Call Centre Outsourcing: An Outsourced Sales Perspective

Call centre outsourcing is an effective way for a business to serve its customers through inbound and outbound channels. Outsourcing your sales calls provides an opportunity to increase the effectiveness of the interactions in a cost-effective way whilst also benefiting from the skills and expertise that a dedicated sales team can bring to your business. Whether you are looking to outsource your outbound or inbound sales calls for a specific campaign or to offload the HR and staffing issues that can be so distracting to the growth of your business, there are many factors to consider. Choosing a professional and skilled outsourced sales partner can make all the difference to your business and the results that it achieves. Effective suppliers will have all the required expertise and experience to deliver world-class service to your customers and build relationships that result in those all-important sales.

Whilst every business is unique and therefore likely to have its own specific requirements, there are many features and requirements that are shared by businesses that are considering this approach. In this article, we outline why it’s worth considering outsourcing sales, the attributes of a great outsourced sales call centre and the key metrics for measuring sales success.

Why Businesses Consider Outsourcing Sales

Many businesses consider the outsourcing sales route to gain from the expertise and experience that it brings. If your business does not have an experienced sales team in-house, is yet to make the most of up-selling and cross-selling or you are looking to improve the effectiveness of outbound sales campaigns, opting to outsource your call centre could be your route to sales success.  We explore the key reasons why businesses consider outsourcing sales calls to a professional inbound and outbound operation.

You Want To Focus On Managing Your Business and Setting The Sales Strategy

Sales is a demanding and target-driven function within most businesses. Whether you are running ad-hoc sales campaigns through an outbound call centre or managing an inbound sales call center, both will be very time consuming and resource intensive. Managing everything in-house can detract from other equally important functions in a business, which results in lost focus and missed opportunities. By outsourcing sales to an experienced partner like Impact, you will be free from the day-to-day operational tasks that running these teams in-house entails and better able to focus on setting your sales strategy. You will not need to dedicate resource to training agents, managing people and executing performance management.

The significant gains that can be made by outsourcing can have a transformative impact on your sales results. Your chosen call centre will be able to take care of the operational side of sales, while you focus on the strategic aspects of sales including setting your overall strategy and targets. As a professional sales call centre with an experienced and trained team of sales agents, we excel at managing the operational aspects of the sales process whilst also providing invaluable insights that can help you to set your sales strategy.

You Have Limited Or No In-House Sales Resource

Managing an inbound or outbound function requires specialist expertise and extensive experience in all aspects of sales. If you have limited, or no in-house sales resource you may find that developing this expertise and experience in-house is not only expensive but also time consuming. By outsourcing sales, you can avoid the associated pitfalls and fast track your campaign which can make delivering excellent service to your customers more successful and you can also make the most of the valuable upselling and cross-selling opportunities during sales interactions.

The risk of not gaining the right sales experience and expertise is clear. It often results in a disappointing service experience, missed sales opportunities, revenue and profitability, all of which are key to the growth of your business. The impact that this can have on your customers and your business should not be underestimated. Whether you decide to outsource sales or develop resource in-house, ensuring that you have the required people in place at the right time will be key to your sales success and the future growth of your business. Impact is well placed to provide the expertise that your business requires and can deliver a complete outsourced call centre solution or augment your existing sales team with a specific outbound sales campaign. Why not get in touch with us to find out how we can help?

Increasing Costs And Inefficiencies Associated With Operating An In-House Sales Team

While outsourcing sales does not suit every business, many that choose this route face ever-increasing costs and inefficiencies. These can be difficult to overcome, even if you operate at scale. The cost of employing the right sales agents alone is significant and ever-increasing. There are also the additional costs associated with agent training in both sales & soft skills and product or service knowledge, both of which are critical to sales success.

Further costs are incurred in terms of technology and IT systems. System security can be particularly expensive given the ever-evolving nature of cyber threats that we all face. Where the majority of sales interactions involve payments being made over the phone introduces its own set of security and legal requirements including PCI DSS compliance. Some businesses may also require custom/bespoke software to manage their operations in addition to off the shelf systems.

You can mitigate the impact of the significant costs that are associated with an in-house sales call centre by leaving these elements to a professional outsourced call centre. Instead of having to meet a number of significant fixed costs irrespective of your usage, your business will be able to pay for what it uses which is far more efficient and cost-effective. Even well-established companies can find that the on-going costs associated with managing in-house operations can spiral as they scale. Talk to us and let us demonstrate how this we can help you to manage these ever-increasing costs.

You Have Issues With An Existing In-House Or Outsourced Call Centre

Some businesses will experience issues with their existing in-house supplier and as a result of this, their sales results may suffer and valuable opportunities for improvement can be missed. Whether the issues relate to a bad culture fit, poor communication or underwhelming results, the impact on you as a business can be significant, which creates impetus to explore alternative options. Businesses may wait until the end of their contract or start to explore alternatives ahead of time.

In many cases, issues tend to compound over a period of time, with their impact on sales metrics increasing as time progresses. What can often start as a relatively small issue such as an under-performing up-selling process can increase in scope and severity, especially if the right proactive steps toward resolution are not adopted. Communication issues often follow and the partnership between business and call centre is damaged.

Continuing with an ineffective solution, either in-house or outsourced will be to the detriment of your sales success. The growth, sales and profitability of your business can be unnecessarily put at risk and become the key motivation for change. At Impact we are experienced at taking over sales operations from both existing in-house and outsourced call centres and have proven processes and systems in place to manage the changeover and do everything possible to ensure that it is successful.

Attributes Of A Great Outsourced Sales Call Centre

While every outsourced call centre is different with its own specific strengths and desirable attributes, a great outsourced sales partner will have many attributes that are truly invaluable for businesses exploring outsourcing for the first time or considering switching to another supplier. The importance of getting this choice right cannot be overstated, and taking the time to carefully select the right partner for your business is worthwhile and will pay dividends in the future. It is important to consider whether each call centre that you are evaluating has the key attributes for sales success. While reviewing proposals and tender responses can go some way in understanding this, going beyond written responses and performance metrics can provide a unique perspective. That is why we encourage prospective clients to visit our world-class UK call centre to experience our culture of care and get to know our great people for themselves.

If your outsourced sales call centre has most of the attributes below, you are likely to have found a perfect sales outsourcing partner that is worth exploring further.

Positive Staff & Call Centre Agents

Finding an outsourced call centre that has positive staff and agents can make all the difference to their clients and clients’ customers. Positivity is often associated with having a strong and supportive culture that encourages staff to strive to achieve the very best sales results. These staff tend to have a can-do attitude along with the resilience to overcome inevitable challenges that present themselves during day-to-day operations. When sales agents are positive and enthusiastic this will be evident in every sales interaction that they have, which often leads to higher sales and happy customers.

When your customers receive or make a sales call from or to a positive agent they are far more likely to engage in a meaningful conversation and be receptive to the products or services that are being presented. Talking to a disinterested or negative agent is highly unlikely to be conducive to positive outcomes and great sales results, so positivity really does matter when it comes to your outsourced sales team. At Impact, we pride ourselves on our culture of care and the positivity that it inspires not only in our sales agents but across all areas of our call centre. We invest significant resources in hiring the right agents who are positive and thrive in the culture of care that our call centre has.

Strong Sales Skillset

Success in sales requires a strong sales skillset. Although many outsourced call centres promise a high service, few have the required sales skillset to deliver the strong sales results that businesses are targeting. The most effective call centre agents have great customer empathy and are able to identify and connect with customers on a personal level. Sales interactions driven by empathy result in successful outcomes and great sales results. Customer empathy is perfectly complemented by sales ability, which includes understanding key sales tools and techniques and the relevant soft skills to put these into practice during sales interactions. The combination of expertise and soft skills is critical to the delivery of successful sales interactions at an individual customer level.

No strong sales skillset could be complete without intuition. Sales agents with strong intuition know when to deploy a given technique or practice, at which point an upsell or cross-sell is appropriate in a given interaction and they know how to connect with the customer. This technique is best developed from experience, and it is something that our sales team pride themselves on. Their experience of delivering inbound and outbound sales campaigns for clients across a diverse range of sectors is truly invaluable in building this. Effective sales agents are also adept at following the correct sales process and knowing which aspects of it are relevant to and most likely to deliver results for a particular type of client and interaction. It is critical that an outsourced sales call centre is able to align their sales process to that of the client and the results that they are looking to achieve.

Many sales interactions involve the exchange of a significant amount of information between the customer and a sales agent. Not all of this information will be pertinent to the focus of the interaction, so being able to use the relevant parts of information consultatively with a view to forming a successful partnership between the client and the client’s customers is key.

Form Great Client Partnerships

Great client partnerships play a central role in delivering excellent sales results. Forming strong and open partnerships where conversations can take place, challenges can be overcome and successes celebrated. Outsourced call centres that take a proactive role can achieve so much more as they bring invaluable insights to the attention of the client that can help to grow their business.

At Impact we are proud of the great partnerships that we form with clients and the excellent sales results that these have delivered. We have helped clients grow their business models and achieve phenomenal, sustained growth over many years. Our sales team take a consultative approach to each and every client, which draws on our extensive sales expertise and a willingness to embrace new technology and sales processes. Our fast test and learn driven approach continues to deliver outstanding results, especially when combined with the positive can-do attitude that our sales agents possess.

Focus On Data Quality

Maintaining data quality is especially important within an outbound call centre that is focused on sales. Inaccurate or poor-quality information can undermine the success of a campaign and make contacting a customer list far more challenging. Using accurate and cleansed data that is free from duplicates and incorrect information offers a world of opportunities and is a great springboard to a successful sales campaign. A professional outsourced call centre will be truly focused on data quality and able to advise clients as to the suitability that a given data set will have for campaigns. Maintaining data quality is very much an on-going task because it is ever-changing and yesterday’s correct data can quite easily become tomorrow’s incorrect data. Regular data cleansing and consultation with clients is key, advising clients as to how data quality can be enhanced is a great way to retain a strong focus on data quality.

At Impact we remain firmly focused on determining and taking proactive steps to improve data quality for clients. While it can be challenging to predict likely sales outcomes based on assessing data quality alone, we are often able to provide well-informed predictions once we have reviewed the available data and have been live for a period time.

Set The Right Expectations

Delivering sales success can be a challenge, even for the most experienced players. Setting the right expectations from the start of a client relationship is key to the delivery of successful sales outcomes, whether they are pure sales, average order values or product of the week promotions. Setting the right expectations with the client and sales agents ensures that there is the all-important clarity surrounding the objectives and strategy without unnecessary ambiguity. Delivering this in practical terms often takes the form of having the right conversations at the outset and committing to evaluating expectations as an inbound sales or outbound sales campaign progresses.

We will always take the time to set clear expectations with clients and our sales agents, so that the desired and expected outcome can be achieved. This ensures that everyone is well-placed to deliver excellent sales results and support sales success. Our honest and proactive approach to setting expectations is favoured by clients and has earned us the trust of some of the UK’s leading brands. We proactively feedback insights collected by our sales agents to clients so that improvements can be made to our outbound and inbound campaigns.

How To Measure Sales Success

Measuring sales success is usually easier than measuring success in customer service, not least because of the smaller number of metrics that are available for sales. But this does allow a strong focus on the few factors that matter including average order value and conversion rate (for orders taken).

Average Order Value (AOV)

AOV is a key measure for sales success, as it represents the amount ordered for a given group of customers. Increasing AOV is an effective way of increasing sales without incurring customer acquisition costs, particularly within competitive sectors where gaining a new customer can be an expensive exercise. Upselling and cross-selling are often used as strategies to increase average order value and when deployed by trained sales agents in a consultative way, they can delight the customer that they are being presented to.

Conversion Rate (For Orders Taken)

This is an important sales metric that measures the percentage of orders secured from all sales interactions. It is a critical measure of the overall success of a sales campaign and the higher the conversion rate, the more efficient a campaign is at converting either prospective customers into customers or past customers into regular customers (depending on the nature of the campaign). Increasing the conversion rate of an outsourced sales campaign often involves changing the messaging of a campaign, drawing on insights from customer data, segmenting it to determine the most suitable prospects or refining the sales process.