Do you have a successful telemarketing function?

Do you have a successful telemarketing function?

?Telemarketing is renowned for its high turnover of staff and younger or less experienced personal. Does that mean that a telemarketing team has to underperform or be undervalued within a company? In this blog, I am going to outline how I have always managed to be a top performer in any of the B2B telemarketing team I’ve worked in and how I have run successful telemarketing functions during my career. I will also outline errors I have personally made and those witnessed first-hand. After all, none of us are the finished article!

Structure and planning

One of the most fundamental tools of a telesales person is a diary. Now a lot of you may view this as an “old school” way of working, with newer tools available to you such as outlook or a CRM like Salesforce or Dynamics. I believe that utilising a manual diary is extremely undervalued in the modern age and how effective physically writing in your actions for the week can be. Things as simple as what time you plan on starting calling prospects and when you are going to grab your morning coffee or lunch. Structure sets out a plan for the day, it installs you with confidence when you walk into the office in the morning. It means you can open your diary up and completely understand what actions you have for that day, when they are due and what needs to be focused on. The time is then focused on doing and not thinking.

Without the use of a diary, it is easy to go astray for the day, gambling on what actions are priority, deadlines can be missed and ultimately not having a clear view of what’s needed to be achieved. I was never a fan of using a diary in the early days of my career, I used to tell my line manager it was a waste of time and that I was competent enough to perform to a high standard on my own accord. A few years later, a less arrogant outlook on life and some after humble pie and I couldn’t look back. Its been and is to this day a key component in my success and helping me move up the food chain in my first sales role. I was miles more productive than my peers who laughed and sniggered as I planned for my week come COB on a Friday. My view on this was simple. If you cant put time into organising yourself and your business, how would I ever expect to achieve my goal of running my own business one day?

?Atmosphere/Environment

To this day, for me this is the most important part of any telemarketing function. Telesales should be known as the engine room, it should be the loudest, most enthusiastic room in the building. When you walk out onto that floor you want to be installed with confidence just from the sheer X factor the room has.

How do you create a positive environment? Easy, incentivise and reward but be disciplined. Incentives don’t always need to be trips away and extravagant cash prizes, they should be activities that get the team on their feet, thinking or laughing at one and other, here’s an example of some incentives I have done recently… Filled the room with 100 balloons, each balloon as a note inside with either a prize or forfeit, for example ‘’Make the WHOLE team a hot drink of their choice’’ or ‘’Early finish’’. The second image was a team incentive, we picked names out of a hat and partnered into three different teams, the teams chose their names and we got some t-shirts made from a local company with the teams faces on them. The team who booked the most vetted appointments by the end of that week were rewarded with an evening out on the business.

?Little things in the office also help, having a bell or dong to ring when a sale or appointment is made, have everyone clap and celebrate, make the moment special because at first it’ll seem cringeworthy but eventually those who mock it will feel left out when those who are performing are receiving praise.

Decorate the office with inspirational quotes specific to your business, put imagery up of the team, we have a polaroid camera which we take pictures of key events/milestones and stick them up around the office. It’s little things like this that create a more positive working environment and make it easier for the team to celebrate each other’s success.

?Training & Development

It’s nothing new to have a team of individuals who think they’re the finished article, the reality is none of us ever will be. Not unless we’re happy to stay as we are with no improvements. As a leader or business owner, it’s pivotal that you highlight the importance of self-development. My business Endeva have a catch up once every 6 weeks to discuss what we’ve done during this time frame to better ourselves as individuals. This could be through reading articles, watching YouTube videos, listening to Audibles or attending events/seminars. We allocate 5-10 minutes per individual to share what they’ve learned and end the segment with a Q&A. You soon find out who’s serious about bettering themselves, these are the people you want in your team.

It’s also important that those same individuals see the business investing in them too, after all if you can’t invest in your people, how can you expect them to invest into themselves when they know no better. Simple things such as regular 121’s, reviews or side by side partnering for a day can go a long way in helping those individuals see you care about them and their development. You may also pick up on a thing or two whilst you’re there too!

Stop accepting sh*t

We’ve all had days where we’re behind our number and it’s easy to drop out standards, maybe your SDR didn’t qualify a meeting properly, but the prospect agreed to meet regardless. It’s easy on those days to turn a blind eye because you need the result. By allowing this, you’re setting a stool for yourself as a leader that accepts poor quality appointments or half arsed sales proposals. Upon induction, it needs to be made very clear from day one of what is expected of your SDR and that nothing less will be tolerated. This won’t be installed overnight so consistent training and revision MUST be completed as bad habits will creep in.

An example of a previous employment would be a saying we had ‘’Throw it at the wall and see if it sticks’’ this term would be used if the appointment set by one of our SDR’s wasn’t fully qualified or ‘’ropey’’ as we liked to say. It created a culture of where it was acceptable to generate these types of appointments and was made a joke when it happened. Upon my very first promotion to telemarketing team leader for this business, it was one of the first things I changed. I created a validation list with a certain criteria which must be met before being able to process an appointment. Over the years this criteria has evolved, with the help of peers, colleagues in other departments and other successful leaders I’ve found a formula which works for me and my team.

Now ALL my teams approach to new business is about generating qualitive results, I would prefer them to generate me 10 HIGH, quality appointments, rather than 100 POOR quality appointments. The ROI on those 10 will far exceed those 100. You may think we’re missing out on opportunities for having this rigorous process in place but we want to be renowned as the BEST in our industry, not the company who can generate high volumes but give a poor ROI, there’s enough of those companies around already…

Pay your team what they’re worth

Unfortunately, in the past I have been at fault for losing key members of my teams at the time for not rewarding their performance enough or ignoring requests for pay rises. As a young leader with a finance driven owner, I was taught that the business must come first and that providing a telemarketing department the opportunity the earn OTE similar to more senior sales roles like a BDM or account manager would be a bad idea. Although I agree the overall business is vital, there needs to be a balance. I soon learned that it was not worth losing my best team members of a couple hundred pound a month, I lost more money in investing my time to re-recruit, re-train and monitor new team members.

Set your team clear objectives that will result in them earning a better OTE or basic salary. Without progression, there is no incentive for your team/department to go above and behind, after all they are not you, they aren’t business owners yet.

Summary

Invest in your people, stop treating telemarketing as bottom of the pile because without their hard work your BDMs have no appointments to go to, your account managers have no customers to manage, they’re more important than you think… They’re the engine room!

If you want advice or support on how to get more from your in house team or you want to look at how Endeva can create you more opportunities, please get in touch.

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