Technical skills
The ability to conduct a conversation over the phone does not yet make for a qualified, competent telemarketer or telesales professional. It takes a certain number of skills and a natural aptitude to maintain a high volume of calls at the standard required to achieve good quality results, particularly in B2B lead generation. An agency will go to great lengths to recruit the right people and provide the client with a pool of call agents, who will be deployed depending on the requirements of each campaign — including multilingual agents for campaigns abroad.
Some skills can be learned, but others are inherent in a person's personality, including self-confidence and the tenacity to stay focused and maintain performance despite repeated rejection. There's nothing easy or attractive about cold calling, and even hard-nosed salespeople shy away from it, particularly those who are used to warm, qualified leads. The strong persuasion skills required for sales are very different attributes than those needed for a research task or survey, and sales agencies recruit and adapt their staff's skills accordingly.
Here at proceeds, our employees are trained according to the best quality standards to equip them with basic skills — solution selling, relationship building, listening skills — in line with their areas of expertise. This is then complemented by campaign-specific training about the customer's brand and offering, the competitive landscape, product benefits, and customer pain points.
With this level of training, agency employees have tools at their disposal that are not available to the average person in a typical office environment.
Proactive customer management
Although telemarketing is a collective term, it includes many different activities such as lead generation, appointment scheduling, telesales, inbound call handling and, in some cases, telephone market research before and after sales. An experienced account manager who has broad and deep knowledge in these areas will use best practices from previous campaigns while working to understand what needs to be done differently as no campaigns are the same. An agency will: 1. Assign agents with the right skills and experience for your campaign profile.2. Work on a detailed briefing that details your offer, USPs, key messages, and desired results, using a framework such as BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) to understand key criteria.3. An early review of the campaign to collect feedback from customers and agents, with obstacles and issues, Implement those that are not included in the briefing.4. Yourself Listen to conversation recordings to understand which agents and approaches are most effective so that best practices can be shared across the team.5. Identify the data and approaches that are more popular than others so that resources can be targeted where they are most benefit.6. Set up a continuous feedback loop using reporting tools to optimize campaign performance. 3. Structured, systematic approach
An account manager within an agency also has the advantage that he receives detailed insight into campaign performance through a tailor-made calling platform:
Productivity The calling platform increases the fluidity of calls and allows agents to track the pipeline, capture notes and feedback. The productivity level is naturally higher in this environment (15-20 calls per hour) than in-house, where the employee may be struggling with a standard CRM or calling from a list in Excel and manually updating it. Reports and metrics This type of platform also provides a wealth of reports and metrics that give the account manager a better overview and enable them to optimize campaign performance at both the agent and campaign levels.
data management
The platform and the reporting it supports make data management easier — a natural cornerstone of any successful call campaign. It shows where the data quality is poor and from which data sources the pipeline and the results are fed. Instead of using up the data for quick results, agents can maintain the pipeline, plan recalls, send literature to follow up, and develop both short and long-term opportunities.
Call Recordings Call recordings provide another level of visibility and transparency and are the perfect tool for monitoring ongoing performance. They give customers clear insight into how their offer is being presented and received and enable them to provide feedback to optimize results. This structured approach combined with tailor-made platforms and systems provides a much better basis for success than a typical office infrastructure.
resource management
Sales agents from agencies are in a results-oriented, competitive environment in which everyone is 100% focused on the same or similar tasks. It's harder to focus when you're juggling a mix of reactive and proactive tasks, and it's easier to get distracted in a less controlled environment. People who talk on the phone in an office environment where no one else is calling can also feel unsafe, especially if they're not trained.
When financial resources permit, it is possible to replicate a call center environment in-house, taking the same approach to recruiting employees, training and ongoing coaching, and IT infrastructure. But even with the required investments, it can be difficult to achieve the capabilities and flexibility of a sales agency. A larger pool of agents who share multiple campaigns allows the agency to move callers to increase or decrease a campaign as needed, to maintain a consistent flow of leads or to respond to spikes and troughs when managing incoming leads.
If you want to expand abroad, an agency can not only provide multilingual agents but also support calls outside of business hours, which may be less acceptable in a normal office environment.
An agency's resources can also be used at very specific times of day, depending on the profile of the target group. Phone calls to schools, for example, are often more successful in the late afternoon because then you have a better chance of reaching decision makers. An in-house team may not be as flexible with their time or ability to target calls.
A large team of trained, experienced sales agents offers a wider range of skills and experience to deal with different levels of decision makers, different functions, sectors, and types of results. When conversion is achieved in a specific area, the agency's resources can easily be shifted to where they yield the best return without significant training costs.
Aside from resource flexibility, an internal team needs a lot of time to manage, not only to ensure that campaigns run effectively, but also to address staffing issues — vacation, illness, turnover, and training and development. With an outsourced solution, the agency takes care of all these aspects without affecting the time and resources of internal management.
brand reputation
A structured framework that supports a consistent approach gives you control over how your brand is presented. Thorough briefing, close support and ongoing monitoring through conversation recordings and detailed reports ensure that the message conveyed reflects your brand values and guarantees the correct positioning of your offers. An in-house employee may already be familiar with your brand and could be seen as better able to answer technical or probing questions about products or services, but an agency with good onboarding can present what a client has to offer much more effectively. Sales agents receive very specific training on the offers they present, with a clear process for escalating questions or planning follow-up appointments with sales or internal teams, if necessary. They typically take a solution-oriented approach by asking open-ended questions and seeking feedback and insights, but with a clear understanding of the scope of their role.
A controlled, measured approach based on solid, thorough onboarding with a consistent message and continuously monitored for quality and consistency ensures your brand's reputation. A less structured and monitored environment and approach may be less effective.
Profitability of investment
Whether handled internally or through an agency, telemarketing can be one of the more expensive marketing channels. However, when done well, it can generate a very strong ROI, particularly in the B2B sector, where the results are often more valuable. In this regard, a controlled, measurable approach is critical to ensure the quality of the output you need.
Once you've got a large team, it's important that they work at full capacity and minimize downtime to ensure the return on investment, but that can be a challenge when requirements fluctuate. An agency with a large pool of sales agents who serve multiple customers can shift resources and redeploy employees if requirements change at short notice.
conclusion
Many companies have built highly successful internal telemarketing teams over time, which produce a steady stream of high-quality opportunities for their sales team, but this also necessarily entails challenges and low points. Furthermore, it is rarely the easiest or most cost-effective option. Aside from financial investments, there are many important considerations, including management overhead and time, hidden costs such as call fees, IT infrastructure, and, of course, higher personnel numbers and costs. Outsourcing may not make sense for every company, but it also has some benefits. At the top of the list are productivity levels that can be achieved by dedicated agency teams and proven campaign management on specially developed technology platforms. And if you're new to telemarketing or telesales — perhaps trying out a new approach or have a short-term need — an outsourcing option allows you to evaluate different models and approaches, particularly “build or buy,” to determine what's right for you and your business.
