How to increase telesales? There’s a difference between being busy and being productive. And a lot of businesses want their teams to be the latter.
It’s no secret that telesales is an effective way to sell products and services, increase sales, engage with customers, and connect with new ones. Therefore, increasing the productivity and efficiency of your telesales agent is crucial to attaining better results.
Mastering telesales agent skills is essential to achieving higher levels of efficiency and growth .
Here are 21 ways to improve telesales performance:
How to increase telesales and improve telesales agent’s productivity? (21 ways)
1. Leverage technology
Having a workforce telecalling solution has grown past being just a competitive advantage. It is a necessity today that helps to achieve higher productivity levels.
You can give as much training as you want to your executives on how to be a good telesales agent but without the right solution, their efforts will not be the same as you expect them to be.
The right workforce telecalling solution allows you to gather relevant data about prospects, manage data, record and monitor calls, schedule calls and maintain , integrate with various platforms for management, and much more.
2. Give them a good training
A well-trained telesales agent will bring you favourable results. So organize timely training and development sessions to ensure that your telesales agents are well prepared before they begin working on .
You can train them to learn more about your products and services, or how to master their telesales agent skills or provide them with technology education on how to deploy new technology to enhance their efficiency.
3. Create a compelling script
A script presents a set of questions, terms, and phrases to guide the telesales agent during a call. And sales script writing often affects the conversational flow of agents with prospects or customers, so it is important to be cautious, well informed, and well prepared with a script before making any contact.
4. Create a phone call blueprint
Unlike a script that includes detailed context about the potential conversational flow between the agent and the customer, a blueprint provides a call structure with simple and clear checklists for a conversation.
For that, telesales agents must have clear call objectives, they must understand the product they are selling, and they must be aware of why the customer would need this product or service. This blueprint checkpoints approach might include points like:
- An introduction to stimulate interest
- Effective questioning, usage of open-ended questions to ensure that the conversation goes in the intended direction
- Presenting a solution
- Handling the anticipated objections and feedback
- Final words or closing the deal
5. Set clear goals before working on a plan
It is important to set a clear goal before working on any campaign or else agents will end up working on an unproductive and time-consuming task. So, communicate clearly and make sure that everybody fully understands what the expectations and objectives are.
Ideally, managers and agents can discuss a 30 days sales plan, agree on the best approach to reach the goals set, and counter other potential challenges that might come along. This can be done by setting the expected number of daily calls, meetings scheduled, emails sent, leads closed, and reports generated.
6. Motivation
Motivation brings the best out of anyone, and it is always required in any kind of work. So work on motivating your telesales agents for better performance and quality results.
Have one-on-one discussions with them to understand their perspectives and give them your feedback, provide them with lucrative incentives, recognize their efforts, etc. Basically, understand them and know what motivates them and take necessary steps.
7. Encourage them to use a pull communication strategy with customers
The push strategy might be quicker in moving a prospect from awareness to the purchase phase, but the pull strategy is more effective in creating an ongoing, long-lasting, and lucrative relationship with customers and improves word-of-mouth marketing.
A pull-style conversation allows telesales agents to lead the conversation and ask relevant questions so that they don’t waste time gathering unnecessary information.
8. Let your team work from home
A hike in telesales agents’ productivity can be noticed when they are working from home rather than in an office. Allowing remote working from a stress-free environment has proven to increase an agent’s productivity, improve their morale, future-proof the business, and reduce operational costs.
9. Empower agents to make their own decision
Empowering telesales agents and allowing them to make decisions based on customer needs, makes them more productive. Of course, the process will be difficult at first, and they will make mistakes, but eventually, they will learn from their mistakes.
They will acquire stronger decision-making skills, improve at making better business-related decisions, and in finding solutions to retain and satisfy customers.
10. Allow them to share their opinion and their advice
Involving agents in making decisions related to improving their productivity and performance can be highly beneficial, as they are more involved than anybody else, operating in the job on a daily basis.
They know what the problems are, which systems are poor and need updating, which policy is more effective, and where the processes are lacking a coherent sequence. So set a meeting from time to time and ask them to share their opinion and advice on the matter accordingly.
11. Incentivize everything that can be measured
Telesales agents tend to be more motivated to do their work when there is something on the line, so a healthy competition for incentives can boost their productivity and make them perform better.
So, create an incentive program to consistently recognize the work of high performers and to boost productivity and morale.
12. Measure the right performance indicators
Give your telesales agent realistically measurable targets to boost their productivity. The right metric-based targets are the ones that can be reviewed, analysed, and acted upon. And remember, it is important to measure what is relevant to the business need. The right performance indicators can be changed over time.
13. Increase the level of team engagement
In a telesales business, it is important to create a positive workforce environment where agents understand their vital role in the success of the business. You can apply a positive workforce strategy for staff engagement. This will improve employee schedule adherence, conformity, engagement, and customer satisfaction.
14. Encourage agents to share their schedule preference
An engaged, stress-free, and satisfied telesales agent who can proactively manage their work-life balance will happen to be more productive. So allow your employees to create their preferred work schedule.
This will increase both employee and customer satisfaction, increase employee morale and retention, and improve the overall key operational metrics. One easy way to implement this is through a workforce telecalling solution or management system.
15. Provide the best to the best
Deploy the strength of each team leader and position them in accordance with their skills. This is a great way to boost performance. Putting the best team leaders with the best performers tends to be more productive, as you are building on strengths instead of weaknesses.
16. Reduce the administrative burden
Most of the time agents are swamped with a lot of administrative tasks such as prospecting, leads analysis, data entry, taking notes, etc., which consumes around 10–40% of their time, while they should be focusing on spending more time, engaging with prospects to convert them into customers.
To avoid this problem, you can implement a workforce telecalling solution that will help in liberating telesales agents from these tasks and give them more time to focus on selling and engaging with customers.
17. Focus on providing solutions
It is crucial for telesales agents to precisely understand why they are calling customers: from the prospect’s perspective, it is to resolve their problems and to provide them with beneficial solutions. So focus on providing value, show them that you understand their challenges, and offer them something useful.
18. Learn to navigate through the rapid peaks in call volumes
Educate your telesales agents on how to handle customers in rapid peaks of call volumes. These situations can be demoralizing for agents if they are flooded with cases of customer complaints, furthermore, it could damage a brand’s reputation.
So, by having the proper means to remain serene and be proactive, agents need to learn to easily handle customers and initiate effective resolution processes.
19. Communicate internally
Always make sure that each individual on the team is well-informed and looped in the communication process. They must have the latest updates on the targets, deadlines, new deals, and so on.
This will keep everyone focused on the same goal. Running regular debriefs and sharing information can help employees learn more and improve.
20. Provide real-time feedback
Providing real-time feedback is one of the most efficient ways to make your telesales agent productive. Having the right workforce telecalling solution in place helps to serve this strategy.
Feedback also helps to guide agents through the kind of language they should be using while engaging with customers. And it enables agents to resolve customer queries efficiently and increase the First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate.
NeoDove is one such platform that provides telesales agents with complete insight into the customer journey. The platform records relevant data/information about prospects throughout the sales process and agents can access this data in real-time when in contact with the prospect, which adds more value to the conversation.
21. Have the agents do their research
Well-informed telesales agents are always more successful than others. They thoroughly research everything they need to know about their prospects. And they well prepare themselves for any possible question or concern that might arise from the prospect.
They know exactly when their company initially contacted the prospect, what they discussed, what the prospect was considering buying, and even what his concerns were.
Final thoughts
Telesales is an extremely important method to get the word out for your brand but it is not something very easy. But the process can be made simpler by working diligently on mastering the necessary skills, implementing the right solution and keeping an eye out for all the changes that take place.
Originally published at https://neodove.com on February 22, 2022.
