Hiring “ahead of the game” telesales experts can make all the difference in creating success for your business. The right telesales staff will increase your profits and create a positive image about your business in the minds of customers. There are many things to keep in mind when looking to hire telephone salespeople.
The following are the six tips to keep in mind for hiring “ahead of the game” telephone sales experts including: verifying the applicant’s job experience, properly confirming their references, seeking qualified business referrals, interviewing them by phone, checking on their record of results and going with your gut.
The first tip for finding qualified telemarketers is to take the time to properly verify their job experience. You should never consider hiring inexperienced telephone sales people because this business is complex and takes a great deal of time and training to perfect the needed skills.
Strategy number two to employing good telephone salespeople is to properly confirm their references. Their previous employer or client can let you know exactly how this candidate has been at achieving their sales goals and maintaining a professional image.
Tip number three for finding qualified telemarketers is to seek qualified business referrals especially from other business owners in comparable fields. If you know a business that has achieved excellent results with their telesales pros, you should ask how they hired them so you can pursue the same method for finding competent telemarketer that get results for your business.
The fourth key to employing good telephone salespeople is to give them a phone interview. This interview should be like an “audition” for the job and you can even ask potential salespeople to role-play a sales call with you.
Tip number five for finding qualified telemarketers is to validate their history of results if at all feasible. Bona fide powerhouse telemarketers have their closing ratios memorized and can easily provide you with their sales numbers, because being an powerhouse means knowing how many numbers they have to call before they make a sale.
The sixth and concluding tip to employing good telephone salespeople is to go with your gut. Talking to your prospective telemarketers over the telephone should give you a decent picture of the type of impact they will have on your customers and how they will characterize your business.
Taking these six tips for hiring moneymaking telephone sales experts into consideration will allow you to find skilled powerhouse telemarketers that can greatly improve your sales figures. Finding gifted telephone sales pros to hire can be tough, but it is worth the trouble since they are so valuable. Realistically, they control the success of your business to a great extent.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Excellent tips. I would like to add that more candidates at the top of the funnel (beginning of the interview process), the more candidates you will have to choose from when extending offers, which will allow you to be more selective, thus raising the quality of the hires.
For companies with large US hiring needs (not just telesales, but outside sales and all call center agents), especially in low population markets where companies place call centers because the overhead costs are lower, you have to deploy a non-standard, mass sourcing solution that targets active, semi-active and passive candidates.
If you do the screening / hiring yourself, don't waste your money on a search firm. Outsource only the sourcing component for a lot less. You'll save a lot of money over newspapers, job board ads, career fairs, etc.
We're a major financial services company and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on our recruiting budget by outsourcing just the sourcing component to a company called MicroDyne Technologies (http://www.mdtamerica.com). When a campaign is released, the phones literally ring off the hook. We've had to make adjustments in our phone systems just to handle the volume, but the folks at MicroDyne are really good at working with your infrastructure to make sure you don't lose out on interested candidates because of volume issues. Talk about a good problem to have!