If this does still happen in your business, then Great Guns Marketing recommends that you ask yourself these questions:-
1. Do the field sales executives like getting on the phone? Like all of us, field sales executives are best at doing what they like doing. What you really, really need them to be very good at is face to face conversations with clients and prospects ensuring that your business continually attracts more customers, who buy from you more often, spending more money each time they do. This must be the primary skill your field sales executives have – creating sales appointments over the telephone requires a different skill. This is most effectively done by people with the right mind-set and the right skills who love the challenge of getting on the phone, creating interest in your product or service, and generating plenty of those vital leads and appointments.
2. Is it the most cost-effective way of generating leads and appointments? Field sales executives are more expensive than telemarketers. Fact! If you want to do the calculations yourself, make sure you take the fully loaded costs of both sets of people into account including the employment and fringe costs of both. Once you’ve done this, ask yourself if it really does make sound business sense to have your relatively expensive field sales execs sitting somewhere, on the phone, calling clients and prospects? Especially when someone who is better at it could be doing it better and costing less?
3. Do you measure the success of the lead and appointment generation activities of your field sales execs? What gets measured, gets done, as they say. And it’s true, isn’t it? To maximise the return on the time invested on the phone, some simple measures need to be achieved, and they need to be measured and managed. Here are some examples of measures:-
• Number of calls made per hour/day. Sufficient calls must be made during the time spent on the phone to maximise the number of conversations taking place.
• Number of decision makers, or influencers, spoken to. It is crucial to maximise the number of calls that result in a decision maker conversations. Getting through to decision makers is a skill in itself and a key element of maximising the amount of leads and appointments created.
• Number of call backs made. There needs to be a pipeline of telemarketing activity building that will ultimately result in business. For telephone activity, this includes all of the activities up to a lead or appointment being set
That’s enough questions for now but there certainly are a few more that could be added to the list. Do you have any to add?
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