the goose

You can tell how controversial telesales is by the euphemisms used to describe it.  ”Inside sales” sounds most respectable.  Ironically, it seems to me to be the phone companies who have done the most to dirty the bib of this sales channel.  I’m just back from South Africa where bad legislation and low wage costs allows for rampant cold calling.  In truth, we’ve also made mistakes in our thirst to figure out a way to find customers.

There are a few good reasons why it can’t be written off wholesale however.

• Even though your product may be provisioned online, your customers may not be.  Not wanting to cast dispersions (as my grandma might say) on actors as a group, some of them couldn’t tell the difference between and ipad and a calculator.  That doesn’t mean they can’t understand that advertising yourself online won’t drive more business for them.  Many don’t have an email address (or if they do, they don’t use it) and others just don’t like buying from an anonymous website.  This means that if we are serious about penetrating our market, we need explain it in person.
• Its non-geographic.  I’ve spent many hours on the phone to people in the UK and Canada, even though I’ve been based in Argentina for the last year.  Being stuck in Ireland is a bit frustrating when the market can be small.  Getting attention in other countries is difficult and airfares and conferences aren’t always an option in economic terms.  It is pretty magical however that you can start building relationships with people over the phone from several time zones away. Its a virtually no-cost way for companies in small markets to start breaking out.  Often times, an Irish accent on the other end of the phone can actually be an advantage.
• The communication is 2-way.  Blogs, emails and landing pages are great and telling people what you think but pretty pitiful at generating feedback.  Following Keiths mantra of find out what people want, go get it, and give it to them is hard if you don’t have an effective feedback loop.  Sure people can leave comments on your blog and respond to your emails, but in fact, we’d be missing out on 99% of feedback if we relied on that alone.  If finding out what your customers really want is truly important, than the phone has to be the most effective way of eliciting that feedback.

So there are,  in my view, solid reasons why it is hard to ignore the phone when it comes to selling.  The question then becomes, how to take this means of communication, shake off the negatives and put it to work.

1. Acquire your list of contacts directly from customer.  In order of preference
   1. They call you
   2. They send a request for a callback using something like Net2Rep
   3. Offer some incentive for them to give you their number, along with a good time to call.  (Eg:  free consultation or ebook).
2. Call them as soon as they do give you that they get in contact.  They are more likely to be interested and available to talk right now.  Calling right away gets around one of the biggest inconveniences of phone communication – the fact that you are interrupting.
3. Offer an easy out.  Some people just don’t like dealing on the phone.  In fact, I’m one of them.  Some can’t wait to talk to someone real. Figuring out which type of prospect this makes life much iease.  In our case, we call people who have received a physical copy of our guide to getting started in voice overs. My first question is just to ask if the book arrived and did they find it useful.  That is enough of a prompt for those that want to talk more to do so.  They go on a ‘hot list’ of people who are interested.  The others just default back to our email subscription.
4. The volume of leads we deal with, although not huge. still exceeds the rule of 5 plus or minus two.  As such we track notes against prospects in our own simple CRM.

Would I prefer to build a cashflow that didn’t require so much time on the phone?  Yes.  Do I have a choice?  Well, unless I don’t want to run Piehole, probably not.  As it happens, Piehole’s customers (mostly actors) are not online and prefer to deal with real people.  Zappos are doing well based on this basis. We’ve started calling existing customer, just a courtesy, over the last while to make sure everyine is happy.  The idea is that we catch someone who is considering unsubscribing and try to assuage any doubts they may have.  That process also feeds back directly into our work practices.

At various times I’ve been involved with developing or selling or trying to use a CRM system.  While the promise is great, the reality rarely matches up.

I first saw Michael mention his take on CRM on the Enterprise Ireland, eBusiness forum.  It was about to launch and while I like the idea of someone coming up to a fresh approach to CRM , I thought ‘oh dear’.  While I’ve always suspected there must be a better way than the traditional, Lead/Contact/Account/Opportunity model,  I’d never figured out what that would be myself.  I think Michael might have however.

Straight from the front page, there are a few things I should learn from, the next time I put a webapp together.

Signup really does take the 30 seconds promised and from the get go, I was liking what I saw inside.  One problem with webapp systems is that without any data, it is hard to get an idea of how the whole thing hangs together.  OnePageCRM pre-populates with a couple of contacts, but actually, I prefer to enter my own dummy data.  The 2 contacts provided don’t take long to delete however.  An add ‘Contact (or prospect)’ link was a good start.  I never quiet understood why contacts and leads were stored separately in systems like SugarCRM and vTiger.  The interactions on the site are pretty Ajax heavy which can be a bit distracting at times.  I personally like a slide effect but there is quiet a bit of fading in.  That might be a personal preference but it does mean that the site is fast to use.  This is a major issue.  Normally, CRM systems crawl (or the ones I have do anyway) and the last thing you want to be doing when a client calls up is be waiting for a new page to load.  Contacts are categorised as Client/Prospect/Inactive with a VIP check box to boot.

The concept of a VIP is a useful one.  We have certain clients who are more valuable to us in terms of the customers they refer or the amount of spend they build up with us.  It makes sense to keep these guys top of mind in the system and make sure they are getting an appropriate level of attention.

It is the task dialog which really has the key to what makes this system stand out of me.  Every time you check of a task in the system, it immediatly asks you what the next acttion will be.  Annoying but invaluable.  If you think about it – there is normally some next action even when the prospect has bought.  There may be a follow up to do or to ask for feedback.  This is what keeps the database from growing stale and makes sure that leads don’t get lost.

So, I’m siging up  - right?  Wrong.

There are a few things which stop me.  Only some of these are to do with OnepageCRM itself.  I love the simplicity but like all simple systems, I’m wondering how its going to look after the glow of initial newness of it all wears off, I’m wondering how it would look with a couple of thousand leads in there.  This is pretty much true for all CRM systems, but until OnePage has more of a track record, I’d be taking a risk.  More customer testimonials might help with this.  They’ll come in time.

One other nagging concern is, I get a bit jumpy about having our entire business process laid out in another companies arms.  I know this is an issue for all hosted systems, but I somehow don’t mind it so much when those arms are on the west coast of the USA rather than down the road in Dublin.

Personally, I’d like some keyboard shortcuts for common tasks such as searching contacts and adding notes and scrolling through the contacts.  Something along the lines of Gmail would do.

Of course the real reason I’m not signing up is that we’ve just been struggling with our CRM process and changing it AGAIN would likely lead to some kind of breakdown on our part.  I’m going ot be keeping an eye on this project though, and looking forward to seeing it make an impact.  I believe it deserves to.

Deciding what to spend your time on is tricky.  As an engineer, I just want to spend more time on the product.  As a sales guy, I agree with my engineer self and want to find out what the customer wants so we can go and give it to them – and make my sales life easier in the process.  As an accountant, all I want to do is get the sales me to spend more time selling and less fannying about.  The amount of ’stuff’ that I can spend my time on is bewildering.

At times I like this, I re-read some of Brad Sugars, Instant Cashflow.  There are only actually five things I can (or should) do.

1. Increase the number of leads:  For us that has meant appearing on national TV, spending money on adwords, giving lectures or public speaking, networking, building relationships with trainers etc etc.  Right now, I’d actually love to run a TV ad – if only for the craic.  My marketing self loves this one.
2. Improve conversion rate:  The engineer normally comes out for this one.  We cook up more features that we can add to entice people to join.  Right now this has been working on the audition system we built.  It also means working on our landing pages and, rather bluntly, following up on sales leads by phone.  Tweaking our aweber has also proved useful.
3. Increasing number of sales / customer:  This means going back to our database and cooking up new offers.
4. Increasing average sale: Doing some customer feedback to see if our pricing can be pushed (not likely in this environment).
5. Increasing profit margin:  Not very glamorous.  This just means sitting down and going through all our expenditure to see if we are paying for anything we don’t need, or could get cheaper somewhere else.  Off the top of my head, that probably means moving from aweber to something else and thinking about moving our hosting (ugh).  Other treats might include changing our VoIP provider. Read the rest of this entry »

Email gets a bad wrap.  Spam clogging up inboxs and untold hours of lost productivity.  Viagra and free visa’s to the US all go towards making it a touchy subject.  However, if email can elect an American president, I can’t afford to ignore it for developing a relationship with our customers.

Checking my own inbox, the oldest email newsletter I’m subscribed to goes back almost 10 years.  It is a technology newletter to do with MS Outlook, something I don’t work on anymore, but I stay subscribed in case some day I need it.  That is one hell of a relationship.

Read the rest of this entry »

CRM systems are behemoths.  No matter how many claim to be ’simple’ they all feature from feature creep.  The fact remains, if you are not using a CRM, you are probably only running at half your potential cash-flow if the ever-so helpful introductary video ad infusionsoft is anything to go by.  The good guys there go on to point out that on average, customers will buy from you after 7 interactions.  Most people give up after 3.  You can manage this to a certain extent using excel or google docs (as we have been for the last three years) but after a while it all get unwieldy.

To counter this I did a quick review of available products  before designing my own minimum viable CRM system (oh groan – another techy reinventing the wheel).  Here were the front runners. Read the rest of this entry »

Natural sales resistance is that icky feeling you get as soon as you feel as though you are beeing sold to.  It is a inbuilt defense mechanism that we all have and is aimed at keeping our hard earned sheckles in our pockets.

It raises both necessary and unnecessary caution.  A lot of the time it will stop you from making a silly mistake, other times it stops you from doing something you really should.  For example, in my dating days, there are many, many, many girls who’s natural sales resistance was alerted every time I asked them for a dance.  Many of these poor creatures missed out simply because they were unsure of my true intentions. Read the rest of this entry »

Numbers are confusing things.  Take probability for example.  I never could understand why a coin wasn’t more likely to come up tails if it has just landed on heads.  Numbers have a way of obfuscating reality.  Humans as a rule are not great at visualising them.  I’ve been reminded of this a number of times recently.  The rule of 72 is  a prime example (pardon the pun).

Despite this numbers are pretty damn important and for the last while I’ve been trying to get head around they effect our sales funnel. There are a number of percentages involved (% conversion rate, % margin) and the compounding effects of changing figures early on in the funnel (eg: adding more leads) makes it hard to understand which changes make the most impact to the bottom line.

To help me play with the figures and explain my thoughts I’ve knocked up this little javascript app below. You can change any of the figures underlined in gray.

Brad Sugars describes this basic model as the business chasis. I only have influence over certain factors in my business.

Number of leads: I can advertise, purchase, network, do press releases etc to generate more of these.

Conversion Rate: I can come up with special offers, deploy harder/softer sales tactics, ask for feedback etc to try and improve my hit rate.

Transactions / customer: I can email my existing customer base, offer upgrades, look for suitable products to pass on to my existing customer base.

Average dollar sale: Here I can offer 2-for-1’s upgrade my product offering etc.

There isn’t much else I can tweak really.  It is just a question of deciding where I should spend my effort.  Should I spend more time on adwords to generate more leads or would I be better off trying to improve my conversion rate or upping my average dollar sale?  This tool is supposed to help me play around with the figures.  It also helps me to think about new opportunities.  Existing business models have reasonably well understood ‘industry norms’ for each of these figures.

For example, free webapps generally speaking have a just under 1% conversion rate to paid plans.  Their average dollar sale / month is gonna be around the €20 – €50 mark.  Using this conventions it makes it easy to slot in the figures and do the math on how many leads would be required to create a viable business.  Of course it is very back of the envelope stuff but even doing these simple numbers has helped me avoid making false assumptions. Why spend $$$ trying to generate more leads when I can add a product to upsell for free and market directly to my existing customers?

It is not perfect as a tool by any means.  I’d love to have some better way to visualise this model.

Telesales is a tricky subject.  It has an awful reputation.  If you haven’t been called by an eircom representative at 10 at night in an attempt to woo you back  – you will hear from one soon.  It does however – work.  Irrespective of whether or not you think people should be allowed to solicit for work over the phone – there are a couple of occasions when you should at least consider it.  When …

• Your market doesn’t live online:  Despite what you might read – the vast majority of businesses and consumers are not online.  While the kids might have badgered Mum into installing a broadband connection, most Irish people don’t spend any meaningful time online.  You can blog, tweet and even email newsletter you little heart out and you still won’t reach these guys.  Direct mail, TV and radio may/may not work – but telesales definitly does.
• You work in a niche: Piehole serves a total Irish market of about 600 people.  That means that we can offer a laser focused offering.  It also means that we can’t afford to leave much on the table.  We have to get as much of the market as possible.  While giving away free accounts might yield a 1% conversion rate, our email marketing efforts gives us about a 2% return – pretty much anything else we try is outstripped by the 7 – 10% we expect from a telesales campaign.  In a market of 600 – we just can’t afford not to use the most effective marketing tools available.  If you are in a small market – you might not be able to either.
• You have a simple proposition: In Ireland, the traditional role of telesales has mostly been for appointment setting.  This means that people hit the phones in the hopes of getting an appointment with a MD in order to sell a big ticket item such as a group insurance scheme or consultancy services.  In our case we have a simple value proposition: “we’ll help you find voiceover work”.  You don’t need to be web-savvy to understand that.  In part this is why it is so important to deploy non-web based services.
• You can demonstrate credibility easily:  You need some way to demonstrate credibility.  In Ireland we are reasonably well known but in the UK we are not (yet).  To get around this we published a book including tips on getting more voiceover work.  The book is fairly slim but packed some of useful tips on finding work and what you can expect to be paid for that work.  Perhaps an even more impressive demonstration of credability would be to ring people up offering them work that you had already found.  I’ve seen this in action recently and it is something I’m keen to mimic.

Having decided how that it is right for you – here is how we go about running a campaign.

1. Allocate a budget (including hours, printing / postage costs etc) to your campaign.  We typically work on a 32 hour campaign.  We might run it over a three week period.
2. Set a sales target.  As a rule of thumb a 1 in 10 hit rate is one to work with.  About one in every ten people you call should sign up.  If it is more than this – look at your offer again.
3. Decide on a tactic.  We try different approaches with different campaigns.  We might ring them up to offer them a free copy of our e-book or an actual physical copy.
4. Write a script:  The script will no doubt go by the wayside but it acts as a good touchpoint.  It also helps with the post match analysis.  It is very hard to decide what worked and what did not if each call is unique.  Writing and following a script helps you to identify phrases that help you to get your point across best.  It also helps in scaling your effort to the rest of the team.  In our case these scripts normally boil down to ’standard answers’ to common questions such as ‘does your website work’ or ‘how much does it cost to join?’.  Key answers like these can make all the difference to your RoI.
5. Fill your campaign with leads.  How you get the leads is up to you.  Ideally the warmer the better.  We use our email newsletter, free downloads and contact forms to solicit contact information.  Remember to use collected contact information in a manner consistent with that lead’s expectation.  If someone gave you a number so that you could call them – don’t start sending them text messages – or vice-versa.  We would get through about 150 leads in a campaign.
6. We work on a 3 call basis.  The first call is to demonstrate value in some way – either by posting out the book or some other offer, the second is primarily aimed at closing once the book has been received and a third is to tie up lose ends such as callbacks and collecting payment details.  We make a point of trying to close on each call if there are the right buying signals.  Buying signals include someone asking the price or asking about terms.
7. Make the calls:  This is the hardest part!  Just get your head down.  The good news is that the vast majority of people are happy to take your call so long as you have something that interests them.

So there you have it.  How we run our telesales.  We don’t actually do a lot of it.  We are somewhat limited by the number of leads we can generate.  It is however an excellent way to driving sales especially if you are looking to hit a month end target.