Business Coaching to Grow Your Sales

How to expand your business using Telesales

If you are ready to take your business to the next level the fastest way to grow your business is to grow your sales. Telesales can be a cost effective way of expanding your business with the added benefit of offering flexibility for you to start small and build up.

Initially business owners may be tempted to do this themselves and that’s not necessarily a good idea. If you haven’t come across Michael Gerber’s book E-myth you might like to get yourself a copy now. He talks about the importance of working ON your business rather than IN it and how to go about doing that.

You may have resource already in the business that you can utilise i.e. personnel that make or take calls. However, it is crucial you get the right people with the right skillset for the job. If you ask your call handlers to start making sales calls you may experience some resistance and their lack of confidence will be evident to their call recipients –your potential customers!

These types of calls can be very damaging for your reputation. So if you do decide to go down this road make sure your call handlers have the right skillset and are briefed properly with clear objectives and quality training. This will pay dividends and set up correctly ensure your return on investment justifies the cost.

Before you consider recruiting or outsourcing take a look at your current set up.

• Are you making every customer contact count?
• Are all your call handlers geared up to spot opportunities?
• If so, what action do they take?
• Is there a follow up procedure in place?

You may be missing opportunities that could be capitalised on in your other departments such as accounts, returns or customer service. By putting in some simple upsell and/or cross sell procedures across the business you can increase sales routinely. As these are timely and relevant your customers are more likely to view this as a benefit.

To expand your sales further you now need to consider whether you recruit or outsource. The beauty of telesales is that you can start small keeping your costs low and build up gradually.

Recruiting

This is a whole subject on its own! Getting the right people with the right skill set is paramount. Otherwise this can be a very costly exercise in terms of both time and money. But no-one knows your products and your business as well as you do.

The key benefit to creating a telesales role is that you have a dedicated resource to building your pipeline, growing your customer base and increasing your sales. Now that’s very appealing! It is also a very cost effective way of doing it.

As a growing, entrepreneurial company, it’s really important that you find the best people to join your team. It takes time to search, interview and finally recruit new employees and time is money but if you get it right recruitment should be seen as an investment in your business.

Before you start to think about recruiting be clear on what you want this role to achieve.

• Consider the type of products or services you offer. Is this a one stage sale?
• How much is the average sale value?
• How many sales equate to cost of set up i.e. breakeven point?
• Do you have quality, qualified data?
• What systems are in place to capture information and action?
• Who will manage the telesales operation?

When you have identified your key objectives and have systems and processes in place to handle the role you are ready to find a suitable candidate/candidates. Initially you may prefer to recruit a part-time telesales representative. If your budget allows it is always better to recruit 2 sales people even if they are both part-time. This creates a competitive environment which is always good in sales. It also means you have continuous telesales activity when one of them is off.

Outsourcing

There are a plethora of companies out there ready and willing to make or take calls on your behalf. The key is finding the right one for you. Ideally you want to use one that has been recommended by someone offering a similar service to you.

Check them out. Make a few calls and see how they are handled. Good agencies will expect you to do your due diligence and will actively encourage you to do so. Then try them out. Start small.
As if you are recruiting yourself you will need to be very clear about what you want to achieve in order to brief the agency.

Here are a few things you may want to consider:

• What are the costs associated with outsourcing? Are they charging per call or per conversion?
• Who is supplying the data?
• What training is necessary and who will be carrying it out?
• What metrics will you use to analyse effectiveness of the campaign and how well your money has been spent?
• Who will manage the project from the business and liaise with the agency?

Choosing the right partner for you can be time consuming but once you have found the right one their input can be invaluable in developing new business growth.