Do you need more business ? Do you have 5-25 vacant seats ?

We can help get you good clients in a variety of successful industries .

There are several ways to get new paying clients . What ever method you use, you have to be mindful of three key areas. Price, Expectations and Results.

Price is the main focus of potential customers in most cases before even considering quality. But during the course of Customer Acquisition sales conversation , when it seems that the price does not get them excited or if they begin to challenge your price by citing examples of other offers that are lower in price, most CustomerAcquisition Managers start to lose confidence in what they are offering and begin dropping prices or over selling. Does this sound familiar ? Selling your offer within your pricing guidelines is okay, But beyond that is where your team has to shoulder your promises . Is your promise of performance attainable ?  Managing expectations is the key to retention . If you guarantee certain performance level, number of leads or appointment results, you are really boxing in your telemarketing team to produce results that may not be possible .

Let us review some Cases to Study

1. B2C – Roofing Appointments

During a conversation with the owner of a roofing company and his sales manager and after a discussion about price and when to expect the first lead, it seemed that we are in an agreement . Then I asked a deal breaker question . I asked the owner ” what are your expectations ” ?. [ This question is seldom asked and is generally avoided because this is where a deal is often lost ]. Before the owner can answer, his sales manager jumped right in and said ” one lead per hour ” . I asked the sales manager how he arrived at one lead per hour . He quickly responded ” Look we are already doing this and that is the results we are getting. We are just looking at outsourcing this at a lower price. After hearing this, most Customer Acquisition Managers will agree based on those results and begin to close the sale with a one lead per hour expectation . Simple, ” I got a sale “

But my experienced team and I already know that those results may not be  achieveable . And if we closed this customer and guaranteed one lead per hour  we will not be able to retain this client . There are only a few exceptions. But if this is a Cold Call campaign for qualified roofing leads with the expectation of one lead per hour , this campaign will not perform. You will not be able to produce one lead per hour or eight leads per day . These clients will become unhappy, discontinue the campaign and will likely ask for a refund based on None Performance . So why even sign up this client ?  But they did, here is why :

The Customer Aquisition Manager is under pressure to bring in Customers and the Call Center Manager is also under pressure to perform, they were both under the dutiful eyes of the Operations Manager, who had NO hands on call center experience . So they began training the crew, watching for key KPI’s, talk time and conversions, not knowing that in two to three weeks they are about to fall off the cliff .

But first,  Ask yourself. how did we know this campaign will not work based on one lead per hour ? The answer is Many years of Experience .

So , do we walk away from this Campaign knowing it is doomed to fail ? Or do we rebuttal the Sales Manager from the roofing company and try and convince him that his expectation is unrealistic ? And how would you do that without the risk of insulting him ?

This is a tough decision , what they call a choice between two evils.

2. B2B – Merchant Services

[  A Merchant Service Company provides newer business a way to accept Master Card and Visa from customers to pay for products or services or offers a lower cost provider to compare and to save them money on processing fees. ]

We received a refferral to this Merchant Service Company who asked if we can get small to medium size business to send us their credit card statements of charges from their current merchant service provider so they can run a comparison and analysis to see if they can offer a lower cost or better service to these businesses . They mentioned that they are currently doing this and needed to expand the service area to support their sales team in multiple areas .

I was dealing with a seasoned sales manager and he seemed like a very reasonable person. I went on to ask a series of qualifying questions to determine how this should be done. We agreed that there are several variables on lead quality and closing ratio and one of that is the Experience and Ability of the sales closer. He also agreed for us to use a lead provider and pay for an additional data enhancement and lead hygiene to achieve better results, better contact rate and KPIs from our telemarketers. He agreed to allow us to set appointments with Businesses that would not or did not send in their Statements and further allowed us to set these appointments to his inside and outside sales team to compare if one way was better then the other .

We secured an agreement for just two telemarketers, and to started producing leads after a two week training and ramp up time , with a target of two leads per day per telemarketer . They provided us with good sales scripts, rebuttals and close . We joined together on creating a Features and Benifits page and also a Vocabulary. They had no formal training guidelines so we had to create our own for the current trainees and for our future internal use. The campaign was a success and expanded to 8 seats .

3. B2C – Real Estate Company

We met with the Owners and Brokers of a Real Estate Company on a Zoom Meeting . They wanted us to set qualified appointments for their Real Estate Agents to meet with and close . They told us the source of leads, what the results they were getting, what the conversion was on the current campaign which we would replace with our telemarketers. They offered us a very generous commission only pay.

We turned down the offer for various reasons.  The expectations were very high and coupled with an even higher commission offer to the center makes the campaign attractive and exciting. But the fact was that their souce of leads were common in the industry, having a Real Estate License can get you those types of leads almost free. The did not want to use a dialer and they said a CRM with click to call was sufficient.  The truth of the matter was that those leads were known to have a high rate of bad and disconnected home phone numbers, for risk and compliance reasons, those data do not come with a cell number or email address. Dialing those leads with click to call is three times slower then a good Predictive Dialer, thus resulting in a very low contact rate if any, further demoralizing the telemarketers.

As a Call Center with increasing expenses also consider the following  :

1. Do you have a customer acquisition plan in place and is it working ?
2. Do you know what your customer acquisition cost is ?
3. If you do not know then how do you plan or budget for that ?
4. Is your pricing profitable or are you overpriced and losing customers ?
5. Are you aware of what your competitions prices are ?
6. Do you know which campaigns are more profitable that others ?
7. Do you know which campaign to walk away from ?

Given enough money and some knowledge or experience in telemarketing you can open and own a call center. But without a flow of clients you will eventually lose money and close out your call center. Try and answer these question and gain some perspective on the challenge.

What do you need first, an experienced telemarketer or a paying client ?

If you answer is a paying client, you are correct. A client after being convinced to pay you upfront has some expectations. Does he expect that you can generate one lead an hour or one lead a week ? How soon does he expect results ? What guarantee does he have that you can perform ? and can you meet his expectations and guarantee it ? After he pays you, how soon can you to find a telemarketer for his campaign one week, maybe two ? And how fast can this new telemarketer begin to perform , one or two weeks ?

If your answer is a trained telemarketer, you are correct also. But what would this trained telemarketer be doing while you are looking for a paying client and how would you pay this telemarketer who is on HOLD ?

This question of what comes first a trained telemarketer or a paying client is a good start on what you are faced with in running and building a call center. If you have an ongoing call center and you have other campaigns, then you are able to shift telemarketers around. But then the campaign that those telemarketers are removed from how would it affect that current campaign ? And how would it affect the telemarketer who was doing well with the current campaign ? Or would you move your worst performing telemarketer to start this new campaign ?

Choosing your Customer Acquisition Manager is a crucial and important decision, it comes with a hefty salary plus bonus and commissions to attract and motivate the right person.  Consider hiring us.  We are experts in Client Acquisition . We just need to make certain that your center qualifies . We need to have a discovery call with the Operations Manager or the Call Center Director and the owners who can make decisions if we move forward. Contact us and we can send you an email so we can make sure is a good fit for us both.