21 Ways To Boost Telesales Efficiency You Must Know

Every business wants to be successful, especially when it comes to telesales. But, how do you achieve telesales success?

Did you know that the most successful telesales agents spend at least six hours in a week researching prospective customers?

There are numerous articles, videos and tips out there on how to increase sales from telemarketing. There’s a difference between being busy and being productive. Majority of businesses want their telesales agents to be the latter. 

It’s no secret that telesales is an effective way to sell products and services. However, there are a lot of skills to master before one can become a telesales executive. Only if telesales executives master these skills can they improve telesales efficiency.

In this article, we will explore 21 ways you can improve telesales efficiency and boost team productivity. 

21 Ways To Improve Telesales Efficiency And Boost Telesales Agent Productivity

Telesales is the way to increase sales, engage with customers, and connect with new ones. Therefore, increasing the productivity and to improve telesales efficiency is crucial to attaining better results.

Here are 21 ways you can improve your telesales efficiency :

1. Leverage technology

Having a telecalling or telesales solution in the workforce to help improve telesales efficiency. It is a necessity in today’s day and age. 

You could be training your telesales executives on how to be a good telesales agent everyday. But, without the right solution their efforts will not be enough to improve telesales efficiency.

The right telesales solution in the workforce can help massively. It can allow you to gather relevant data about prospects, manage data, record, schedule and monitor calls. It can also help maintain follow-ups, integrate with various platforms for lead management, and much more.

2. Train your telesales agents well

A well-trained telesales executive will bring you favorable results. So, organize timely training and development sessions to help improve telsales efficiency. This is important before they start working on  outbound calling campaigns. 

You can train them to learn more about your products and services and master telesales executive skills. Moreover, you can also improve telesales efficiency by training them on technological solutions.

3. Create a compelling script

A script presents a set of questions, terms, and phrases to guide telesales agents during a call. And sales script writing often affects the conversational flow of agents with prospects or customers. Thus, It is important to be cautious, well informed, and well prepared with a script before making any contact. 

4. Create a phone call blueprint

Blueprints are not the same as telecalling scripts. Telecalling scripts include detailed information about the conversational flow between the agent and a customer. In comparison, a blueprint provides a call structure that telesales agents need to follow for every conversation. 

For this, telesales agents must have clear call objectives. They  must understand the product they are selling. They must also be aware of why the customer would need the particular product or service. 

A typical blueprint might include points like:

• An introduction to stimulate interest
• Effective questioning, usage of open-ended questions to ensure that the conversation goes in the intended direction
• Presenting a solution
• Handling the anticipated objections and feedback
• Final words or closing the deal 

5. Set clear goals before working on a plan

It is important to set clear goals before working on any campaign. Otherwise, telesales agents will end up working on an unproductive and time-consuming task. So, communicate clearly and make sure that everybody fully understands what the expectations and objectives are. 

Ideally, managers and agents can discuss a 30 days sales plan. Then, they agree on the best approach to reach the goals set, and counter other potential challenges that might come along. This can be done by setting the expected number of daily calls, meetings scheduled, emails sent, leads closed, and reports generated.

6. Motivation

Motivation brings the best out of anyone, and it is always required in any kind of work. So, work on motivating your telesales agents for better performance and quality results.

Have one-on-one discussions with them to understand their perspectives and give them your feedback. Provide them with lucrative sales incentives and recognize their efforts. Basically, understand them and know what motivates them and take necessary steps.

7. Encourage a pull communication strategy with customers

The push strategy might be quicker in moving a prospect from awareness to the purchase phase. However, the pull strategy is more effective in creating an ongoing, long-lasting, and lucrative relationship with customers. It also improves word-of-mouth marketing. 

A pull-style conversation allows telesales agents to lead the conversation. This allows your telesales agents to ask relevant questions so that they don’t waste time gathering unnecessary information.

8. Let your team work from home

A hike in telesales agents’ productivity can be noticed when they are working from home rather than in an office. Allowing remote working from a stress-free environment has proven to improve telesales efficiency. 

Not just this, it improves their morale, future-proofs the business, and reduces operational costs.

9. Empower agents to make their own decision

Empowering telesales agents and allowing them to make decisions based on customer needs, makes them more productive. Of course, the process will be difficult at first, and they will make mistakes. But eventually, it will improve telesales efficiency.

They will acquire stronger decision-making skills, make better business-related decisions, and in finding solutions for customer problems.

10. Allow them to share their opinion and their advice

Involving telesales agents in making decisions related to improving their productivity and performance can be highly beneficial.

They know what the problems are, which systems are poor and need updating. Telesales agents know which policy is more effective, and where the processes are lacking a coherent sequence. 

S,o set a meeting from time to time and ask them to share their opinion and advice on these matters accordingly.

11. Incentivize everything that can be measured

Telesales agents tend to be more motivated to do their work when there is something on the line. So, a healthy competition for incentives can improve telesales efficiency and make them perform better. 

Create an incentive program to consistently recognize the work of high performers and to boost productivity and morale.

12. Measure the right performance indicators

Give your telesales agents realistically measurable targets to improve telesales efficiency. The right metric-based targets are the ones that can be reviewed, analyzed, and acted upon. 

Remember that it is important to measure what is relevant to the business need. The right performance indicators can be changed over time.

13. Increase the level of team engagement

In a telesales business, it is important to create a positive workforce environment. Agents must understand their vital role in the success of the business. You can apply a positive workforce strategy for staff engagement. This will improve employee schedule adherence, conformity, engagement, and customer satisfaction.

14. Encourage telesales agents to share their schedule preference

Engaged, stress-free, and satisfied telesales agents who can proactively manage their work-life balance will happen to be more productive. Allow your employees to create their preferred work schedule. 

This will increase both employee and customer satisfaction, increase employee morale and retention, and improve the overall key operational metrics. One easy way to implement this is through a workforce telecalling solution or management system.

15. Provide the best to the best

Deploy the strength of each team leader and position them in accordance with their skills. This is a great way to improve telesales efficiency. 

Putting the best team leaders with the best performers tends to be more productive. This is because you are building on strengths instead of weaknesses.

16. Reduce the administrative burden

Most of the time telesales agents are swamped with a lot of administrative tasks. These include prospecting, leads analysis, data entry, taking notes, etc., which consumes around 10-40% of their time. This should be when they should be focusing on spending more time engaging with prospects to convert them into customers. 

To avoid this problem, you can implement a workforce telecalling solution that will help in liberating telesales agents from these tasks. That would give them more time to focus on selling and engaging with customers.

17. Focus on providing solutions

It is crucial for telesales agents to precisely understand why they are calling customers. From the prospect’s perspective, it is to resolve their problems and to provide them with beneficial solutions. So focus on providing value, show them that you understand their challenges, and offer them something useful.

18. Learn to navigate through the rapid peaks in call volumes

Educate your telesales agents on how to handle customers in rapid peaks of call volumes. These situations can be demoralizing for agents if they are flooded with cases of customer complaints. Furthermore, it could damage a brand’s reputation. 

By having the proper means to remain serene and be proactive, agents will learn to easily handle customers. They need to initiate effective resolution processes and thus, improve telesales efficiency.

19. Communicate internally

Always make sure that each individual on the team is well-informed and looped in the communication process. They must have the latest updates on the targets, deadlines, new deals, and so on. 

This will keep everyone focused on the same goal. Running regular debriefs and sharing information can help employees learn more and improve.

20. Provide real-time feedback

Providing real-time feedback is one of the most efficient ways to make your telesales agents productive. Having the right workforce telecalling solution in place also further helps improve telesales efficiency.

Feedback helps to guide agents through the kind of language they should be using while engaging with customers. It enables agents to resolve customer queries efficiently and increase the First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate.

NeoDove is one such platform that provides telesales agents with complete insight into the customer journey. This telecalling CRM software records relevant data/information about prospects throughout the sales process. Agents can then access this data in real-time when in contact with the prospect, which adds more value to the conversation. 

21. Have the agents do their research

Well-informed telesales agents are always more successful than others. They thoroughly research everything they need to know about their prospects. And they well prepare themselves for any possible question or concern that might arise from the prospect. 

They know exactly when their company initially contacted the prospect, what they discussed, the prospects’ interests, and even what his concerns were.

Also Read : B2B telesales tips

Conclusion

Telesales is an extremely important method to get the word out for your brand but it can be challenging. 

However, you can make the process much simpler by keeping the above points in mind. With a little work, you can ensure your telesales agents master the necessary skills to be successful at telesales. 

Alongside this, implementing the right solution also plays a vital role to improve telesales efficiency. So, consider signing up for the ultimate telecalling CRM and empowering your business today!

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