Understand how to avoid the dangers and difficulties associated with telesales to improve lead conversion for your company.
In this webinar, our esteemed speakers share telesales tactics for 2024 and some handy advice on becoming a better salesperson and manager.
- Rishabh Ladha, Co-Founder, SquadStack
- Nikhil Parwal, Business Head, LeadSquared
You can watch the webinar in its entirety or read the takeaways below.
Buyers are becoming more at ease communicating with salespeople virtually rather than in person.
This is changing how businesses sell, with fewer placing a priority on field sales and more putting an emphasis on inside sales, which is the art and science of creating a strong business pipeline and generating sales growth remotely.
The telesales model has evolved in line with this shifting B2B sales landscape. The term “telesales” is often misunderstood, with many organizations thinking that telesales focuses purely on high-volume, transactional sales.
However, telesales is a powerful, multi-faceted discipline that covers a broad spectrum of remote phone-based sales activities and strategies.
Rishab Ladha, the co-founder of SquadStack highlights the challenges and aspects that can be improved instantly. Before we get into that, here’s a brief introduction to SquadStack.
About SquadStack
SquadStack is a Saas-Enabled Talent Marketplace for Inside Sales. Their goal is to make skilled employment available to everyone, anywhere. With a strong emphasis on quality and the use of technology and data, they aspire to enable millions of inside sales experts worldwide.
Their aim is to assist businesses scale with greater conversions, speed, accuracy, flexibility, and cost by fusing the power of AI with human expertise.
With the support of on-demand and “qualified” telecallers, a strong tech stack, and quality-control and script improvement driven by artificial intelligence, SquadStack enables you to scale your outbound sales and operations calling in a secure, efficient, and high ROI variable-cost model.
Telesales Problems: Hiring, Training, and Management
The three main problems in telesales are hiring, training, and management. All these problems can be boiled down to one issue: the lack of structure. This lack of structure causes several problems.
Hiring is difficult in telesales because it is hard to assess aptitude from a resume alone. Managers often end up hiring the wrong people, which causes problems with scaling. There have also been situations of over-hiring, burnout, and cultural problems.
When it comes to training, businesses face a massive challenge. Classroom training or long training doesn’t scale, and businesses have been struggling to find a way to effectively train their employees for a long time.
Salespeople management is always a big challenge. You can give them a CRM and a dialer, but it is still difficult to manage productivity. Campaign management and agent management are two distinct things that are equally important.
We asked 232 salespeople about the tools that are a part of their telesales tech stack. The most popular response, with 49% of the vote, was CRM software.
You need a good system to run an effective telesales team and the investment in that system is as important as hiring people.
Things to Improve in Telesales
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many companies are looking for ways to cut costs and improve efficiency. One way to do this is to invest in better-quality managers, who can create more flexible work environments and improve data security.
This will help to reduce the number of times businesses are affected by data breaches or spamming and will also make it easier to model productivity and costs in a recessionary environment.
There is a slowdown in every country across the world and sales is an expensive function.
This means that there will be a lot more focus on better cost and productivity modeling for any type of sales, especially telesales.
We asked 232 salespeople about what managers can do to boost telesales efficiency. 31% of them think mapping or assigning leads to representatives based on their expertise could help.
Here are a few more things you can improve in 2024 for a better outcome:
- Better quality outreach that is value-adding and not spammy.
- Better managers and better incentive alignment can lead to better performance.
- Flexible work environments that lead to a better life experience and create more jobs.
- Data security for both internal and external teams.
- Better cost and productivity modeling.
6 Key Telesales Trends That Will Magnify in 2024
Remote is here to stay
People are getting used to the idea of working remotely, and it is here to stay.
Telesales is not the highest-paying sales job, it is usually an entry-level job. It’s difficult to make a good salary and live in a large city, especially in a country like India. After the pandemic, many businesses were uncomfortable with the idea of remote work because they couldn’t hold employees accountable for their work.
In order to make a remote sales team work, you need to have good technology like a CRM in place to hold people accountable.
We asked the webinar attendees which KPIs they track to measure the performance and accountability of their telesales teams. Not surprisingly, the opportunity-to-win rate is the main performance indicator for 43% of sales managers.
A culture of accountability is critical for a successful remote team, especially in telesales. Without someone looking over their shoulder, employees need to be held accountable for their productivity.
This can be done by setting clear expectations and goals and providing regular feedback. And working remotely can help to reduce costs and access a wider talent pool.
Optimizing sales ops
Sales ops brings system to selling by providing support, enabling processes, and driving the sales team to sell more efficiently.
Sales ops is a broken function in many companies because it doesn’t integrate different systems, it’s difficult to track data, and calls are often not recorded. This makes it difficult to understand what’s going on and how to improve sales.
CRMs like LeadSquared integrate into everything that already exists. You just need an individual who can help you understand what’s going on and help figure out a way to improve your sales.
Another aspect is to measure sales team productivity, you need to track and analyze a range of data points including the number of sales activities, calls, conversations, and pipeline value. This data should be consistently tracked and monitored in order to identify areas of improvement.
Productivity is key
It’s no secret that telesales is a successful technique to market goods and services, boost sales, interact with existing clients, and attract new ones.
Therefore, improving your telesales agent’s productivity and efficiency is essential to getting better outcomes.
With the correct workforce telecalling solution, you can manage data, plan calls and maintain follow-ups, record and monitor calls, collect pertinent information about prospects, and much more.
You’ll get good results from a trained telesales professional. To guarantee that your telesales agents are well-prepared before they start working on campaigns, schedule timely training and development events.
When telesales professionals operate remotely rather than in an office, their productivity tends to increase.
It has been demonstrated that allowing remote work from a stress-free setting increases an agent’s productivity.
The pull method is more successful at building a continuous, long-lasting, and lucrative relationship with clients and enhances word-of-mouth marketing than the push strategy, which may be quicker to get a prospect from the awareness to the buy phase.
One of the most voted, 38% of people feel the biggest challenge that slows down telesales is not knowing which leads to contact first.
Telesales representatives can take the initiative and ask pertinent questions during pull-style conversations to avoid wasting time obtaining irrelevant data.
Call Quality Coaching
There are several reasons to coach call center agents. It may be concentrated on progress, as a coach aids a person in overcoming their limitations in the workplace.
Additionally, it teaches your representatives new software and technologies that can aid in improving client relations and offering first-rate customer service.
A frequently underutilized strategy for getting the most out of your staff is coaching. You may use it to retain top people, tap into the tremendous human resource potential, and develop the next generation of leaders for your organization.
If you are still unsure about the value of teaching call center agents, take a brief look at some of the major factors that can assist you in overcoming these difficulties:
- Maintaining customer satisfaction
- Providing top-notch goods and services
- Working in collaborative networked organizations
- Managing continual change
- Retaining top personnel
- Delivering excellent performance
We asked the webinar attendees, what should be the average duration of a telesales cycle? 37% of them reported up to 45 days and 24% said less than 30 days.
Sales Manager 3.0
In telesales, sales managers need more training in order to be effective. The sales industry has not done enough to make their sales managers cutting edge and they should spend more money on manager training.
Sales managers play an important role in any organization as they are responsible for leading and motivating a team of salespeople to achieve targets. However, it is not always easy to be a successful sales manager as it requires a mix of art and science.
There are three areas where sales managers can focus on in order to improve their performance: remote working, sales training and development, and effective use of data.
Sales managers are struggling to adapt to the new remote working model. The biggest challenge is managing salespeople who are not used to working remotely.
The key is to have a data-driven approach and to know how to read the data to understand what the problem is and how to fix it.
Analytics is Your Most Important Weapon
The three most important things for a business are sales, marketing, and product.
Marketing and product teams are typically more expensive than sales teams, but sales teams are the ones that talk to customers and have insights about them.
There can be tension between sales and marketing teams because sales teams can miss out on analytics and insights about customers because you’re just too busy getting to your quota and getting to your number.
It’s critical that you look on your sales team as an inside-generation machine. In other words, a team that generates leads from within your organization.
Specifically, in telesales, you need to ensure that you’re capturing analytics effectively. This means going beyond basic productivity metrics and really understanding your sales funnel.
It’s important to invest in lead quality analysis, so that you can understand why people are buying (or not buying) from you. This information can then be used to improve your marketing efforts.
Telesales Predictions of 2024
There are two big changes that will happen in the next few years in the business world:
First by 2025, SMEs & SMBs will be able to take up many more advancements and take a massive step into building their telesales engine, which big players marginally did.
“In a few years, technology will advance to the point where smaller businesses will be able to put together a stack of sales tech that rivals that of a large business spending a lot of money on a custom Salesforce setup. This will allow them to run a more efficient and effective sales team.”
Rishabh Ladha, Co-Founder, SquadStack
Second, Technological advancements will help automate the support function in the future, and today’s support team will also be selling (upselling & cross-selling) tomorrow.
Many businesses are looking to automate and cut costs on support because it is not a revenue-generating activity. However, there is a future potential where the support team becomes an upselling and cross-selling machine. This would increase the lifetime value of customers.
Once a customer is acquired, it is important to extract and increase the lifetime value of that customer. This can be done through the support team by automating some processes and making the team a revenue center.
Give your agents the freedom to deliver the ideal pitch at the right time.
With access to the prospect’s information, LeadSquared enables you to totally customize your sales pitch. To know more about LeadSquared capabilities, book a quick 1-1 consultation with us.
Audience Questions
First, make sure that the phone numbers used by the Telesales agents are not Spam/Junk. This could highly impact the pick-up percentage.
Second, try to call during the daytime when people are more likely to be available.
Third, keep the calls short and to the point in order to avoid frustrating potential customers.
Incentivize them on achieving daily goals starting with making calls from the CRM and making sure they are completing the tasks assigned to them.
You can also make CRM the only Performance Management mechanism for their efforts that will translate into their incentive/bonus calculation.
Start a multi-channel approach which means using more than one method to communicate with a client. This could include email, texts, calls, and LinkedIn.
Better research about the client can help you personalize your outreach and increase your chances of connecting and converting them into a customer.
Speaker
Rishabh Ladha
Co-Founder, SquadStack
Featured in the Forbes 30 under 30 list of 2018, Rishabh Ladha is the Co-founder of SquadStack, a SAAS-enabled talent for marketplace for sales. They help consumer businesses that sell high-ticket products and services across various market segments like Brokerage, Lending, Insurance, E-Commerce & Edtech, etc. to improve their sales conversions and funnel efficiency.
