5 Pragmatic Steps to
Maximize the ROI from Telesales

Embracing Transformation

Today’s customer expects a greater degree of personalization, timely customer support, and omni-channel presence on all digital channels. They prefer self-service and tightly integrated processes that deliver faster service.

Conventional tele-sales processes with siloed infrastructure will stay behind in the race. Digital transformation is no longer a necessity; it is a quintessential business need. Covid-19 has proved to be a force multiplier of this trend: the pandemic has force multiplied transformations across industries. Transformations that took place during the last three years equals ten years combined together. New technologies and models are accelerating the speed of transformations.

Therefore, enterprises should visualize the path to future tele-sales processes for remaining relevant and staying competitive. Chief Technical Officers should stay aware of changes on the horizon and know-how to take the best advantage of those trends. Tele-sales transformation means a lot of things. It has a lot of bits and pieces. There are mainly five questions that stand on the path of tele-sales transformation.

Enterprises face these shouldering questions on their path to Tele-sales transformation

• Operations model: How to perform marketing and sales in terms of scale & structure (people, location)? • Data structure and compliance: How to structure and access data? Data systems that will be added? • Platforms: What platforms will be needed? Will the platforms be cloud based or on-premise? • Measurement: How to measure the performance of marketing and sales initiatives? What will be the KPIS?

Tele-sales processes transformation is a continuous process, and it should enable a seamless pathway across multiple channels, integrate IT infrastructure, and workflows internally to enable cross-channel engagement. It will entail the inside-out transition of a legacy contact center into a customer-centric, cloud-based business and multi-channel centre that fully is optimized for delivering a positive customer experience, increased revenue and improved ROI.

Ensuring Alignment Between Teams

Alignment in the context of tele-sales means a lot of things and it presupposes intentional planning. It can mean a chat channel where sales and marketing teams can collaborate for tailoring scripts. It can also mean cross-team brainstorming sessions. Every team can have related KPIs to measure performance against shared targets.

Enterprises should stop putting their teams on islands. Transparent and real-time communications across the workforce breaks down silos and benefits everyone, especially the customer. Tighter alignment across the sales, marketing and quality teams provides the best opportunities for improving the tele-sales performance. Marketing and sales teams should use one type of messaging about their products or services. The buyers journey needs to be uniform and consistent for ensuring a seamless transition of leads into prospects.

The marketing team should collaborate with the tele-sales agents to provide content covering all stages of the buyer journey. The sales enablement content should help agents to answer the burning questions of prospects and build lasting relations with them. In addition, the sales teams should let marketing teams know about the objections or questions they encounter during the calls.

Leveraging Sales Data

Accurately validated sales data can be a gamechanger – it cannot help in connecting with the relevant audience but also drive purposeful engagement towards closures. Right customer connect data blended with sales intelligence can help enterprises in embracing a buyer-first/ buyer-driven mentality to win their trust and build lasting relationships.

Businesses must commit to fundamental changes in processes, technologies, and techniques to reap the full benefits of the data. Modern-day organizations leverage powerful AI and ML tools to extract customer data from multi-dimensional sources. They use digital automated tech and whitespace discovery methods to eliminate errors from the data and fill the gaps. The data delivers them a complete 360-degree view of customer and purchase intent for scaling personalization and building momentum during tele-sales conversions.

Another relevant technique for making the best use of customer data is using advanced techniques to keep the extracted data updated and accurate. Data maintenance, enrichment, and validation techniques need to be used to improve sales data for better output. These advantages help in digging deeper inside the needs of prospects and answering their questions better.

Deploying a Phone-Call Blueprint

A key to improving telesales is implementing a blueprint of call structure with checkpoints along the route. The blueprint is not exactly a script of defined questions and phrases for being used during calls. The blueprint helps in enabling pre-call planning to move the conversation flow. It provides complete objective of the call and a unique value proposition that needs to be provided to customers.

Enterprises need an onboarding training models to enable new sales reps to get up to speed and intensify their learning progress with industry specific sales training. Experienced agents can be given a boost of product-specific or relationship-building training.

Experts believe that bite-size training sessions are more effective then high-intensity learning sessions. Short but high frequency sales training sessions don’t overwhelm trainees and help them in course correcting errors. That’s why, monthly learning sessions are considered better than quarterly learning sessions for real skill growth. The training sessions should be conducted to empower agents to take independent decisions rather than grilling and over burning them.

It is also important to prove the value of training at every turn. Modern-day learning platforms have inbuilt tools to effectively measure the progress of agents. Analytics provide a clear view about the learning curve of agents and prove how they are benefitting from the sessions.

Lastly, enterprises should continuously gauge and upgrade their trainings as per changing customer needs and market trends. The KPI must be evaluated to ensure that organizations are measuring the right things. They should employ new techniques and technologies to improve the effectiveness of training sessions. Gamification of training processes is the recent trends in this context. Smart organizations are using this trend to continuously monitor the performance of employees at one hand and engaging or motivating them on the other.

Tele-sales as a part of digital demand generation attracts instinctively competitive people. Incentives can really drive the hunger, hard work, and determination of employees. Incentives can push agents towards goals. Enterprises can realize tangible value by incentivizing employees.