Outbound and inbound teleselling has to be the most difficult form of sales there is. Everything that can make a sales person great in person, rarely works on the phone. For example, a “normal” sales presentation involves visual contact, which encompasses body language, facial expressions and other non verbal cues. There is also no time limit to a normal sales presentation allow the customer and sales person to work free of heavy time pressure whereas many telesales roles have an ACD (Average call duration) between 3 and 10 minutes on average.

So how can you succeed in telesales without going crazy? Firstly there are a few factors that many telesales people don’t think about. Time management, we’ve already stated that telesales is quite tightly timebounded, but because call centre mangement quite often tell staff when to take their breaks. Staff themselves don’t really think about managing their own time. For example

Lets say you worked two hour bursts 09:00 – 11:00 with a 15 min break, 11:15 – 13:00 with an hour for lunch 14:00 – 16:00 with a 15 min break and 16:15 – 17:30. Rather than plodding through the day as it comes, look at the day as a whole, think about how many calls you want to do per “burst” this can sort your productivity for the day. Work out how long on average it takes to ask your qualifying questions and sell the revelent benefits

Next think about call quality, now, to be great in telesales, you need to consider three attitudes. Firstly, you need to be proactive. This means that you don’t get upset by the unpleasant customer you spoke to earlier, you forget the last call and the next call and concentrate on the call at hand. Its maybe your 50th call of the day but its your customers first.

Next, we need to think about being objective focused. Why are we making a telephone sales call? Quite simply, to make a sale! Never forget this, however the call goes. Ask for the business wherever you can (ethically of course) because telesales is usually more transactional as opposed to consultative, we can present our products after we have asked our qualifying questions to find out what the customer needs, and, after testing the waters, ask the customer if they would like to go ahead with it. I’f you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Finally, we need to be target driven…all the time! Not just when the Team leader says so, don’t do it for the team leader, do it for yourself. Break your yearly target down into monthly ones, your monthly ones down into weekly ones and your weekly ones into daily ones. Once you have that daily target, you now have a benchmark to hit everyday and something to work towards everyday. Plus, aiming to hit £500 every day in immediate sales is a lot easier psychologically than trying to hit £10,000 a month.