You’re a business manager or owner who wants to increase sales from your appointment reps.
That’s a no-brainer, right?
Make more appointments, they’ll talk to more people, and the law of large numbers will do the rest.
They will close more deals, and what can be simpler than that?
But the trick seems to be getting them to “sit down” with prospects more. If you ask your salespeople to dial more and smile, that will be a waste of time and energy, and they will say that they will not be able to participate in more meetings, which is their goal.
Furthermore, they will grumble that their biggest and best use is on the field.
So it sounds like you have two options: (1) create your own call center to provide a constant stream of appointments, or (2) outsource the appointment scheduling function to another company to schedule them for you.
A call center is not an easy business unit to manage, for a number of reasons, one of which is staffing. Turnover, as you know, is rampant. I have consulted for call centers that experienced a 100% turnover of phone staff EVERY MONTH!
This shifts your focus from customer creation to ongoing recruiting and training, and that steady, expected stream of appointments is more like an intermittent, unreliable trickle.
Examining the cost per appointment, you find that it’s astronomical, and then you give in, shut down your phone unit, and call the “pros,” those companies that schedule appointments and charge by the hour.
It seems like a reasonable and easy move.
But this probably won’t solve your problem.
Outsourced call centers see themselves as part of the staffing business, obtaining and keeping their staff by providing them with a constant supply of projects, a continual source of paid hours.
Their goal is to sell you many hours, the more the better, and if they take 10 hours to set up an appointment for your team instead of 2, they are quite happy with their inefficiency. After all, it’s making them rich.
You complain that you’re not getting enough appointments and your response is, “Buy more hours!”
Reluctantly, he does so, but then an even more perplexing problem arises.
You find the quality of citations to be poor. Your people are shuffling across town or across the country to see unqualified prospects, and are humiliated by a staggering number of cancellations and no-shows.
You complain.
The call center replies: “Buy more hours!”
At some point, you scratch your head and wonder why you don’t get enough quotes from ANY source at any price.
What’s going on here?
You and your hired callers don’t see the real challenge: It takes sales skills to schedule appointments.
Specifically, a capable caller has to GENERATE INTEREST with a decent prospect, entice them with the VALUE PROMISE, ESTABLISH CREDIBILITY, and CLOSE for the appointment, and only then will the most time-pressed prospects open their calendar and agree to meet.
By mistake, you probably don’t perceive a date conversation as a sales conversation, but it is.
The sale doesn’t start when your field rep walks into a prospect’s office. She must start on the phone, to earn the right to enter the prospect’s office.
Call centers that make appointments don’t see themselves in the sales business, and neither do the people they work with on their phones. They don’t generate interest, they don’t spark a sense of value, they don’t pan out in a believable way, and they certainly aren’t closing.
They are expensive office workers with headsets.
Someone once said: “If you put enough monkeys on the keyboards, sooner or later one of them will create War & Peace.” The same goes for fools who make phone calls. Accidentally, they will find the occasional gold nugget.
But to get to the Mother Lode, you have to put well-trained salespeople on the phones.
Until this happens, you will not get what you are really looking for.
It’s not just dating.
That’s more sales!
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