Successful Telemarketing Sales: Seven Key Elements of the Training Challenge

One of the many reasons an organization chooses to outsource telemarketing calls to a professional telemarketing company is the challenge of assembling and training an effective telemarketing staff. Thats not to say that an organization cannot start from scratch and assemble an in-house team of telemarketing callers, but to do so, management must be fully prepared for the time and attention that training will require.

In planning telemarketing training, management should set specific goals based on characteristics of successful telemarketing callers. Here are some of those characteristics:

1. Professional manner: Telemarketing callers need to be able to speak clearly, use with good grammar, and understand what comments are appropriate for a business conversation. In part, this is as much a matter of hiring well as it is of training, but some refinement is likely to be necessary. With younger employees, for example, it may be necessary to teach them how to talk to older and more traditionally professional business audiences.
2. Following the rules: Telemarketing rules are being tightened all the time, and a successful operation will not stay in business very long if it does not respect those rules. It is managements responsibility to stay abreast of the rules and to communicate them to the telemarketing staff, but that staff has to be rigorously indoctrinated on the importance of following those rules.
3. Product knowledge: Product knowledge is one area where an in-house staff has a clear advantage over an outside telemarketing company. Given that telemarketing tends to be a high-turnover occupation, though; management should plan on a continuing effort to keep telemarketing callers educated about the companys products.
4. Working with a script: There is an art to working with a script. Planning content and conversation flow in advance is important, but too rigorous a script makes the caller sound stilted. Good telemarketing professionals know how to use the script as a general guideline, so they can stay on track while still sounding natural.
5. A step-by-step approach: Progress with a prospective customer must be made incrementally, from initial willingness to engage in the conversation to interest in the subject matter to agreeing to provide information for taking the next step. Callers who try to go from the greeting right to the close are likely to be rejected immediately.
6. Ability to take rejection: Speaking of rejection, the ability to take it and keep calling is a key characteristic of successful telemarketing sales professionals. It is difficult to train people for this, but preparing them for what to expect--and quickly weeding out the people who cant take it--is an important part of telemarketing training.
7. Different approaches for different audiences: Telemarketing callers need to adjust their manner and their approach to different types of sales and different types of prospects. In particular, the transition from, say, customer service surveys to business-to-business sales involves a step up in complexity that a caller may not be ready to handle.

Because training is such a significant challenge, when doing a cost/benefit comparison between developing an in-house staff and using an outside telemarketing company, the time-to-market and management involvement required for training an in-house staff must be factored in.

Sources

Realtor.com

Prairiepublic.org