Much of the success in outbound telesales is in the head of the agent or salesperson. Confidence, enjoyment, camaraderie, recognition and reward all factor in the agent and the campaign achieving set targets.

If you are a team leader, part of your role is to maintain a positive demeanour, lift the chins of worried agents and manage a constructive work environment.

Here are some suggestions to help get more out from your outbound or telemarketing operation.

1.  Recognition

It’s amazing how far simply showing your appreciation for someone’s work goes.  This could be as simple as thanking them at the end of the day to acknowledging their performance in front of the team at pre-shift brief.  

It’s likely that you have the usual suspects at the top of the sales ladder most days so look for those who have improved significantly and give them accolades.

2.  Career Plan

It’s possible some of your team perceive their current role as a dead end job and haven’t made a connection with how it impacts on their future career.  In my experience, getting staff to understand the transferable skills they are developing is critical to getting their buy-in to the role and significantly lifts performance.  This can be particularly powerful if you have a “lazy larrikin” who leads the others astray- turn their performance around and you’ll see behaviour change in the others- and they’ll still bring the fun too!

3.  Personal Ownership

When it comes to telemarketing, the more your people own the role, the more likely they will be successful.  This goes beyond target achievement but understanding what their personal contribution brings to the business.  Get your team involved in helping each other, through coaching, listening to each others calls, sharing ideas, and talk about what you achieved as a team.  

Wherever possible and reasonable get your people involved in shaping the business.  Let them know what’s going on; if you keep them in the dark they’ll feel like a minion, but if they understand a situation they are often empowered to do something about it.  Thus listening to your people is paramount, finding out what they need and want and what ideas they have for improving the business e.g. training, office look, and what else is going to make life comfortable so they can perform effectively.  Remember that an idea might sound bad to you but the team might love it and it’s all about them! 

4.  Coaching

If coaching isn’t part of your team culture then it needs to be.  In my first telemarketing role a simple tip in a 10 minute coaching session quadrupled my sales.  There’s a number of ways to analyse calls - remote, side by side and recordings.

A good contact centre system will allow you to listen to calls without your salesperson being any the wiser.  You will be able to get an accurate perspective of their calls and feedback accordingly.  

Coaching side by side means you can give tips through the call and even help close sales.  This is particularly powerful because it shows the salesperson that your ideas really work.

If your system allows call recording, share some of the successful sales calls with the team.  When they understand the process behind a sale and see it working they are far more likely to adopt the technique. Call recordings also allow agents to self-analyse and coach themselves.

5.  Leverage technology

Technology can create more agent selling-time which means more sales in the same timeframe. A dialler is a technology that seems to have a black or white reputation; it's either loved or hated. Typically there are two reasons why you’re not using a dialler already:

1. Diallers are expensive and complicated
2. Diallers are for “sweat shops”

Firstly, it is possible to have your dialler on-demand, i.e. no capex, and pay as you go so you don’t pay more than you need.  These systems are simple to manage and it is likely that you current IT resource can provide all the support needed.

As far as the sweat goes, modern diallers allow the agent to control when they terminate calls and when they take a break- after all, we’re all adults.  The advantage for the salesperson is that they spend as much as double the time engaged with prospects, therefore selling, therefore putting more commission in their pockets.  Customers report that typically an agent dialling manually will spend 20 minutes in an hour talking to customers, versus 40 minutes upwards on the dialler.  And they see their sales grow proportionally.

6.  Incentives non-monetary

You don’t always have to have a huge prize - sometimes something with novelty value from the $2 shop will suffice.  Or even a daily trophy - perhaps the person who wins the trophy most over a prescribed timeframe gets a day in lieu.

Try letting people go home as soon as they have achieved 10 percent over target for the day. 

An unexpected free afternoon can work wonders for the psyche!

By Jason Hime

Jason is Alliances Director at IPscape and runs the alliance program group who assist and support alliance partners in pre-sales, marketing, training and sales.