Outsourcing Telemarketing, Lead Qualification Or Generation

 Articles, Marketing, Prospecting, Selling  1 Comment »
Feb 142010
 

A professional marketing contact brought up the topic of outsourcing telemarketing and lead qualification and generation this week. What are the advantages and pitfalls of such arrangements?

Marketing departments like these services and gravitate towards such arrangements. Sales managers are desperate for sales and are looking for solutions. Salespeople are often less amiable. The arrangement frequently leads to tension between the sales and marketing departments, within the sales departments and even discourages the sales team from pursuing any leads that have been generated if the initial pass is less than optimal.

Outsourcing is no longer exceptional at companies of any size. Respective marketing departments feel that outsourcing agencies are a simple and relatively pain-free answer to the demands of the organization for lead generation and lead creation (after all that is part of what marketing does). The sales department is constantly asking for more and better leads. It all seems to come together. Consequently, the number of outside agencies that take over some of the functions of sales and marketing departments has ballooned. From being the front-line for inbound calls to outbound calling and even setting appointments the outsourcing firm stands ready to do all or a part of it.

Marketing is looking for a Return On Investment justification.

Sales is looking for increased sales leads or slam-dunk sales.

Sales management is hoping for the same as above two, and needs to ensure the integrity of its processes and effort.

I have been involved with organizations that have hired outsourced firms several times. The results have been uneven. The promise, inevitably, exceeds what is delivered. There is no silver bullet and if anything is too good to be true, then it is.

Here are several tips and factors to consider:

  • Marketing must involve and integrate the sales department into its decision-making process. If the decision is made to go ahead then the salespeople – the direct beneficiaries of the outsourcing – should be part of the team that trains the outsourcing firm’s team.
  • Do not short-change training.
  • Plan for change management. How are product updates handled? How are changed versions taught? How is a change in company goals and target market communicated? Have you budgeted for these including trips, visits and training?
  • Do not discount the need for airtight definitions including leads, prospects, hot ones, credit, time-lines that are acceptable, appointments (should that be part of the mandate) and the definition of acceptable and unacceptable leads, calls, appointments, sales, etc. While outsourcing companies often provide some credit or replacement time, calls or leads for any ‘returned’ results that were not acceptable, these can quickly become overwhelming and a source of dispute. Moreover, companies do not always have the best feedback mechanism set up internally.
  • Similarly, what are the metrics, what is the formal mechanism for feedback and what rights does it confer upon the two parties?
  • Could you, for efficiencies sake, integrate and automate your internal sales tools and software with the outsourced agency’s?
  • What is your fallback and contingency plan? Should the new arrangement not succeed have you kept an infrastructure in place that can be reactivated internally?
  • What is in the contract cancellation clause?
  • Do not allow the new arrangement to become a source of conflict between different departments. Involve all concerned prior to pulling the trigger (see first bullet above) and have an internal charter, agreement and buy-in before proceeding. To do otherwise, is to contribute to disappointment and create resentment and disenchantment just the opposite of what the sales and marketing groups sought.

Asking – Level III

 Selling, Selling More  Add Comments »
Jan 162010
 

Most serious salespeople know that asking questions is better than talking when selling. The most elementary type of questioning is what I call Level I questions. Example, “How much do you have to spend?” or “what features are you looking for?” Standard stuff, but better than telling a customer your cars are $30,000 or that they come with three DVD players inside without caring to find out about their budget or needs in the first place.

Level II questions are posed when the salesperson goes beyond the obvious, customizes and probes deeply. I have never come across better Level II questions than what SPIN Selling offers. “How much lost produce would not having an irrigation system result in annually? Could you quantify that?” Level II questions address implication and consequence in a personalized manner.

Most people in sales, however, are not aware of the Level III. These questions relate not so much to what you need to do as they do what the buying person/firm/group needs to do. Politics, Personality, Proof, etc. are all reasons a sale either does not happen or is postponed.
A Level III questioner asks about the buyer’s internal processes recognizing that there are always internal processes at play. Level III questions ask what is going inside the labyrinth the buyer lives in. By knowing this, the seller can begin assisting managing the internal issues. Just because the sales team has done an outstanding job producing compelling reasons for the sale to happen with which the buying team has no argument it does not follow that internal buyer mechanisms have been triggered. Be a Level IIIer and ask how you could work to take agreement to a Purchase Order.

While you are it review the below article.
The Other Side

Hiring The Right Salesperson

 Management  Add Comments »
Jan 032010
 

Which one of the below have I heard recently?

  1. I got hired when I met the VP at a class.
  2. Many of the people in the office were hired after meeting each other at church. That is normal at my company.
  3. The Vice-President hired me before my eventual manager met me. No one told my manager.

The answer: 1, 2 and 3.

Hiring a salesperson is one of the biggest decisions a company makes. Managing that salesperson (aligning his or her goals to the company’s objectives) to be successful is going to underwrite the success of the firm.

Hiring a salesperson should never be left to feeling. ‘More science, less art’ as I always say.

Part of the problem is that the hiring managers really do not know how to hire. There is a general notion of the kind of salesperson should be hired (very much like the general public likes to eat Sushi, but doesn’t know enough to stay away from Kushi i.e. Korean ‘Sushi’ or Cushi i.e. Chinese ‘Sushi’), but the feeling is never formalized. Given this dilemma, it is no wonder that salespersons are often mismatch.

authentic

Any company and its hiring team need to have formal and written criteria on what constitutes a good hire. As importantly, the plan is useless if not followed. No more, “I liked her. She seemed aggressive” platitudes.

A good hiring process includes:

  1. A formal qualifications list derived from industry best practices, company objectives and what has worked at the company.
  2. The interviewer(s) need to be familiar with the position and its requirements.
  3. The candidate should be able to sell the interviewer on him or herself and their track record of success.
  4. The candidate should be able to sell the interviewer on a product or service. This doesn’t need to be the company’s own given that the person is, as of yet, not intimately familiar with those.
  5. The candidate needs to demonstrate a presence of mind and the ability to handle surprise questions and unexpected situations. The reality is that customers are more knowledgeable and educated than ever. Since no one can predict a prospect’s next question or reaction or an existing customer’s issues being able to respond with knowledge and respect is important.

Selling To The Overly Difficult

 Articles, Selling  Add Comments »
Dec 292009
 

Sooner or later every salesperson comes across a buyer who believes in him or herself to such an extent that doors are shut even before the sales process begins. These prospects are potentially current or former Mr. or Ms. salespersons that either consciously wants to make life difficult for the salesperson or have a point to make regarding their own tough as nails trait. There are two ways to manage this difficult situation.

Firstly, be prepared to declare your intention to abandon the sales process. “Ms. prospect, I can see by your reaction that no matter what I say or show today, you are not interested. Given that, I believe it is a better use of both our times for me to leave.” It is a stronger version of Sandler’s ‘negative reverse’ (“I am not yet sure whether we have a solution for you). It is like verbal judo. Their grisly exterior and standoffish personality used to inform the prospect that they have gone too far with the closed-mindedness and you will not be a victim. Time to fold.

Naturally, this applies if you have exhausted your options. For instance, as a prerequisite, have you really listened to the customer? If not, read this: http://www.alighaemi.com/wp/?p=411. In all cases, control your emotions, save yourself the wrinkles and simultaneously de-escalate. As always, do not take it personally. It is not personal. Even if it is on the customer’s side, do not make it personal on your part.

Secondly, do strongly consider packing it up and leaving. After all, wouldn’t you rather speak to someone who wishes to give you a fair chance and consider your service?

How To Obtain New Customers?

 Marketing  3 Comments »
Dec 272009
 

A couple of weeks ago a professional e-mailed me wondering how a young and budding new company would get new customers. This Indian-based gentleman was at a loss as to how a small, up-start company would market itself and how it would get its voice heard over the clatter of bigger competition. In that particular case, a useful suggestion was ‘guerrilla marketing.’ Creativity and novelty would have to trump inside-the-box methods.

So, how does a company go about its business and attract customers? For the purpose of this post let’s assume you are not the head of marketing for Time Warner. That is, the marketing budget is below average, limited and corresponds to the depth of experience and dedicated resources at hand.

Many would consider a variety of marketing techniques as a starting point. That would be a mistake. A much better approach would be to understand one’s product or service and the associated customer (or if not enough exist, the target market’s) psyche.

Understanding one’s customer involves understanding one’s target market. What is it? A small firm needs to be brave enough to be able micro-target. That is, be willing to accept that you will not be servicing a major portion of the society. What niche within that target market is under-served, under-developed or, due to novelty, unaddressed? Leave the prejudices behind and let the customer speak for itself. What does the market say it wants and cannot currently get. How much of it do they want, at what frequency and how much is it worth to them? Let the voice of the customer surprise you.

An existing client base will complete and augment this information. Existing clients need to be mined for information. Part of his information is already available.

  • What is the existing average sales figure?
  • At which price level, and how often, were customers lost?
  • What did they purchase, what did they not purchase and what else was added to the sale from external sources?
  • Where did your customers find you in the first place? Where did those, which were lost, end up?
  • Was the money not spent with your firm banked, spent on the company Christmas party or move to your direct competitors?

The above information should be of a large enough sample to lend itself to aggregation and slicing and dicing. Three customers: bad! Three hundred responses: better!

The data derived should enable your company to limit – that’s right, I said limit – your pursuit of customers to a very tight grouping of potential customers. All the residents of Northern France are not a target market. Expatriate Brits living within 50 km of Paris, though, is somewhat better.

This kind of triangulation will allow your company’s limited resources to be spent with a narrow target in mind. This is where a small firm will find where it needs to call/advertise/be present/sponsor/showcase/call into/other in order to yield maximum output for the tight marketing resources. Additionally, this type of marketing is self-perpetuating. The Anglophone Brits living near the capital of France are more likely to know and communicate with one another and may become your inadvertent word-of-mouth marketers (for instance).

You Are A New Or First-Time Manager

 Management  Add Comments »
Dec 062009
 

There are several do’s and don’ts that a new manager needs to consider right after the ‘congratulations’ phase.

A new manager is typically chosen because he or she has not only succeeded in the most recent position, but also because there has been a demonstration of potential.

Be aware that someone above has liked your character and trait and found it useful for the organization. This makes it easier on how to act next. You don’t need to change that much. However, that doesn’t mean that you should keep doing what you were doing in your last job.

1- Stop Being Tactical. It is time that you stop doing the job. You can stop dusting the desks now if you are a manager for a janitorial service. After all, you cannot clean enough to cover for everybody.

2- Start Being Strategic. Your skills need to be leveraged for the team. It is time to tell your team how you did it and what actions and skills yielded results. You are now standing behind the group and directing. If that is what you do, your team needs to learn from you how you managed to chop the heads of more fish on a daily basis than anybody else. Start teaching others how to clean, sell, cut the head of the fish or whatever your company does. However, please do not confuse being strategic with boiling the ocean. Strategic means picking and choosing what can be changed and improved efficiently and within a permissible time-line. That implies not everything could.

3- Understand That One Approach May Not Work For Everyone. While one person might be motivated by a pat on the back another might need one-on-one coaching. In other words, you need to customize the management line of attack to different team members.
Do you know your team and their likes and dislikes? That will help you avoid issuing decrees or transferring orders from above and expecting that everyone would be ready to go. Take the time to listen.
Moreover, and I have always found this to be critical, you need to work more with those on your team who need more help. In other words, help those who are not where they should be and get out of the way of success. Yes, you are still the manager, but those who are doing well need to keep doing what they have been doing successfully. Their techniques, know-how or methods need to be transferred to those who are not doing as well.

4- Manage People And Processes Not Statistics. So many new managers miss this. Statistics and numbers are tools that aid and assist. They are not the holy grails of success. Remember that success is a process and not a magical conception at the end of the day. Use all the tools to assist, guide and motivate your team to do what they need to do better as part of a multi-pronged approach. As a trusted manager, you need to not win the battle (‘you skinned only three fishes today!’) and lose the war (‘my team hates me’). A manager needs to help the team and report to upper management so the numbers need to be counted. However, many new managers confuse the tools required for reporting up with a club with which to hit employees on the head.
How often do you congratulate and delight your group?

5- Be Respectful. It is part of the soft skills required to be an effective leader of others. A climate of fear and intimidation loses its effect quickly. The micro-manager who thinks acting rudely works should remember that such short-term thinking causes more harm in the long-term.
There are things that are going well, employees who are doing well and things that reasonably can remain as is and even should be watered and nurtured. Acknowledge that and do no harm.
Open lines of communication and understanding precede respect. ‘You need to clean three more units every week come hell or high water’ is nowhere nearly as impressive as ‘how do we become even more efficient and organized so you guys can do three more units every week?’ And here is the key to asking that last question. Listen, follow-up and enact. Pose a perfunctory question and watch how fast you lose the trust of your team next time you need actual feedback. Communication is integral to respect.

Perhaps in a future post I will discuss the other portion of a manager’s job – the reporting up part – that freshmen might not have an exact handle on, but for now I will just say that organizations need to facilitate the above for their managers.
After all, there is very little managers can do to become effective leaders if the company president, for example, wants the new manager to hit the staff on the head with the proverbial club. In this context, it is important that new managers remember that communicating up (i.e. with one’s own manager) is not only about reporting numbers and results, but also about understanding company/group strategies, so these can be communicated to the team, as well as about protecting and promoting one’s employees.
manager

Two New Books Made Me Think

 Articles, Management, Marketing, Negotiating, Prospecting, Selling  Add Comments »
Nov 262009
 

Common wisdom in sales and management circles has revolved around the need to set personal goals, visualize, negotiate, and achieve.
A new school of thought suggests that the secret to success could actually be to take the opposite route.
Two new books regarding happiness, success, communication and persuasion argue respectively that happiness should not come at the expense of realism and the way to negotiation is to be receptive and listen with purity.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, from the author of over a dozen other books, has used her experience as a breast cancer survivor to argue that the advocates of positive thinking are doing their followers a disservice. She insists that being positive about everything is not always good or superior. In other words, in corporate-speak, not every problem is a challenge and not every challenge is an opportunity. Ehrenreich claims that the incessant abuse of positive thinking has lead to a culture of not confronting problems. This school of thought leads to tangible problems.

Dr. Mark Goulston’s Just Listen: Discover The Secret To Getting Through To Absolutely Anyone comes from the perspective of a psychiatrist and an FBI negotiator. He claims that the contemporary needs for ‘producing’ costs us business and personal relationships. Should we accept that sales, marketing and management have relating and relationship building as their cornerstones then we would do well to delve deeper into his thoughts. The book takes the stance that the best way to achieve what we want – be it a sale, a promotion or a concession – is to be receptive to the other party – i.e. empathy. The book insists that taking a more ‘natural’ stance is actually the better way to succeed. Goulston believes by listening, and listening even more deeply, could one get through to the angry customer, narcissistic co-worker or dissatisfied employee. He goes on to insist that the social media does us a disservice by emphasizing quantity over quality. According to the book, the best way to listen is to listen without an agenda. This would be the purest form of listening. Oddly enough, he does have a Facebook account!

Just Listen To Buy The Book

Just Listen More information

justlisten

Bright-sided To Buy The Book

Bright-sided More information

brightsided

How To Ask Existing Contacts For Referrals

 Articles, Selling More  Add Comments »
Nov 122009
 

Back in November of 2006, I talked about being “specific” with your prospects and customers. In order to achieve the desired results one has to go beyond generalities and delve into precision.

Specifics

In a May of 2007 post, I discussed the ins and outs of marketing and keeping ones customers. In the same post, I briefly mentioned asking for referrals.

Referrals

How about combining the two?
How does one ask existing customers for referrals? One asks by being specific about who those referrals would be. Instead of asking, for a referral vaguely (”would you be able to refer me to one of your contacts who might need my services?”) say something like “I would be grateful if you would refer your contacts to me. The ideal contact would be a Florist (or whoever needs your service) that is the owner of the business and has at least three employees.”
Notice how direct the request is?
Follow up your request in a week or so for additional emphasis.

Relating To The Seller

 Marketing, Selling  Add Comments »
Oct 262009
 

Among the common criteria usually prescribed for achieving sale success, ‘rapport’ and ‘relating’ are two that are often cited.
The idea is that we buy from those we like or share experiences or traits with. This idea is not revolutionary. We seek the safety of the known and avoid dark places.

A new Canadian study for the Journal Of Consumer research, however, takes the study one step further and offers even stronger evidence in this regard. The study claims that, what it terms, “incidental” traits help persuade a consumer to make a purchase. These motivating factors include extraneous factors like shared names, shared birthdays and hometowns.
The sales process is irrational after all.

Journal Of Consumer Research

This actually reminded me of my Whistler trip where the facilities’ employees – lifts, counter staff and the like – wore tags depicting their name and country of origin. I now know that many Australians and Japanese work at Whistler.
What the study highlighted makes me think. By deduction, the opposite can be true as well. Could the information that the workers at Whistler are Japanese and Australian be detrimental to my purchasing decisions?
It is possibly a double-edged sword.

What does this idea say about the desire of many buyers to have a ‘trusted advisor’? Trust is a function of time and experience. Could relating to a seller be a stronger factor in situations involving smaller purchases? Very possible.
And could being a ‘trusted advisor’ or ‘relating’ also be a double-edged sword in that the relationship requires a higher level of service and knowledge?
After all, one would expect a higher quality of engagement from the ‘trusted advisor’ or someone one has a rapport with than from any seller. The relationship has a lot longer to drop.

Are Women Better Salespersons?

 Articles, Selling  Add Comments »
Oct 222009
 

When I found myself in a sales supervisory role several years ago my team comprised of both males and females. While this would not be true across the board, something that soon became apparent was that there is a sales technique and methodology difference within the group.
Men, largely, leaned more towards the more assertive approach of being forceful and aggressive, while women seemed to operate more deliberately and by the book.

Could this difference in approach be more universal? Do men sell more aggressively, while women follow a recipe or methodology? Perhaps the behaviour is correlated to recent findings that men think more sequentially, whilst women are multi-taskers?

The question could soon, in turn, become ‘do women sell better?’ Theoretically, women should be more successful for playing by the rulebook and appearing more detail-oriented? Following the methodology should bring success. This dynamic has played itself at more than one company under my observation. Having discussed the phenomenon, I have found other sales managers having observed the same.

Yet, women have not necessarily been sales leaders. If true, is this due to a lack of skill or will? Perhaps women have, in fact, had above average success.

A recent article in the daily Vancouver Sun highlights this finding as regards the Real Estate profession. It is not exactly classified information that women form a higher percentage of professionals in the real-estate game than the average industry. Reasons given include women’s love for design, decoration and general liking for homes. Additionally, buyers who see them as more diligent and knowledgeable in the field might consider women better sellers of houses.

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/women+sell+better/2082572/story.html

The article not only highlights several female realtors, but also points out how successful each is. The featured professionals are happy to highlight their sales numbers and superlative achievements.

Does this apply to sales in other fields? Do women indeed make better salespersons? Should they be encouraged to enter the profession in greater numbers? On the other hand, does the profession manage to put off women, as does a career in (say) the law? Women have been leaving legal practices for, among other reasons, the propensity of the job to be high-pressure, demanding and requiring long hours. Consequently, do women ‘not succeed,’ due to sales careers’ requirements, in which they do not wish to partake, in spite of their innate abilities?

woman

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