Cold sales calls are annoying at the best of times, but when you’re busy running a business they can actually distract you from making money.

17% of callers to UK businesses are sales calls.

Not only that, they can fill up your messages and risk you losing an important message in a pile of junk.

Or worse they can distract you from the day job quite significantly research says that one unwanted call in your day costs on average 23 mins of time and distraction.

Don’t panic though there are a few ways you can reduce the number of sales calls you get.

And it’s important to find a way to create a barrier between yourself and these unwanted calls so you can carry on with your day without distractions.

Why cold sales calls can be a problem

It would be wrong to say that every unsolicited sales call is unwanted but they often come at an inconvenient time and, sometimes, can be completely irrelevant to your company.

And when you’re dealing with them consistently, these types of calls can easily eat away at your day and prevent you from focussing on value added tasks that actually benefit your business.

Plus, you’ll often find yourself dealing with repeated sales calls over time as you or your business are added to new lists.

How to stop unwanted sales calls

One way to stop unwanted sales calls is to register your company number with the Corporate Telephone Preference Service.

Once you’ve registered your number it should indicate that your number shouldn’t be included or added to any sales lists – especially those that are often purchased from third parties.

The problem is that even this service is extremely inconsistent.

Even if you’re on the CTPS register, it doesn’t always guarantee you’ll stop receiving unwanted cold calls.

So, what else can you do?

Use a telephone answering service to divert calls and remove you from sales lists

Using a telephone answering service not only means you’ll never miss a call from a lead or customer.

It can also act as a barrier to screen you from calls that only take away your time.

Depending on your preferences,  or what your chosen telephone answering service offers you can choose several different ways of dealing with the sales calls

1. You could ask your telephone answering service to answer the sales calls but not transfer them through, simply send through the messages, still giving you the option whether you ring them back or not. This will reduce wasted time for you, although it would still incur costs if persistent callers keep calling.
2. Your telephone answering service could offer you an amount of calls within the package as a “%” of the total package that are not charged for and still deal with them for you.
3. Alternatively a few telephone answering services still offer you the option of “No sales call charges” where they simply and effectively deal with sales calls free of charge as part of the service, ask them to remove you from the list and don’t charge you for this service as they hard turn back any sales callers. The odd call may slip through where the caller lies blatantly, however with effective questioning a good telephone answering service will remove 95+% of sales calls simply and deter folks from calling again.

Depending on your preference and what your telephone answering service provider offers you will clearly have good options to reduce wasted time, leaving you to concentrate on your business and educate any nuisance callers.

Improve your business’ telephone answering with Face For Business

At Face For Business we’ve worked with thousands of businesses to help improve their call answering and reduce the time they spend dealing with nuisance sales calls.

With our team of virtual assistants dealing with all or some of your incoming calls, you can focus on your business without worrying that you could miss a new business call.

And we are one of the few telephone answering services that don’t charge for sales calls, it’s all part of the package with us. Our PA’s follow your instructions on sales calls, and if your choice is no sales calls they are extremely adept at turning away unwanted callers and requesting them to not call again.

If you want to know more about our telephone answering services, feel free to contact us and we’ll be able to run through your options.

If you’re interested in telephone answering but aren’t convinced it’s right for your business, then take advantage of our free trial and see the service in action for yourself with no obligation to continue at the end of the trial period.