Strategies to be successful with your outbound calling

Outbound calling services tips

Prepare yourself and become the professional everyone expects

While this may sound too simple and no-brainer, a lot of people make the mistake of making outbound calls halfheartedly and without any preparation. If your outbound calling strategies, efforts and attempts have fallen flat, this could be the major reason behind it.

As with everything else, professionalism and being prepared to address the issues that come up are extremely imperative to improve the chances of success. It is important that you understand why you make the call in the first place and draw an intelligent goal for each call. Only then can you strive towards the goals you have established.

Look at some of the examples how you can do it

• If you are making sales calls, think about how many sales you require to ensure that you break-even and to make the entire effort financially viable.
• If you are calling for to collect over dues, create a plan that can financially justify the efforts you are putting in and try to meet the established goals.

Always research and be well-informed why you are making the calls

When you make calls to someone without knowing why or who you are calling, it can only do one thing for you—make your job harder than it previously was. If you call asking for someone and just lost the words and the name of the person you are calling for, it not only sounds disrespectful but also extremely unprofessional.

Most of the times, people are not ready to talk to people who do not know what they are talking and it can become all the more difficult especially if you are talking over the phone. In the age of internet and social media where you can get information about people and businesses quite easily than ever before, none of your excuses are ever going to sell.

It is always important to keep in mind that you are not the only person who would probably make the call to the same company with a similar offering. There is a myriad of companies doing the same job you do and if you play the clumsy-game, you are going to lose, sooner or later. As such, the only best way is to know what you are doing and have the information you need to have handy.

Grab all the details that you can and sound knowledgeable, authentic and professional, all the time, even when the other side is cold.

Never forget to measure the performance; and not just measure, act upon the findings

This is one of the most important outbound calling tips. In order to measure the performance of a team and its members, there always are key performance indicators or KPIs established in every context. Most of the times, the businesses are always keen on assessing the performance of the teams and agents by assigning the service of quality specialists. However, they tend to miss one of the most important parts of it—acting upon the findings.

Performance appraisal was established not only to reward the employees who perform exceptionally well, but also to identify the areas where the performance and quality of outbound sales calls need to be improved, to identify the reasons for such performance issues and also to implement corrective measures.

For example: If you have established a sales target for your teams and most of the teams achieve it except one, would you investigate into the issue or sit idle thinking that almost all are achieving it? A good businessman investigates, finds the reasons behind it and solves the same.

If you have not considered this aspect yet, it is real important that you do now.

Figure out why your agents aren’t able to sell

If you are a professional company offering call center services for small businesses whose primary target is sales and your agents aren’t selling, it is important that you find out why.

Following are a few examples

• If you have an agent with exceptional sales percentage and has high cancellation rate as well, the chances are he/she is not following your instructions or is not ethical.
• It could be that the agent is not working as well as he/she should.
• It can also happen due to limited knowledge of the agent about the products being offered to the audience.
• Also, may be his/her outbound calling skills are not good enough to convince the prospects.

The corrective measure to any issue begins by identifying the fundamental reason that caused the problem in the first place; only if you are able to understand the reason can you devise befitting and intelligent strategies to solve the problem. So, call monitoring in call center is something really inevitable.

Be prepared to face challenges and keep going

Outbound cold calling is one of the toughest tasks to successfully pull off and is acknowledged so even in the call center community. Most people would never like to get an intruding call offering items even if they want them. There can be several elements that can prevent the person you are calling to refuse the offer you are making.

The point is that let downs are bound to happen and it can happen more often and persistently than you would like.

Whatever be the situation, you need to keep going and doing everything you can. Sooner or later, you will see your efforts making better returns than you have ever imagined.

If you are treating your customers like kings, do not ever treat your agents any lesser

In the grand scheme of everything that happens to impress your customers, if you forget the need to rewards, recognize and make your employees feel wanted, you are destined to fail again regardless of your outbound calling techniques. Always keep in mind that for the customers, the agents they talk to are the company and if your agents are not treated, paid and rewarded well, it will all seep down to reducing the customer satisfaction levels.

Employee dissatisfaction is extremely contagious and it does not take much time for the dissatisfaction to affect your customers. So it is important that you devise certain employee engagement, rewards and appreciation programs where the employees all can feel valued, respected and wanted by the company.

If you give the care your employees need, there is no doubt that they will double it and give to the customers thus paving way for successful outbound campaigns.

Intelligently weaving these points to your business strategies can undoubtedly make your employees committed and your business reach soaring heights.