Telesales Models for Success

Successful sales and marketing organizations understand their limitations -- they are not afraid to call for specialized help when necessary. This is especially true for small- to medium-sized businesses that are constrained by budgets and manpower. For these companies, it makes sense to outsource certain operational functions, such as telesales. Over the years, we have worked with a variety of outsourced telesales/telemarketing organizations with mixed results. In this post, we will examine the various models for managing telesales and discuss what practices are required to be successful.

Fine-tune The Processes You Deliver to Outsourcers

A common mistake that many start-ups make is that they outsource the telesales process before they have mastered it themselves. Outsourced telesales organizations are not product marketing specialists. In some instances, they can help refine your pitch a bit, but understanding and explaining your product's features and benefits are not their core competency. Presumably, they are able to hit the phones hard -- harder than your people. That's why you pay them. But to achieve the desired results from hiring a telesales outsourcing firm, you need to follow some best practices in terms of developing processes.

With that in mind, you will need to:

1. Develop an effective script. Your script needs to be tight and to the point. It must be compelling enough for prospects to agree to a meeting or Web conference with one of your sales executives. Remember, anything that's not in the script won't make it to the prospects, so iterate and improve the script to make it as effective as possible.
   
   
2. Segment your prospects. Part of the point of the telesales process is to qualify prospects so that you don't waste the time of the sales team by inviting everyone to a meeting. While it sounds obvious, you need to name the individual titles and specify the types of organizations you are selling to. For example, the process could specify only a certain type of individual: The VP of Application Development in Telecommunications companies with greater than $200 million/year in revenue.
   
   
3. Insist on the use of your SFA/CRM solution. Every phone call, email, and meeting needs to be logged in your sales force automation (SFA) or customer relationship management (CRM) system. With cheap hosted solutions available from vendors like salesforce.com and SugarCRM, there is no reason not to implement an SFA/CRM system from day one. When you do outsource telesales, your vendors must be required to work within your system -- not theirs.
   
   Note: Here are two tips for giving outsiders access to your CRM: 1) Protect yourself legally with an NDA in case the outsourcer decides to unscrupulously use your contacts; and 2) seed the database with a few vague, but reasonable contacts that lead back to you via 3rd party email (Yahoo, Gmail, Comcast, Verizon, etc.). In the event that your employees or partners share your prized database without permission, you have proof.
   
   
4. Measure to gauge success. Some organizations push numbers -- almost to a fault. If you ask telesales to make 300 calls per day -- they will. But those calls will not necessarily deliver the revenue you are looking for. Sending your telesales department on a forced march will lead to misqualified leads, sloppy entry in the SFA/CRM system, and other problems that will diminish the effort's return.
   
   The best metric for telesales success that we have seen has been to measure the reps based on how many meetings -- not phone calls! -- they establish between qualified prospects and the sales team. Getting meetings is much harder work than dialing and reading a script -- but it will make your sales team more efficient and make the outsourcing effort worthwhile.

After developing and rolling out a solid process for your internal sales team, you can then consider how to mange the telesales process. Here are three possible models and some pros and cons for each: 

• Internally managed. Most SMBs have an internal sales function, where a small team is responsible for populating your SFA/CRM system with new leads, qualifying those leads, and setting appointments for the team.
  
  Pros: This model affords the most control for your team. In addition, processes can be changed quickly.
  
  Cons: The team is only as good as its previous experience. While good telemarketers can quickly move up the sales food chain to become outside sales directors, telesales managers with little experience will languish.
  
  
• Fully-outsourced. Companies like By Appointment Only (BAO) want to manage the entire process of lead generation. You give its people some script pointers and provide access to your SFA/CRM software, and the BAO reps will call prospects and schedule appointments for your sales executives.
  
  Pros: Service providers like BAO will generate meetings for your team. An added benefit is that a company like BAO uses its own database -- a database with many contacts you most likely don't have in your system.
  
  Cons: These types of all-inclusive service providers can be very expensive, they can deliver inconsistent results, and, in some instances, prospect meetings will be declined at the last minute with no explanation.
  
  
• Hybrid. Your organization may benefit from having an inside team but also supplementing its activities with outside representatives from an experienced outside agency or consultant.
  
  Pros: Your team can improve its own activities and success rate from the exposure to reps with their own best practices.
  
  Cons: Like the full-outsourced model, hybrid solutions can be very expensive. Accountability is also diluted.
  

How do you decide which model will work best for your organization? Ideally, your VP of marketing and/or sales will have the experience to put the right model in place given his/her intimate knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. If you need help making the decision, we highly recommend bringing in an outside expert, such as Teledirect Partners. In another life, we worked with the company and found that it helped create a process that meshed well with the goals or our organization -- an organization that measured success by both qualitative and quantitative results.