Posts Tagged ‘telesales’

Offshoring telesales reduces close rates – why?

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

I’ve heard from several friends in call center operations that outsourcing inbound telesales to the Philippines has resulted in close rates below expectations. In at least one case that I know of, a company is re-establishing an internal sales center to try to get to the root of why telesales is harder to offshore than customer care.

After listening to hundreds of sales calls and care calls and helping companies find actionable patterns in them, I’ve got some opinions on the subject.

1) Sales is harder to script than care – a care call is bounded by the product or service the customer has bought. There’s only so much that can go wrong, and most/all those scenarios are documented and can be scripted into the CRM system. Sales calls are open-ended; they can go anywhere, and can veer off track at any moment. Will the prospect complain about the price? Will they bring up a competitor you’ve never heard from? Any left turn a prospect makes can cause an offshored rep, already managing language complexity and reduced empathy, to panic or lose his place (see “confusion kills sales,” below).

2) It’s easier for a prospect to give up than a customer - anyone who has made a call through an offshored center knows that it’s more difficult to communicate with someone who’s from a different culture, with a different accent and familiar with different figures of speech. That difficulty can breed frustration. A current customer with a problem is more inclined to persevere through the frustration, in order to solve her problem, than a prospect, who can hang up the phone or say, “No thanks” and be no worse off than she was before.

3) Confusion kills sales - if your sales process has a number of steps, and/or it has options a customer has to understand and select, the rep or the customer is prone to become confused. And if the rep gets confused, the prospect is soon to follow. My experience listening to and finding patterns in sales calls tells me that confusion is a sales-killer. There are enough negative emotions swirling around the buying process that adding confusion into the mix can tip a sale from Yes to No.

What have your experiences been with offshored telesales? Are there other reasons sales is difficult to outsource?

(If you’re interested in getting a deeper read as to why your telesales operation is undershooting its objectives, we can help.)

(Photo by vlima.com via Flickr Creative Commons)

Related posts:
Complex sales: it’s all about the negatives

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Customers are talking: the weird, alchemic process of distilling insight from stories

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Book clubs are big these days. A group of folks read the same book, then get together and discuss it, accompanied by refreshments (often of the wine & cheese variety).

Besides the social aspects of the book club, there’s something powerful about a group of different people, who’ve read the same story, discussing and deciding what it’s about.

When I try to describe to folks the work I do helping companies gather, find patterns and put to use stories their customers tell, I say that the “discussing and deciding what it’s about” is the secret sauce of the whole process. It’s the part that can’t be automated or left to algorithms to decipher–it requires a diverse group that shares key experiences to root their assessments in common ground.

You can find and collect stories by hand, by computer or by applying algorithms to data sources. (The pluses and minuses of each technique are best left to another post.) But I haven’t figured out a way to computerize the weird alchemy that allows a group of colleagues to distill 100 stories into 10 deep insights in 4 hours, and I’m fairly convinced there may never be a way to automate it.

The mechanics of the process are mundane, at least the way I’ve practiced it. I spread the stories, printed one to a page, around a conference table. Graphs that show the correlation of certain story attributes (the graphs are also stories) are arrayed on the wall. People immerse themselves in the stories. Perhaps they are sales calls. Or complaints. The people read slowly at first, tentatively. Then one person writes something they noticed on a sticky note. Then something else on another. Soon everyone is writing.

They may share thoughts while this happens. I scramble around the room collecting stickies and plastering them to an empty wall. Eventually the pace of writing stickies slows. It’s like cooking microwave popcorn. When the frequency of popping slows down, it’s done.

They cluster the stickies, finding relationships. Then they name the clusters–those are insights. Perhaps they go through another round of clustering and naming, if they have time and energy.

Then we talk. There are 8-10 clusters that stand out. They may be issues their customers are facing–which present opportunities and threats for the company’s products. They may be values the customers hold–which are key to marketing and positioning the company. They’re always interesting, usually surprising, and often unveil conflicting or contradictory views. For instance, a very strong attribute the company or product has often is highly valued by one constituency but viewed negatively by another.

It’s an amazing process to watch, to see a group of people take the same material, view it from different angles, reconcile their assessments, and come up with “the truth” as they see it.

It’s a lot like a book club, without the wine and cheese.

UPDATE, 6 May: Per Stephane Dangel’s comment below, here is a fictional example of a story told by a graph:

This chart tells a story, don’t you think? It’s a crosstabs chart comparing people who bought a product over the phone versus those who didn’t, under two scenarios. In one, the sales representative used established best practices; in the other, he/she didn’t.

I get two themes from this “story.” One, when reps use best practice, more sales are made. Two, best practice is not frequently used.

Both are valuable insights for a company seeking to improve its telesales. The first is probably no surprise (though it’s possible to imagine a situation where using best practice would make no difference in closing sales–that would be a surprise!). The second theme is probably surprising under any circumstance!

Related post:
Another kind of value proposition

[If you're interested, the new version of Cynthia Kurtz's "Working With Stories" e-book contains a case study I did on my first story project. Check it out here.]

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Customers are talking: turning points in telephone sales calls

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

I’m working on a project to listen to telephone sales calls and help the client find patterns explaining why some calls end up in a sale and others don’t. Each call is a story, complete with emotion, conflict, and turning points. Listening to dozens of these, pictures begin to emerge of how people buy, and how, even when they like the product and may want to buy, don’t. And it has nothing to do with logic.

One turning point I’ve experienced is the moment when a call turns from being headed to a close, to not. On the calls, it’s very subtle: a pause, a change of subject, perhaps an additional question from the prospect. But afterward, a call that seemed to be heading toward a sale instead is, at best, a promise to call back.

The best way to explain it is to relate a personal story.

I’ve been a customer of Verizon Wireless for more than five years. I got a telemarketing call from them today, offering inducements to renew my service contract early. I’ve been evaluating this for a while now (this is a subtext of my posts on the Blackberry Storm), and after discussing it at some length with my wife, we’re headed toward renewal.

This call, then, could have been Verizon’s way of closing the deal. I was pretty ready, although I was thinking of doing this in March. If the deal was good enough, perhaps I would pull the trigger today. The call went something like this:

“Mr. Caddell,” the rep said, “we are offering some extras today if you want to renew your contract early. You might be able to get a discount on a new phone.”

“When does my contract expire?”

“The end of July.”

“I thought it was the end of March.”

(turning point 1) “That’s the time when you are eligible for an early equipment upgrade. Your contract expires in July.”

“OK, what are you offering?”

(turning point 2) “100 extra minutes per month.” (This wasn’t attractive to me at all. We don’t use the minutes we have now.)

“How much off the phone?”

(turning point 3) “Well, you’ll be eligible for that at the end of March.”

“Earlier you said I could get a discount off a phone.” (I didn’t tell her that Verizon had already sent me two mailings offering me phone discounts for renewing now.)

“I said you might be.”

There was no way was I going to renew then. At each turning point, in fact, I became farther from renewing than I had been before the call. Instead of feeling happy, encouraged, eager to get a new phone, I felt frustrated, annoyed, and that I had wasted time even picking up the phone.

It wasn’t the rep’s fault. She was given a difficult product to sell (competing, in fact, with the company’s own mailings). When I began to ask pointed questions, the pitch fell apart. There was probably no rep on earth who could have closed me with that offer.

Which is a significant learning from this project for me. Selecting and training reps is only a part of the formula for success in telesales. The product must be useful, and the offer must be made attractive. And that work happens far outside the call center.

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