Not only are we Gold Sponsors of Sales Confidence‘s first SDR Managers event of 2021, but our Sales Director, Marco Alfano-Rogers, was invited to give a 7 minute talk around driving relentless positivity in an SDR team.
Why watch?
Who is it for?
When it comes to training, I have often found that the main objection I’m met with is cost and the potential loss of investment – “what happens if we train our staff and they leave?” My response… what happens if we don’t and they stay?”
Yes, training can be expensive and in businesses, people come and go. However, if the training is right, the relevant benefits far outweigh the cost. Training is vital in the workplace as it aids both personal and company growth. Training also makes employees feel valued and invested in, resulting in a happy environment and increased productivity.
Training can benefit company growth in numerous ways:
Training doesn’t always need to be delivered in-house. At times it is necessary to seek out external guidance and assistance. External training really helps with:
When our comfort zones are stretched, we find it fosters creativity making us more flexible and adaptable to unexpected change. It also motivates us and increases our overall productivity and performance.
So, if you’re considering implementing a training programme for your team, give it a go, you’ll only know once you try – ‘the proof is in the pudding’ so to speak.
Opinion Piece by Nicolette Karides, Learning and Development Coordinator at Air Marketing.
Motivation can be difficult to achieve in an office environment; hard work can often go unnoticed and the constant pressures of a competitive environment can begin to wear employees down. Research has shown, each day, 10% of employees are absent in call centres due to the lack of appreciation felt in the workplace. This research alone highlights the need, especially in my industry, for touchpoints which allow managers to show their appreciation to their staff, highlight individual achievements and deliver motivational objectives. In this blog post, I will share my experience and tips for achieving the above in one morning meeting.
So, how do you maximise your morning buzz meetings to encourage individuals and create high performing sales teams?
There’s nothing worse than a long-winded ‘motivational’ meeting that is set to demotivate from the offset. It’s therefore important that you plan and prepare; effective buzz meetings should be concise and last no longer than 15 minutes, be armed with your objectives, focus on team wins and pinpoint your collective areas of learning.
Our physical behaviour influences our mental and emotional approach to the day.
Think of ways to get your team moving, have a walking meeting, introduce a quick-fire game or play uplifting music to get the blood pumping. Increased blood flow creates a positive mood, resulting in employees being more equipped to handle objections, take on new challenges and meet personal milestones.
69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognised.
This is the perfect opportunity to feature the activity which you want to encourage. Celebrate your teams wins, even if they don’t lead to a direct sale and avoid focusing on losses. Recognising individual and team achievements has become my common practise, as I know this makes the individuals in my team feel more confident and in turn, pushes them to set bigger targets.
41% of companies that encourage colleagues to support one another experienced a significant increase in customer satisfaction.
If you want to create a great support network and boost team morale, encourage employees to praise fellow team members, this assures no one’s hard work slips past management and brings the team closer together. If your team is feeling positive it will show in their client conversations, resulting in better relationship building, more sales and higher ROI for the company.
Remember, the key for creating a great buzz meeting is positivity. Take negative feedback from the day before and turn it into takeaways and learnings for the team to overcome together. If a client isn’t happy with an element of your team’s performance, encourage your team to think of tactics that will better engage them and the people they are selling to.
90% of business leaders believe that an engagement strategy could positively impact their business, yet only 25% of them have a strategy in place. It’s therefore no surprise that only 40% of employees are well informed of their company’s goals, strategy, and tactics.
It’s time to hit the reset button and introduce a new action plan for the day. Ask each individual team member, “what do you want to achieve today?” I have found that when the whole team acknowledges personal targets, that individual immediately feels more accountability to meet their goal, success is more likely to be achieved and goals are more likely to align to the company’s bigger picture.
At Air Marketing, we have experienced great success from our initiative to focus on our internal company culture. Achieving £18 for every £1 our clients invest, we are performing higher than the industry’s £11 average. I personally believe this success is down to the time we take out of selling to promote appreciation, individual achievements and team objectives. The culture at Air is one that I haven’t experienced anywhere else, our team’s positive and supportive nature is infectious, thanks to our daily buzz meetings we continue to deliver fantastic results for the companies we support.
Opinion Piece by Annie Blundell – Account Director, Air Marketing
Each and every outsourced campaign brings with it a different client briefing. Some may be efficient and give the telemarketers the tools they need to produce results, and some may see a few implications further down the line from a rushed briefing process.
If you’re looking at briefing a telemarketing agency for an up and coming campaign, there are a few elements that you need to be completing in order to run an effective outbound operation.
So, without further ado, here is our 10 point checklist that can help your business when briefing the telemarketing agency you’re working with.
1. Regular Communication
Ask your telemarketing agency how often you’ll be in touch. Dropping communication can lead to potential opportunities to improve the campaign being missed.
Suggest a guideline, perhaps every couple of days, where you speak to the account manager to stay up to date.
2. Monitor and Review
Regular communication also helps you to monitor and review what’s happening with the campaign.
Ask your agency how they are monitoring what’s happening on the campaign, and what their review process is in order to check changes are being made where necessary.
3. Set and Evaluate Targets
Work with your telemarketing agency to set targets for the timescale of your campaign. And, look deeper in to whether these are realistic based on your industry.
Both KPI and team targets can help you to give the agency you work with an extra push to hit those all important objectives of the campaign.
4. Set Key Messaging
Without discussing the messaging that will be communicated over both verbal and non-verbal channels, you may get different callers with different ideas of what the messaging should be.
Be concise with the messaging, making this clear to your provider. And, take out any unnecessary add-ons or information that will confuse a prospect rather than advise.
5. Outline Product Benefits
You and the agency should on the same page when it comes to what benefits are being promoted during telemarketing calls.
Provide them with any information that might support the benefits of your product and service. For example, a results statistic, testimonial or case studies.
6. Define Audience Pain Points
Continuing on from the benefits, inform the telemarketing agency of what pain points your target audience have and how your product answers these.
Think about the perception of the audience; advise the agency on why your company is the best solution for problems they are experiencing.
7. Set Audience Action
Brief the telemarketing agency on what you want the audience to do. Be part of a meeting? Will this be over the phone? Face to face? What is the booking process?
Tell the agency exactly what the prospect needs to do, in order for a successful sale or meeting to be made.
8. Outline Profiling Questions
You know your perfect buyer, but does your telemarketing provider? Look to set up profiling questions that callers might ask in order to define whether a prospect is the right fit.
The better information both the agency and sales team has on the prospect, the better they can assess the needs and wants of that potential buyer.
9. Seek Relevant Data
Whether you or the telemarketing provider is supplying the data for the campaign, it will need to be accurate and relevant to your target audience in order to justify seeing any results.
10. Set Meeting Quality Guidelines
If the outsourced agency is booking appointments or setting meetings, you need to let them know what an ideal lead looks like.
Quality beats quantity every time, so avoid setting meeting targets without knowing how a quality lead may look.
Outsourcing your telemarketing to an agency may come about for a number of reasons; Lack of skill, lack of time, or simply because you would rather set your sights on other operations within your business.
Whatever the reason, the campaign setup and briefing are crucial to ensure effective results and, of course, a better return on investment for you.
Want to know more? Call us today on 0345 241 3038 or get in touch here.
The telemarketing industry carries with it some pretty strong stereotypes, which is unfortunate for one of the most direct routes to market with a huge amount of results to back it up.
Additionally, and as a consequence of stereotyping, there are several negative myths which are associated with telemarketing. As a company that sees our clients get great results out of telemarketing campaigns, we’ve set out to debunk these and explore why they really are just myths.
Telemarketing calls always use scripts
Sticking to strict scripts does not result in conversations that are tailored to each and every individual on the phone.
Although there may be some structure to the calls, a strict script is not adhered to, enabling real conversations that adapt to the prospect’s needs.
There’s no emotion, each call is just a number
With no emotion, and with people on the phones that didn’t care, we wouldn’t get much done. Each call isn’t just a call; it’s a conversation which looks in to pain points and reasons why a service or product might help someone.
This therefore requires a deeper and emotional understanding that goes beyond statistics.
Complex products can’t be sold over the phone
This all comes down to training. We would agree that without the right training, no product can be sold over the phone.
If you’re looking to work with an outsourced telemarketing supplier, it’s important to understand that full training is carried out in order for telemarketers to be confident on what they’re talking about.
At Air, we work on a vast range of products, which means we have to be seriously clued up on the details of each and what they could potentially offer a prospect.
Inexperienced staff that don’t stick around
The phrase ‘call centre’ brings with it connotations which surround the idea of young and inexperienced staff members who leave not long before their seat is warm.
At Air, we have ex-directors, business owners and sales professionals from a variety of backgrounds, spanning a wide age range.
Dishonest or aggressive methods
Telemarketers hammer the phones, they’re aggressive and their practices are dishonest, with some assuming information about the prospect.
A powerful myth and again, one that is far from true. Before any campaign, we at Air ensure that our data is as clean as possible with the right information and that we adhere to any TPS registers.
Cold calling is dead
And this is the biggest myth of them all. There is an ongoing debate which is based on the concept that cold calling just doesn’t work anymore.
This simply isn’t true. What’s more, the results from both telemarketing and multi-channel marketing campaigns proving this ideology wrong every year.
In fact, our clients made an average return last year of £18 ROI for every £1 they spent.
Air Marketing Group – Nurturing prospects is a large part of what we do
We don’t throw mud at a wall and hope some of it sticks; we look to nurture leads to encourage conversions.
We’re passionate about the way we work with your business. We’ll ensure that any questions or uncertainties you may have surrounding a campaign with us are answered.
Get in touch today or call 0345 241 3038.
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