Everyone who wants to make cold calls, take one step forward? What? No takers?”
“Okay, who wants to call everyone on our invite list to the seminar to see if they’re coming?”
“What do you mean you’re too busy?”
Making those calls is usually not a favorite pastime for your already busy staff, is it? Well how do those call center companies do it? Can’t we just do what they do?
What do they do anyway?
Here are six secrets that your call center company won’t tell you about how they go about a successful calling campaign, whether it’s qualifying leads, confirming an audience or responding to inquiries from advertising. Please don’t tell them we told you.
6 Secrets Your Call Center Company Won’t Tell You
1. The Right Stuff
Nothing is more of a turn off than to receive a business call from a bumbling, mumbling person who’s not sure what to say or a bad actor reading sing-song from a script. Good call center companies recruit people with outgoing personalities, who are engaging and well spoken. They make sure they have the right kind of people making calls.
2. The Right Target
Spending too much time on the wrong titles, people who are not really the decision makers, is a common rookie mistake. The president doesn’t always make the decision you are looking for and in fact sometimes engaging the wrong person can do more harm than good. Experience in gathering accurate intelligence about how a company makes decisions and who are the various influencers is a valuable skill set that call centers don’t necessarily want to share.
3. Once Is Not Enough
One call usually won’t do it. Statistics show that it takes an average of 7 to 13+ touches to acquire a ready-to-buy qualified lead, over half of which can be strategically placed telephone contacts. Knowing when and what to say in follow up calls is critical to nurturing the prospect to fruition.
4. Timing
“There’s no time like the present” doesn’t always apply to marketing calls. The best time of day and best day of the week may vary from industry to industry, and even from company to company, but every one of them has an optimum receptive window. Finding it takes some experience and expertise. Timely responses to inquiries are even more critical or it will be your competition getting the nod instead of you.
5. Professional Listening
You can’t listen with your mouth. The purpose of calling is to gather useful information. Good call centers provide ongoing training to their callers in Telemarketing Best Practices and follow through to make sure those practices are being implemented. This training focuses on developing strong listening skills and how to engage with someone based on their responses. They listen carefully to what prospects say, as well as what they don’t.
6. Conversational Flexibility
Having flexibility in one’s responses and following the direction of a conversation is a key engagement skill. Canned scripts are a fatal mistake. Intelligent relevant questions from the caller demonstrate expertise within their field and spur informative responses from the prospect. One of the big secrets to a successful telemarketing or calling campaign outcome is training callers in these techniques. Here’s another article about cold calling scripting best practices.
When you put it that way…
The right kind of people making calls to the right person, calling the number of times necessary at the right time of day and week, to listen to what they have to say… when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so secretive. It just seems to make sense.
You can either take the time to put these practices into play within your organization or when you decide to hire a professional call center company, just make sure they know the secrets.
