I’m often contacted by telesales people who obviously aren’t experienced. I usually imagine that these are secretaries, assistants or office juniors who have had the daunting task of generating new sales opportunities thrust upon them.
I try to imagine what it must be like for them. The Sales Director or MD says we need new sales, call these companies and try and get me an appointment. It must be awful and very demoralising. I chose to do telemarketing in my early days and even after my training I still found those first few calls quite intimidating.
Then I wonder what type of company would do this, would they ask the same person to do their accounts, or design a new product, maybe they ask the cleaner to do international calls? They obviously don’t want to increase sales if this is their approach to lead generation, but I suspect they are the companies who look at their sales forecast and have palpitations so have this knee jerk reaction.
So what options are available to these companies? They could outsource their lead generation, but often they say telesales doesn’t work – I wonder why. They could bring professionals in to do the job properly or they could embark on training the staff they have.
Whatever happens they have to do one of them, continuing isn’t an option. Well, I suppose it is, and it’s probably the only option where you can accurately forecast the future – tough times, redundancies and possibly closure.
So please do something positive to generate sales, something likely to succeed.