VoIP can help small businesses run a successful telesales campaign by using the same advanced calling features found in enterprise systems.
Telesales campaigns can help your business in many ways. They can increase revenue and profit by following up on leads, setting appointments for your field sales team, selling directly to prospects and customers, or strengthening relationships with existing customers.
To run a successful telesales campaign, you must plan carefully and provide the team with training, support, prospect and product information, and tools that help them make calls productively and cost-effectively.
VoIP provides an affordable solution for agents working in small teams or large multi-channel contact centers. Your agents can access detailed contact information on customer relationship management (CRM) systems integrated with the telephone system. They can also monitor progress and workload on VoIP dashboards.
Supervisors can monitor calls for compliance and quality control and use VoIP’s analytics to balance workloads and make the most effective and productive use of their resources.
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Implement VoIP to run a telesales campaign.
VoIP is available as a hosted service from the cloud—no need to invest capital in your telephone or contact center infrastructure. Instead, you pay a monthly fee to a service provider who manages, maintains, and upgrades a system you can access via the Internet.
You can choose the features and services that would be most useful for your business and benefit from advanced communications with minimal delay or disruption. With VoIP in place, you can also reduce your calling costs because long-distance calls travel over the Internet at lower rates.
With VoIP, even small telesales teams can use the same advanced calling features in enterprise systems, helping them operate an efficient, professional service.
Get the right campaign capacity.
You may need additional phone capacity to handle increased call volumes if you only run telesales campaigns occasionally. This is essential if you market seasonal products or aim to make the most of certain opportunities like Black Friday.
Installing surplus fixed capacity to cover peak periods is an expensive option that leaves you with underutilized resources most of the time.
VoIP solves that problem by making additional virtual lines available on demand. Ask your service provider to deploy the number of additional lines you need. The lines will be available almost immediately with no delay or disruption.
You can handle higher incoming call volumes without increasing waiting times, which can frustrate callers. If you reschedule agents to take on more calls at peak times during the campaign, you can be confident they have the capacity.
Centralize customer and prospect data.
Providing access to detailed information on customers and prospects before a call can help agents personalize conversations and offers. Accurate contact details are essential to ensure agents reach the right person. Information on product preferences, purchase history, and responses to previous offers and campaigns lets agents tailor their approach for each call.
Personalization is important, according to a consultancy Accenture study (“Mastering Omni-Channel B2B Customer Engagement”). Fifty-one percent of respondents welcomed information about promotions and special offers, but 54 percent preferred personalized recommendations.
Information from previous marketing campaigns and other sales and marketing interactions helps teams build a profile of individual customers and prospects. By collating the information in a single place, sales and marketing teams can share their insights and findings to drive improved results.
VoIP makes it easy for agents to access this information through integration with CRM systems. Agents can review the information and use a click-to-call feature to dial a contact from the CRM system.
Offer contact options
Although a telesales campaign is primarily based on voice calls, some customers and prospects may prefer contact by other channels.
With VoIP, you can offer contact by email, text, instant message, or video conference in addition to voice. This increases flexibility and improves convenience for customers.
The ability to offer contact by video conference is important if you market products that require demonstration or want to differentiate your service to higher-value customers and prospects.
Ensure agents understand compliance.
When planning a telesales campaign, it’s essential to avoid contacting prospects registered on the National Do Not Call list. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) publishes these lists to businesses and call centers and imposes fines on businesses that fail to comply.
Despite this regulation, the National Consumer Law Council reported that there were more than 3.5 million complaints about unwanted calls in 2016, double the 2010 figure.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has taken further action to discourage call centers from sending automated outbound marketing messages, also known as robocalls.
To alert agents before they make unwanted calls, your CRM system should include details of any prospects registered on the FTC list. In addition, you should set clear policies on the use of automated messages.
Integrate sales and marketing activities.
Telesales can deliver great results when part of an integrated marketing campaign. Using telesales to contact prospects who respond to advertisements or promotional offers can increase conversion rates.
Following up email campaigns with a telesales call can move prospects through the buying cycle as part of a lead nurturing program. And notifying customers of an upcoming product launch or promotional campaign can build awareness and interest before the event.
Ensure the telesales team is aware of other sales and marketing initiatives so they can refer to them and focus on the same benefits when talking to prospects. This ensures that each part of the campaign delivers consistent brand and marketing messages.
You can help agents to access campaign information by building prompts about other marketing initiatives into telesales scripts and publishing the scripts on the integrated CRM system.
Give agents support
Your agents may need support on some of their calls. For example, a customer may require detailed product information that the agent does not have. Or the customer might need information that is available from other departments.
VoIP makes it easy for agents to transfer calls or set up a conference call while speaking to the customer. Agents can use VoIP’s Presence feature to check the availability of a colleague or a product specialist before making contact.
VoIP lets agents escalate voice calls to conference calls to ensure customers get the best possible advice. Alternatively, agents can send instant messages to colleagues during a call if they only need confirmation of specific information.
Supervisors can also provide support during a call by listening in and offering advice via instant message. If there is a major problem, VoIP lets the supervisor “barge in” to the call to deal with the issue.
Follow-up telesales calls.
Following up a telesales call with a brief email message can help build relationships with customers and prospects.
The email can thank them for their interest in the product, confirm a sale or appointment details, or ask if they would like to receive further information from your company.
VoIP’s unified messaging feature lets agents record details of any responses in a single inbox for later analysis and action. They can also update the integrated CRM system with details of follow-up actions and responses.
Record calls
It’s important to record telesales calls to monitor quality and compliance. VoIP systems record all calls automatically for later analysis.
Supervisors can use the recordings to check that agents provide customers and prospects with accurate information, present the full benefits of the product or service, and handle questions accurately and efficiently.
If the analysis highlights individual or team problems, supervisors can develop training programs to resolve issues. The recordings are also important if you must resolve a dispute with a contact.
Call recording is essential to maintain compliance. Supervisors must check calls to ensure agents are not providing inaccurate or misleading information to customers and prospects. In addition, if your company is subject to industry regulations, you may need to keep recordings of all calls as evidence of compliance.
Monitor performance
VoIP gives supervisors and managers other tools to monitor different aspects of telesales performance. An online dashboard provides key metrics such as the number of calls, average call time, the number of transfers or callbacks, and lost or abandoned calls.
These metrics help supervisors monitor productivity as well as performance. They can identify agents taking too long on calls or not completing their target number of calls.
Metrics also indicate how well the team is performing against targets. Under-achievement may indicate a need for retraining or additional resources.
Analyze results
By integrating analytics programs with VoIP, you can measure the effectiveness of your campaign. The metrics may come from other sources, such as sales records, but by integrating them with call records, you can measure direct or indirect results.
Depending on your program objectives, you may want to measure factors such as turnover increase resulting from the campaign, the number of new customers, increased sales to existing customers, or the number of follow-up appointments set.
Measuring results help you calculate the campaign’s return on investment and provides a basis for planning or modifying future campaigns. You may vary the offer for future campaigns if the original campaign had a low response rate. Or you may focus on market sectors where you achieved the best results.
Make the most of VoIP’s features.
VoIP can help your team improve telesales campaigns’ performance, results, and costs. With low-cost long-distance calls and affordable monthly subscriptions, a VoIP system will reduce your calling and infrastructure costs.
Integration with CRM and analytics systems helps improve the precision of your campaigns and provides measurable results to analyze performance. And VoIP’s scalability lets you match your phone capacity to your campaign needs.