Osiri Weithers, head of inside sales at The Marketing Practice, offers some top training tips
One of the questions I’m asked most often is: ‘What training does your telemarketing team need to be effective and drive sales?’ It’s a good question, because more and more companies risk getting it wrong by following outdated telemarketing processes – losing potential opportunities and valuable pipeline.
Put simply, knowledge of just the product or service on offer is no longer enough. To achieve more meaningful conversations and results, the telemarketing team needs to act as an extension of the client’s own sales team.
So what training and skills do your telemarketing people need to differentiate themselves from the typical sales caller and hold the audience’s interest? Here are some of the most important areas to focus on:
Integrating the team
First, think about what you want to get out of the sales calls. Ideally, you want your team to take a consultative approach, focusing on the prospects’ challenges and needs and not just pushing the proposition. So train your team before the start of every new campaign to keep this in mind.
You want the telemarketing team to work as an extension of the client’s – or your own – sales team. To achieve this, callers need training sessions and workshops with key contacts and knowledge holders from the client sales team, and also from within the proposition team.
Use workshops and demos to ensure the best possible understanding of the solution and the kinds of challenges or needs the audience might have. And make sure callers are armed with the right questions to ask the sales and proposition team – such as the common objections they come up against, or what competition they should be aware of. Also consider providing messaging matrixes for the different job functions and industry types that the callers will be targeting, so they know how to tailor the conversation accordingly.
In a nutshell, this stage is about immersing the callers in the audience’s goals and challenges, establishing the value that the proposition will achieve for them.
Structuring the conversation
At this stage it is vital to arm your team with the right questions to help spark a conversation. A call guide will help keep them focused on the prospect and their situation and not just on the proposition. It acts as a sense check to ensure the caller has understood the proposition, the approach and the audience. What’s vital is that the call guide doesn’t become a script. The conversation has to feel natural; we’ve all had those annoying conversations where we can tell that the person on the other end of the phone is reading from a sheet of paper.
It’s also worth making sure that callers are trained to speak in plain English, avoiding jargon but using the right buzzwords where appropriate. Use straightforward language in the call guide, so callers don’t pick up poor language from there.
Before starting a campaign, role play can be used to test out the conversation starters and check how the caller performs in tricky situations. It’s a great way of helping them identify the objections the audience might have and seeing how they will handle them.
Capturing insight
Throughout the campaign, make sure call notes are reviewed regularly, to ensure the callers fully understand the proposition and are taking the right approach to get the desired results. It also provides an opportunity to refine the messaging and approach, or take another look at the data if necessary. As the campaign progresses, continue to share best practice among the team and use your call note reviews to make sure the correct balance of speaking and listening is taking place.
To best capture insight, make sure callers know how to put the CRM system to best use. Callers should know what makes a good lead, and what the lead criteria are. This means that when the leads are handed over to the sales team they’ll be able to follow them up effectively.
Also make sure callers are shown how to capture relevant information in a way that is easy to report on and share with client sales teams. This avoids tricky situations later on.
Most importantly, ensure callers can feed any insight back into the messaging, to continue improving the effectiveness of the campaign. This requires close collaboration with the data team to make sure the information and contacts that the callers have is the best it can be. Callers also need to liaise closely with the marketing team to ensure that any messaging can be kept updated on prospect conversations.
Insight from caller conversations can be fed back into the contact data to strengthen the information held, which helps with the delivery of effective nurture campaigns. This also enables new contacts to be built, adding to the data set for the campaign and providing fresh opportunities.
These are just the essential steps to make your telemarketing more effective. Each team and every campaign will have its own characteristics and you will need to refine your approach according to the objectives of the campaign.
But if you give your callers the information they need, review and refresh your approach regularly, and let the team bring their own personalities to the process of opening conversations, you will see improving results throughout each campaign.
