Posts Tagged ‘telesales team management’

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Get all your sales quotes out within 48 hours

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Get all your sales quotes out within 48 hours. It is important to get into this vitally important habit. Quite simply it will get you more business. What other incentive could you need?!

I’m frequently amazed that clients do not have standards around this issue. They will often say that their telesales team members aren’t quick enough at following up proposals that they’ve sent out. Now, come on. Surely this should be an imposed standard, a minimum. Enforced if necessary. Really if you can’t get your team to follow these up quickly, you might as well pack up and go home.

Business is competitive

Beat your competitors - get your quotes in fast

Ensuring you have the 48 hour rule ensures you work to a standard. It keeps things moving. Momentum is good, especially in selling.

You will also find that frequently getting the quote or sales proposal out quickly will impress them. It will be fresher in their mind when they’re reading it, and if you get it there quicker than the competition, it might just help you get the order.

There are some other key reasons I find that help too. Writing and sending your sales proposal quickly gets it done while it’s freshest in your mind too. So you will probably be able to do it faster. It also gets it out of the way. You can clear the decks mentally. So if other things come up such as illness, meetings, work crises, you won’t have to go back to it.

And never ever leave it to do until after a holiday. But then you’d never do that anyway would you?

The lesson I’ve learned

Apart from all the above, I’ve never lost an order because the client thought I’d sent it in too quickly. However I have won many for this reason. Even within the last few months, an industrial distributor in Birmingham commissioned me to run a training programme for them as they got tired of waiting for the other 2 competitive quotes. Suits me and it’s simple.

Templates

To help you write and send out sales quotes and proposals quicker, have templates for proposals. Have a master template that you just edit.  This is much more effective than recreating the wheel each time. It will also save you time. Time you can use to go out on more sales calls selling.

 

 

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Posted in business development, business growth, Field sales training, sales development training, Sales tips, Selling advice, small business marketing, telemarketing, Telemarketing management, telesales, telesales team management, Telesales tips | No Comments »

Your key responsibilities as a telesales or customer service team manager

Friday, April 1st, 2011

Key responsibilities as a telesales or customer service team manager are many. We’re not saying for one minute that if you apply these key however many principles your life will be wonderful…… HOWEVER

Telemarketing telesales customer service management

Telemarketing and customer service management tips

There are some key bits of advice and tips that come up time and time again.

  1. Be prepared to lead from the front (set a good example with behaviour and attitude) Be someone they can look up to.
  2. Set targets with your team. Admittedly easier with a telesales or telemarketing team than customer service but important nonetheless. Everyone needs to know what they’re supposed to be doing and how much of it they’re supposed to be doing.
  3. Give each of the members of your time (specific one to one time) and learn about them as individuals. By understanding them, and their goals and personality, you’ll find it so much easier to manage and motivate them. And they’ll respect you more for the time and attention you give them. It’s exactly the same with children for that matter!
  4. Adopt a calm attitude. Don’t allow little things to make you anxious (regardless of how you feel inside!) A calm leader will find their team respond better and learn to be calm themselves.
  5. Be positive. It is always easier to be negative and point out all that’s wrong with everyone else and with the company. Once you’re perfect – then you’ve got the right, but not until …..
  6. Learn. Always be looking for opportunities to learn. Watch what other people do : other managers, other human beings in certain situations, from books, from television, from Mary Portas, from Sir Alan Sugar. Opportunities for personal growth are all around – all the time.

We’ll put together some more ideas on this in the not too distant, but for the time being use some of these 6 principles. And if you have any ideas of your own : about the key responsibilities of a telesales or telemarketing or customer service manager, let us know at info@tomarket.co.uk/ We may include your ideas and if we do, we’ll credit you as the source.

To Market runs training courses for supervisors, team leaders and managers in telephone sales, telemarketing and customer service across the East Midlands, Peterborough, Cambridge, Leicester, Northampton, Derby, Nottingham, Kettering, Corby, Wellingborough, Coventry, Birmingham, Lichfield, Solihull, Peterborough, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, Milton Keynes, Lincoln, East Midlands as well as wider parts of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire

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Posted in benchmarking customer service teams, benchmarking telesales teams, Customer service management, Customer Service tips, Personal development, Telemarketing management, telesales team management | No Comments »

How to be an effective phone team manager – some free tips

Monday, November 1st, 2010

How to be an effective phone team manager – some free tips. Some great ideas came out of a recent course we ran for a team of telephone team managers in Birmingham.  We run courses for telesales, telemarketing, customer service and internal sales team managers, supervisors and team leaders and we enjoy seeing buckletloads of good ideas coming out.

Customer Service and Telesales Managers training

Customer Service and Telesales Managers training

On this course we ran a session on what makes an effective team manager. The question we ask the group is ; What personal characteristics do YOU think you need to be an effective phone team manager. We will write about some of the other ideas that came out of this course in future articles, but for the time being we thought you might be interested in the following top 10 tips ;

  1. Be proactive
  2. Be approachable (friendly & open)
  3. A good listener
  4. Decisive
  5. Positive
  6. Respect (need to earn it and show it)
  7. Courtesy
  8. Able to give constructive feedback
  9. Flexible
  10. Dynamic

If you are a telephone team manager, supervisor or team leader in charge of a telesales, customer service, telemarketing or internal sales team, we’d be interested to hear about 3 characteristics you think you need. We’re interested in building a list that anyone can read and benefit from. Send your ideas to info@tomarket.co.uk

And remember our customer service management, telesales team leader and telemarketing supervisor courses run in Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Northampton, Nottingham, Derby, Melton Mowbray, Daventry, Wellingborough, Ketttering, Corby, Loughborough, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Peterborough, Newmarket, Rugby, Solihull and Lichfield. You can either join other phone team managers, or alternatively we can provide telephone team manager training on site at your offices.

Our next public course – the art of running a successful telephone team is running in the East Midlands on  Wednesday 24th & Thursday 25th November 2010 which isn’t far off now. Follow this link for more details http://www.tomarket.co.uk/courses.php We are taking bookings now!!

To Market runs training courses for telephone sales, telemarketing and customer service managers, supervisors and team leaders across the East Midlands, Peterborough, Cambridge, Leicester, Northampton, Derby, Nottingham, Kettering, Corby, Wellingborough, Coventry, Birmingham, Lichfield, Solihull, Peterborough, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, Milton Keynes, Lincoln, East Midlands as well as wider parts of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

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Posted in Customer service management, Customer Service tips, Forthcoming courses, Telemarketing management, telesales team management | 1 Comment »

The magic ingredient that will help you get on in life – ENTHUSIASM

Friday, June 25th, 2010

The magic ingredient that will help you get on in life is ENTHUSIASM and it’s close associate ENERGY.

I often sit there watching TV at night wondering what makes those who offer us advice on all manner of aspects of our life, celebrities. Is it that they’re the most highly qualified in their field? Not usually. Are they the brightest or most experienced? Again not necessarily. But what they all possess in common is enthusiasm for what they do and energy around doing it. This is especially true of the TV chefs. I always think people like Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein really love what they do. The cynic may say, well yes “if I was earning what they were earning, I could be enthusiastic too.” But of course it doesn’t happen that way round does it? You have to put the effort in first and loads of energy, then the rewards will come. Ok, that’s the moralising over!

Enthusiasm and energy are what will get you waht you want from life

Enthusiasm and energy are what will get you what you want from life

If you’re selling your business to others as a business owner or director or you’re employed in a sales position, it is really important – vital in fact that you’re communication  reflects this positive attitude and strong belief.

Those of you who have already been on one of courses and done the work on ‘Expression, Energy and Emphasis’ will know that you can tell 40+ things about a total stranger from the opening 6 words of a telephone conversation! Remember grey, red, pink & fluffy and the brown man ?!

The energy in your voice will say more about you than you will ever realise. Make it part of your power of attraction. Jamie does.

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Posted in communication skills, Independent audit of telemarketing team, sales development training, Selling advice, telemarketing, Telemarketing management, telephone techniques, telesales, telesales team management, Telesales tips | No Comments »

Make sure your telesales team is targeted on what you are targeted on

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Make sure your telesales team is targeted on what you are targeted on. Obvious advice in theory, but not every organisation with a telesales or telemarketing team follows this. It can be easy to dismiss the need to do this on the basis that the management looks after the commercial elements for instance.  We have worked with companies in the past who only target their team on sales and then have to manage a large volume of unprofitable orders.

Make sure your telesales targets reflect corporate goals

Make sure your telesales targets reflect corporate goals

We’re just starting a programme with a client just outside Birmingham who has a large team selling items business to business over the phone. We carried out a team audit with them recently (more details of team audits at www.tomarket.co.uk/teamaudits.php.)

The team actively promotes the fact that the goods are free on approval and “if you don’t want them, we’ll simply pick them up from you free of charge.” Also phrases such as “no obligation” appear frequently. Clearly this strategy is intended to get as many products out as possible which is great – but there is no sense of them being selective at all with who they mail out to. The result is that the company feels that too much of it’s sales activity is unprofitable.

The team is targeted on products sent out. It doesn’t take into account how many products come back.

It is really important that you understand what your business needs and ensure at least some of this is fed through to the telesales or telemarketing team on the front line. It pays to make sure everyone shoulders the responsibility for the overall success of the company. And the danger of keeping any part of  your team in the dark is that first they don’t understand what is important to the organisation they are working for, and worst they may not realise that what they are doing is counterproductive. Furthermore, how can you ever discipline someone for poor performance if they have every reason to believe they’re doing a good job?

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Posted in benchmarking telesales teams, Commission schemes, Independent audit of telemarketing team, sales development training, telemarketing, Telemarketing management, Telesales team assessment, telesales team management, Telesales tips | No Comments »

Hire an interim to support your new telesales manager

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Hire an interim to support your new telesales manager. You may have a new team leader, or a supervisor who you’ve just promoted to run the team for you. This is something they deserve and have worked for, and you want to acknowledge their contribution. However you may also acknowledge (perhaps privately) that they don’t have all the rounded commercial and business skills that will help them become an immediate success. This is a situation we are coming across increasingly at the moment as clients seek to motivate and reward the staff they already have without wishing to commit to management wages and extra salaries.

Help support your telesales or telemarketing team leader

Help support your telesales or telemarketing team leader

You want them to lead the team on a daily basis, but you recognise that they may need some help and assistance setting up good management reporting systems and training. Perhaps they’ve never had to look at key performance indicators before, perhaps they don’t know where to start. Have they ever trained a team ? And what are they like at working with you to set up a good motivational commission scheme ?

Other areas we typically look at include the quality of the database.  What’s the quality like ? Have they had to evaluate it before ? In order to help your team supervisor or team leader make a quick success of their role and in order to help shorten the learning curve, we can work alongside them on an interim basis to help get the systems set up. Once that’s done, we step away and you then manage your team in-house.

Hiring an interim on a fixed number of days per month can give them the support they may need to get things set up without you commiting to the ongoing cost. If this is an idea you’d like to explore further, just drop us an e-mail to info@tomarket.co.uk and we can have a chat.

We can help you with interim telesales or telemarketing management across the West and East Midlands including Leicester, Birmingham, Lichfield, Solihull, Coventry, Derby, Nottingham, Kettering, Corby, Wellingborough, Milton Keynes, Melton Mowbray, Daventry, Northampton, Newmarket and Cambridge

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Posted in benchmarking telesales teams, Independent audit of telemarketing team, interim telesales manager, owner managers directors, Telemarketing management, Telesales team assessment, telesales team management | No Comments »

Create a dynamic atmosphere with your telesales team

Monday, December 21st, 2009

It’s really important you create a dynamic atmosphere within your telesales team. Winning teams look, sound and behave different to other teams. You may believe that the feeling of success and the buzz comes from the success itself. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t encourage the team to produce this energy themselves. This is one common theme with team audits we carry out on teams – where we go and listen in to them for 2 hours while they talk to real customers and prospects on the telephone. http://www.tomarket.co.uk/teamaudits.php for more details of our team audits.

Motivate your telesales / telemarketing team - success brings success

Motivate your telesales / telemarketing team - success brings success

In one report for a Birmingham client in metal manufacturing we wrote “Consider working on some more ‘jazzy’ ideas for making it feel more like a sales office. We could work on this with the team collectively.”

Teams often have whiteboards in the office to record something, but it’s frequently not in real time. One car company we visited in September (2009) had a whiteboard divided up into sections with each persons name down the left. It was titled Targets 2008 ! and there were no numbers anywhere on the board ! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear ! Instead use your whiteboard to monitor activity and give feedback to your team.

Having a series of KPIs (key performance indicators) is another important part of this. Every member of the team needs to know how they’re doing against what the company requires. Again in realtime, not just at the end of the month. How can a person be motivated if they don’t know how they’re doing ?

There are many more ideas about motivating your team through creating the right atmosphere, and if you think your team would benefit from some more structured working and an injection of energy, give us a call today on 01858 461148. We can kick some ideas around.

To Market runs team audits with companies across the company and we can agree the fee with you in advance. We work across the East and West Midlands including Birmingham, Lichfield, Solihull, Leicester, Northampton, Derby, Nottingham, Cambridge, Newmarket,Wellingborough, Kettering, Corby, Warwick, Leamington Spa, Huntingdon, St Ives as well as wide parts of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, and Suffolk.

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Posted in benchmarking telesales teams, Independent audit of telemarketing team, owner managers directors, Telemarketing management, Telesales team assessment, telesales team management | No Comments »

Get advice on why not to hire a new telesales manager

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Get advice on why not to hire a new telesales manager. If you are currently looking to build up the telesales or telemarketing function in your company, you may be looking at recruiting a new telesales manager. Alternatively you may be looking to recruit one who has left. However there is a flexible alternative.

Hiring a short term telesales manager gives your business flexibility

Hiring a short term telesales manager gives your business flexibility

You can hire in a manager for a limited period of time. You can agree some objectives for them, and you can ‘hire’ them for a fixed number of days per month. A package might be between a half a day per month and say 6 days per month. In this time a quality telesales or telemarketing manager will be able to help you set up good managment systems and KPIs (key performance indicators) for your team. They should also be responsible for training and agreeing with you some targets and benchmarks for activity and results.

We can come and have a chat over a coffee about how this may work for you.  We can give advice on what to look for, and what an interim or short term contract telesales manager may be able to offer you. So if you’re in Leicester, Northampton, Market Harborough, Corby, Wellingborough, Kettering, Lutterworth, Cambridge, Newmarket, Daventry, Coventry, Rugby, Birmingham, Lichfield, Solihull, Melton Mowbray, Uppingham, Oakham give us a call on 01858 461148  and we’ll have a chat.

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Posted in benchmarking telesales teams, Independent audit of telemarketing team, interim telesales manager, Marketing, owner managers directors, small business marketing, telemarketing, Telemarketing management, telesales team management | No Comments »

What is the difference between commission and bonus ?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

What is the difference between commission and bonus ? This is a question we’re asked frequently by clients. Not only what is the difference, but equally importantly, “do we need both of them ?” and “how can we use them both to motivate our team in different ways ?”

Get your commission and bonus schemes right and this is what should happen to sales

Get your commission and bonus schemes right and this is what should happen to sales

Indeed we think commission, bonus and campaign incentives all have a place in how you reward your telesales or telemarketing team. It is worth spending some time thinking these elements through too, because if you get it right you can motivate your telephone team to produce better results, increased sales, more appointments, higher numbers of quotations etc. You don’t mind paying more if you get more do you ? However you don’t want to pay more for the same or less !

Commission should be a regular payment for doing the telesales or telemarketing job well. It should be a constant, and the best performers in your team should earn the most. In addition it must be easy (for them) to work out at the point of getting the order. After all if it isn’t, it can’t motivate them can it ?! So a percentage of order value is a common version of this.

“My commission rate rewards me at 2% of order value.” “Great so if I can get this deal for £500 this morning, that means that will be £10 in my sky rocket (or pocket – for those of you not familiar with cockney ryhming slang !)

Bonus however is for what you reward individual members of your team with on top of their core job. So if you sell any of the platinum service plan we give you £50. You can tailor this then to sales of your more profitable products or services, or end of line stock that you want to clear etc. Alternatively it could be for achievement of quarterly target. Bonuses then should be for specific (relatively) short run campaigns or business objectives. This allows you to direct the guns in a particular direction until the objective has been achieved, or time has passed.

Then on top of commission and bonus there are incentives and for a phone team these are the fun bit. Very short term and with a high profile to add some energy and dynamism to a team’s activity and performance in the short term. But this is perhaps a subject for another day. In the meantime, there is a slightly more indepth article at ezine articles. Follow the link here http://ezinearticles.com/?Should-I-Pay-Commission,-Bonus-Or-Run-Campaigns-For-My-Telesales-Or-Telemarketing-Team?&id=2088836

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Posted in Commission schemes, Marketing, owner managers directors, Telemarketing management, telesales team management, Telesales tips | No Comments »

Don’t hire a new telesales manager yet !

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Many companies are in the situation where they want to develop a more effective telesales or telemarketing team, but don’t necessarily want to commit to spending £40,000 a year that it would cost to secure a quality manager.

How to find a quality telesales manager for your team

How to find a quality telesales manager for your team

Furthermore the economy is fragile and so you want to maintain flexibility. A great and increasingly popular solution is to hire a quality telesales manager on a short term contract. And if you can negotiate a flexible and open agreement where you’re not even committed to them for as long as a year then so much the better !

By agreeing to take on someone with a track record in successful telephone team management you can improve your own systems and processes so that after they’re gone, you can run the systems yourselves. Often a team leader or supervisor can look after the team on a day to day basis and they might only be costing you £20,000 a year.

Our advice on beefing up the telesales management in your company is that you should expect a good telesales manager to help you with such varied issues as ;

  • Advice on your team’s callpots. Do you have enough names, too many, about right ?
  • A check on your database quality. The best sales team will struggle and get demotivated if they’re working poor quality leads.
  • Input into setting up some effective KPIs and management reporting systems. This gives you complete control then. Disciplinary procedures rely on evidence. Underperformers must know they’re underperforming.
  • Advice on how to set up and run easy incentives schemes
  • Help integrating incentives into company campaigns
  • Added value in terms of general marketing advice on things such as your website. Optimising it so that it brings in more visitors is straightforward, it just takes some time and dedication.

If the idea of hiring in an interim telesales or telemarketing manager is something that appeals to you, feel free to contact us on 01858 461148 for some tips and advice. Alternatively go to Associated Learning Systems site where you will find an audio CD on the topic of how to set up and manage an effective telephone team. Click through here http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=2

We have worked with companies in many areas including ; Leicester, Northampton, Market Harborough, Corby, Wellingborough, Kettering, Lutterworth, Cambridge, Daventry, Coventry, Rugby, Melton Mowbray, Uppingham, and Oakham

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Posted in benchmarking telesales teams, Independent audit of telemarketing team, interim telesales manager, Marketing, owner managers directors, telemarketing, Telemarketing management, telesales, Telesales team assessment, telesales team management | No Comments »

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