Blue house front door Number 7

Keeping your telesales or telemarketing team motivated is clearly important. You don’t need me to tell you that! Also it’s important to recognise that making lots of outbound calls is a tough job. It is repetitive by it’s nature, and your telesales personnel face a lot of rejection.

Nevertheless it is a vital part of the sales process. You can talk to more customers and prospects in a day than you can using any other medium. And the quality of contact is much higher than direct mail or e-shots, because when you talk to prospects you’re engaged in 2-way dialogue.

There are obvious ways of motivating outbound telemarketing and telesales teams. These will include offering incentives, running campaigns and paying bonuses. There are a few things you can do that are more systemised and are proven to work.

Along with the obvious stuff around incentives, coaching and motivation, we’ve found that simple changes can have a huge impact on the results of sales campaigns.  Here are a few:

1. Regular short breaks – away from the phone

Make sure your team members have time away from the phone. At least every 2 hours or more often if you can. Even a 10 minute break will give them a chance to clear their head, and think about other things. Encourage them to spend lunch breaks away from their desk too.

They will appreciate this element of pastoral care on your part and it will help them keep their energy levels up. This is so important in business development roles.

2. Keep them informed

It is vital to keep your team in the loop. Encourage and maintain good flows of communication – both ways. Encourage your team members to let you know what is happening in the market place. Remember your phone team is almost certainly having more customer interactions each day than anyone else in the company.

Share company information with them too. Keep it positive. Talk about developments, new products, new initiatives. Above all, make sure you have reporting systems that tell your team what business is coming in as a result of their efforts. This is particularly important if they are appointment setting telemarketers. They need to know what results from their efforts. By all means have daily briefings or flag-waving sessions before they start phoning sessions if that is your style. Or your organisation’s corporate style. But the key is keeping them informed.

3. Regular feedback, stats & praise

Your team has KPIs right? Like our KPI system telemetrics it is important to keep your team clear on what they’re supposed to be doing. How many appointments are they setting in a week or day, or month? And the KPIs such as our telemetrics will also tell each phone team member what they need to do in terms of dials and decision-maker conversations to achieve the desired outcome.

Make sure you sit down with each member of your team at least once a month to discuss their personal progress. Use stats where you can, as they’re objective and it’s not personal. If you present figures that show a phoner is getting less orders or appointments because they’re making less calls / dials than anyone else, they can’t complain that you’re having a go at them because you don’t like them, can they?!

Look for reasons to praise. In any form of management, praise always works better than reprimand. Keep your communication style light but clear.  And be aware of spending time with everyone. It’s easy for management to spend most time with underperformers, and miss those who are doing well.

4. Get them out of the office

Many phone based teams are promoting products or services that they may not encounter in their daily lives. So make sure that you give them the opportunity to experience the products in use and to meet some of the clients who use them. Giving telemarketers or telesales personnel days out from time to time with their field based colleagues, is something I’ve always found worked really well. They’ll like the fact that they’ve got a day out of the office. They’ll learn from their colleagues who sell your products and services and meeting clients / customers will help them envision how people interact with your products and what they think of them. Even the team manager should do this too.

5. Have a strong call structure – scripting

You and your team will find good ways of making calls. Some things work, some don’t.
People tend to get a bit emotive when the subject of scripts comes up. Admittedly you don’t want your team members to read a set of words that aren’t even theirs. Nevertheless they should all be following a standard call structure. You will have worked with them on writing benefit statements. Different people may find different ones work. That’s fine, they can mix and match. And don’t use the same ones on every call. Chances are it will all sound a bit bland after a while.
Also, work through the objections. Pretty much all the objections that the team will face will have been uncovered within a few weeks so have your responses ready. Yes, you want to sound natural, but given that all the objections have been raised before, they shouldn’t cause any hesitancy or anxiety.

6. Minimise the admin

Making sure a phone team is focused on making calls is clearly key to achieving success. So be really hard on yourself to avoid giving them lots of admin to do. If they make calls interspersed with lots of other jobs, processing orders, getting the board room ready for your VIP visitors, booking the M.D.s flights to France, going to the bank, you can’t be surprised that the outbound calling doesn’t get done. Or if it does, you may find it’s not especially successful. Make your mind up!

You can always get one person per day, or per half day to do the order processing. Focus produces better results and less mistakes. Fact.

They need to put all call notes on the CRM system. This is important, but discourage them from writing chapter and verse. Comments such as “I spoke to him and he said that he might review their choice of supplier at some point next year depending on how their year goes sales wise…” are too lengthy, waffly and time consuming. Keep it concise.

7. Regular training

You might expect this to be on my list. I run a telephone skills training business after all! But it’s still important.
Give them training. Regularly. There are 3 types of training;
  • Product training
  • Process training
  • Behavioural training
Process training they have to do in the first few days. They can’t do the job right until this training has happened. Product training too will have to happen early in their time with you. They need to know about your products and services and more importantly what they will do for the customer.
The behavioural training or ‘soft-skills’ training is equally important though. Don’t assume that just because they’ve done a job before which involves talking to customers that their skills are in great shape. Sometimes clients leave it to their team members to decide whether they need training! What?! Chances are some are in favour, some feel they don’t need it. Then what do you do?! We also find a strong correlation between those who seem to rate the courses we run most highly and the top performers in a team. In other words the top performers are top performers because they’re keen to develop their skills and they’re open to ideas. Those who say they don’t need training are ironically those who probably most need it.
Training on audio CD

Measure Monitor Motivate CD for telesales teams

Telemetrics

Above under section 3 I mentioned our KPI system telemetrics to measure, monitor and motivate your team. We have an audio product available which sets out how we do this and the 4 main measures that you need to manage your outbound team effectively.

Next steps

We at To Market live and breathe telephone teams. They are the sales lifeblood of many companies and our portfolio of training courses and consultancy services are designed to help you keep your team motivated, focused and above all successful in the achievement of your goals. If you are planning out training drop your details and we’ll contact you.
Alternatively you may not be at the point where you are considering training but you might have some questions. Again feel free to contact us. We’ll be happy to talk to you about any aspect of running an outbound telephone sales or telemarketing team.