We all want our sales agents to perform at their best – after all, they’re the ones driving the success of every single campaign. But, across organisations of all sizes, the same few mistakes are affecting performance and, in turn, campaign results.
It’s a significant issue that has a direct impact on your bottom line. However, unless you maximise your visibility to identify mistakes in real-time and correct them quickly, it can be a remarkably hard cycle to break.
To help, here are three of the most common mistakes made by sales agents – and what you can do to resolve them and improve performance using a hosted dialler.
1. Not making enough calls
Prospecting begins with volume. Your first priority should be reaching the highest number of people to sell your benefits and drum up new business. Today, in a world of distractions that makes it harder to forge strong connections with prospects, that’s more vital than ever before. In 2007, it took 3.68 attempts to reach a cold call prospect. In 2016 it takes 8 attempts, according to TeleNet and Ovation Sales Group. There's no debate - to sell more, you need to make more calls.
While motivating your sales agents to make more calls is important, technology can also play a role. A hosted dialler, for example, could increase agent productivity by up to 300% by only passing connected calls to your agents. When you control the pace of outbound dialling, this allows up to 50 minutes talk time every single hour. What's more, with a wallboard to display key metrics, a sales director can monitor performance throughout the day. If not enough calls are being made, this can be rectified immediately - not when it's already too late.
2. Poor questioning
Once your agents are on connected calls, it’s essential that they ask the right questions. They can only sell benefits and overcome objections if they can elicit pain points and objections in the first place. One way to address this issue is with scripting that guides every conversation. With an on-screen prompt, agents always know what to say next or and the questions they can ask to get essential information. As a result, they can build up a better picture of customer pain points, convey the most valuable benefits, and avoid forgetting a key point that needs to be communicated.
A wallboard can give you better visibility over metrics including call durations. If calls tend to be short when compared to your top performer, this may indicate poor questioning and conversations that routinely stall.
3. Breaking promises
Any manual process is fallible, and that’s why promises routinely get broken by sales agents. If you fail to return a call, dispatch more information, or take follow-up action, your prospects will turn to a competitor that does what they say they will do.
A hosted dialler can help in two key ways. First, call disposition codes can be used to record call outcomes and keep track of the promises that are made. This information can even be fed into your customer relationship management (CRM) system, where follow-up activity can be automated to remove the risk of human error.
Meanwhile, certain tasks – like returning a phone call – can be automated into your hosted dialler. Sales agents simply schedule the call while they’re on the phone, and this is then delivered to an available agent at the appropriate date and time. It’s a way to guarantee that your agents keep their promises – and their prospects.
Find and fix sales agent mistakes with a hosted dialler.
Often, the biggest obstacle to resolving sales agent mistakes is finding them in the first place. That’s where a hosted dialler can help, bringing every call into a centralised system where it’s tracked, monitored, and audit-able via a web-based wallboard.
Find out more about eliminating agent mistakes - and increasing your sales - using a hosted dialler..
