound means nothing.

It is what and HOW you say it. even if you sound like Elmer Fudd

Also. have you ever met some one you thought was just plain stupid?
Me too.
They also made money on the phone... they just stuck to the script.

In this game, in order to survive you don't have to ...
be good, look good, sound good, you just have to do it.

Also, you sound like you want to go from learning... to awesome.
That does not come from voice lessons ... that only comes from experience.

Hi Delta 223,

It's really about getting on and making a few hundred calls and finding your groove. After 45 calls or so you will find that you are connecting better with people when you do this or that... and every 50 calls or so you will make another distinction till you are mastering your approach.

It's really about getting on and what I call "banging it out".

Like Ken said , I have managed telemarketers who stuttered and all kinds of stuff... and they sold all day long, its about finding out what level people connect with YOU on... that only happens from alot of dialing.

There really are a few techniques that help, such as "dont make statements and inflect with a question mark at the end of them....", but its mostly about finding the part of your own personality that people connect with and capitalizing on that.

To do that you just have to get on and bang it out... I have had alot of telemarketers that , at the end of training they didnt feel rerdy to hit the phones yet... but i knew we were at that time that eventually comes for all "Time to bang it out". Within a couple of hundred calls you will smooth out and work out all of your kinks.

You may not learn to fix a stutter, but you learn to WORK with your stutter. That only comes by "working" with it!

Almost everything is about the dialing, and about the doing it, and getting momentum.

Here is the deal, if you are authoritative, then 10% of the people will connect to you, but the guys who respond to softies wont... THEY NEVER WILL.

If you are a softie, then 10% of the people will connect with you, but the guys who only respond to authority wont... THEY NEVER WILL.

But SOME personality type out there (a percentage) responds to YOU, and you have to learn to recognize when you are talking to one, and capitalize.

Your job is to find the percentage of people who connect with what you offer. In 100% there is a percentage that will connect to you and your style... but you only learn to recognize that by dialing.

This is interesting to me because I have often thought that it's not that we dont create opportunities to capitalize on, its that we fail to RECOGNIZE them.

When I monitor a telemarketer, I hear all kinds of people they let go that they could have capitalized on.

Well, the longer you are on the phone, the easier you will find what it is about you that people connect to, and learn to capitalize on it. Its not that there will be any more opportunities, and its not that they dont exist ALREADY, it's that you will begin to RECOGNIZE those opportunities to capitalize.

You begin to develop a keen sense of when you are onto something.

The longer you are on the phone you will develop a more keen sense of when someone is connecting to you, and its not that you get better at capitalizing (which you do), but alot of it is that you see more opportunities to do it than you used to, and you recognize it more.

-John

Ps. Ken

Im ashamed to tell you some of the stupid voices I took on on the phone, just to be cocky... you would lose any respect you have for me...lol...It becomes too easy...

This is why I think phone people are sharper in some areas than the average Joe, we learn alot of things that "in theory" wouldnt make sense, because we deal with so many hundreds of personalities.

Okay, I hate to say this, but one time I acted like I was a robot for an entire week. Because my manager was making me read a script VERABTIM, and I thought "if you want a robot, I will give you what you want", and people thought I had a mental disability... they were buying like crazy, so just to make my co workers laugh I kept it up for a week, till I began to worry about myself, then I went back to normal. I would do it loud and on purpose.

Hi- I -Am -John- And- I - Am - Glad- To Meet- You.

How- Are -You- Do -ing- To- Day?

That - Is - Nice

The - Reason - I- Am- Calling - Is- That-

I got more and more "stupid" as I went along...because it was working and I was trying not to get sales on purpose.

My Friend Robert and I used to get bored, and exchange headphones with each other mid conversation, trading customers... just to see if it would go over the customers head... Or some person would be going off and he would say "You gotta hear this", and hand me his headset... and I would listen and laugh then start talking to the person when they paused till they started talking again, and hand it back...

Didnt hinder sales at all.

I wasnt ALWAYS that way...but I had my times on frustrated clock watching days...

People dont realize the level you can get to with this. It's all about dialing alot. That would be hard to fathom if you havent spent forty hour weeks in a set of headphones for months on end.

It' really "there for you" from week ONE, but you just dont realize it, you tend to think you have to take yourself too seriously.

After awhile calling is just like working on a production line, and you can do it in your sleep, half hungover, and "NO", web design is no different than anything else...its about repetition and learning your pitch and your numbers.

The value of that "production factory" thinking, is that you make more sales.

I use to manage telemarketers who sold websites all day long while playing game boy or watching football on a screen we kept in the corner during football season.

The deal was "Production goes down, the TV goes off".

As a matter of fact, (as far as thinking "circumstances must be perfect...") usually you are surrounded by LOUD people all pitching just like you....the first hurdle is learning to do it when you know your customers can hear other people in the back ground, saying the exact same thing... You are trying to talk over other telemarketers... Thinking that its going to be an issue for your customers BUT IT ISNT!

Thats all in your mind.

MOST of peoples telemarketing hangups are theoretical, and all in their mind. There is a vast difference between what makes sense to you and how it actually works. You cant intellectualize it, you just have to DO it.

In my mind, if I talked like a robot no one would buy... (makes sense right?) but that wasnt how it worked. There are a percentage of people who will respond to that because they think you are too dumb to lie.

It really is about just doing it and dialing, all these little things dont matter as much as most people think. It's about MOMENTUM.

Yes lessons definitely help. But not in the way you're thinking (this is just my own opinion).

I use to do toastmasters meetings years ago and it helped me conquer my fear of public speaking. I think some people suck over the phone, not because of their voices, but because of social anxiety. Which many people suffer from. Anxiety makes people "suck". Let me rephrase, anxiety convinces people that they suck at things. =]

The phone is just a lesser form of social anxiety imo.

So if you conquer one of your bigger social fears, all social tasks will become easier. I think what it does is make you more socially confident overall, and that tends to help more than anything I can think of. Or you can practice over the phone like JD recommended. Anything will help, as long as its something you don't want to do.

Which brings me back to the point of lessons. If you want to do it, it probably won't help. To me, its just mental masturbation to help prolong the inevitable. Not to mention, you listen to good speakers everyday if your a normal human being and leave the house. So the key is to model those types of people, in real world scenarios.

Thats my best advice.

Interesting perspectives. Jordan Belfort says tonality is critical and communicates a ton more than words alone

If you have THAT much hesitation, and you have enough money to hire a speech trainer, then I would just hire a telemarketer instead.

And yes, as helisel said, some of us have trained hundreds of telemarketers live in call centers...it IS more than just an "interesting perspective"...

You guys are reading into this too much. Making calls is not an issue for me (I make calls daily); this is meant as a supplement.

Anyways I'll try out a couple lessons to see what can be gained from voice-specific coaching.

But when Jordan Belfort speaks of tonality, he's talking about modulating your voice to add a dimension to what's being said, i.e., you lower your voice to a hush when saying, "just between you and me..." It could be said the tonality is the message. On the phone, your voice is a character. It plays a part. It paints a picture of you in the receiver's mind.

The OP is speaking about getting away from a flat, monotone speaking voice. That's a somewhat different topic than tonality. I've been on the receiving end of weak voiced callers mumbling monotonously through their script. If you sound like you're sleepwalking, if your prospect is saying, "What? What?" then that probably loses an audience fast IMO.

That's uncalled for and a straight personal attack. While there were some great responses earlier in this thread, I also didn't feel some of the responses were on point so I decided it was worth a few bucks to test the waters. This thread was NOT about motivation, it was about the value of working on voice specifically.

If your attitude is that the forum's word is god then feel free to avoid my future threads.

Trial by fire, I'd say.

You learn how to BE a telemarketer by DOING telemarketing.

It's like learning how to sell.

You can read books all day about turn arounds, trial closing, question-based selling.

But you're going to have to walk in and talk to somebody to really internalize what sales is REALLY all about.

Same with making the calls.

Do 200 this week and tell us how well your voice has improved.

You wouldnt be the first wanna be telemarketer who didnt think I was on point when I was, but go ahead and dont take expert advice. Thats wise. Learn telemarketing from a public speaker instead of a telemarketing pro who has trained every personality type imaginable... one of those types, BTW, is classified as "untrainable".

Lol...Me and Ken, not on point about telemarketers?

ROTFLMAO!

You go on with your brilliant self.

I didn't single anyone out but it doesn't matter, I don't get into these long-winded personal attacks

You're right. This isnt worth it.