Outbound Call Strategy

A vast majority of tips on successfully interacting with one’s customer audience are superficial both in their insightful meaning and practical application. They usually briefly mention an outbound calling strategy as a ‘very important stage of interaction’, which it is, yet this concept should be approached in a more in-depth manner in order to some real use out of it. The thing is, live communication allows your contact center experts to build transparent, cooperative honesty-based relationships with both potential and existing clients. We are about to share some truly insightful guidelines for forming an efficient outbound contact strategy and talk about how to unload your sales department in this aspect. 

Outbound Calls: Automation Is Your Best Bet

Achieving impeccable results in the corporate customer communication routine is practically impossible without the integration of a reliable CRM system. It helps to thoroughly automate important business processes lying at the core of sales department experts’ responsibilities. Integrating such a system, though, is only half the battle. In order to really exploit the software potential, you should also: 

• Provide a CRM phone integration. An utterly efficient way to enhance the performance and flexibility of work for your sales manager is the analysis of recorded conversations with customers. On top of that, you can also employ some useful calling features, like auto-dial and call forwarding;
• Implement a CRM database integration. Acquiring leads and capturing each in the dedicated database is a profoundly time-consuming task. Even an hour of such work a day will equal five work hours a week, which is 20 work hours a month - whole 2,5 workdays. All that time can be used to focus on their primary responsibilities - making client-base expanding calls. Integration of a CRM system (with its highly-useful automation capacities) with your in-house database can help you solve this irrational time distribution issue, allowing your sales to spend their precious 60 minutes of work time more productively.    

How to Motivate Employees to Boost Calls Efficiency?

The main reason for enduring corporate cold calls which aren’t effective enough is, first and foremost, the lack of motivation among the employees of your sales department. Many of them may go only as far as making such calls for the show, which, in turn, affects the quality of customer interaction most negatively in the long run. In order to fix this situation, internal workflow planning experts recommend forming employee compensation plans subdivided into the stated salary (25-30%) and bonuses (60-65%).

Setting the Order of the Day for Sales Department Workers

Forming the order of the day plan will help you achieve maximum managers’ performance efficiency, as it helps them to distribute time and adjust their overall time management efforts without going too far, or getting confused with all the scheduling. 

Keep in mind that the level of workers’ responsibility and of their personal professional qualities should correspond with timeframes you set for completing certain stages of a workday (because, for instance, if a sales department expert Anna doesn’t put effort into productively communicating with clients for two hours straight, another employee - Nick - will have to work an extra hour straight in order to not lower his own productivity results).

Thorough scheduling will also help to recognize workers that only imitate dedication and ‘frenzied activity’ without, actually, bringing real work results. 

Why is it important to subdivide important tasks into several smaller ones?

Outbound calling for potential clients can be pretty difficult to handle in certain aspects without composed, optimized, and prepared beforehand scripts. Moreover, if you don’t provide a detailed algorithm for every other occasion, you can get total profits results that differ a lot as opposed to what you expect. 

That’s why it is important to subdivide global tasks into smaller, simpler ones and make individual plans for separate workers if need be.

It is also crucial to create and define a global objective - a desired total number of calls during a certain period of time.

How to Maximize Results?

To properly subdivide tasks into several subtasks, it’s important to understand which income growth readings you reach. Here, you should base your conclusion both on the factual size of the desired volume of profits and on your expectations as to margins related to certain income sources, sales funnel conversion results, average checks, etc.  

You should also take the level of performance certain employees demonstrate into consideration.

In particular, you should analyze finished in-house calls 1-2 recorded conversations a day for each employee. Form a separate checklist for that. We’ll help.  

Here’s a checklist with some major checkpoints on the conversation standards and basics, from greetings to worker introduction, to conversation management, and handling of objections. Thus, try to keep your in-house outbound calls in check according to the following criteria: 

• greetings, employee introduction;
• specification of position;
• specification of company business;
• small talk techniques;
• customer compliments;
• definition of the goal of the call;
• calling a customer by their name;
• conversation management;
• acquisition of customer contacts;
• figuring out objections a customer might have, etc.

These are some points by default, which should be assessed synonymously (‘+’ or ‘-’, without any ranking systems involved). 

Read also: Outbound Call Script

FAQ

To help you a little more out there on your business enhancement quest, here are a bunch of answers to some frequently asked questions on the topic.

How do I make a successful outbound call?

There are a few common and major outbound call tips:

• know a product or service you offer. Both you and your company employees must be absolutely confident and knowledgeable, demonstrating dedication alongside high qualifications;
• form a list of clients to call up. Thorough timely planning always makes wonders, make sure to make lists of clients to call with major details;
• research clients. Find out as much as possible about people your department calls. The Internet is your best helper here. Initial knowledge of intercalators can help win over the goodwill of potential customers;
• don’t overthink it. This goes for all sales managers and contact center workers out there - just relax and enjoy the conversation instead of worrying how you will act or sound during that or another callup; 
• Find a way to boost your mood. Again, a lot depends on how a worker treats conversations as a whole. You cannot see and you’re unlikely to ‘feel’ emotions on a phone, yet a good, easy-going mood will always be a bonus and enhancement of one’s performance.

What does Outbound Call mean?

An outbound call is a corporate cold call, which is, most usually, perceived by clients less than enthusiastically. You may have come across phone conversations of the following nature at least once in your life: ‘Good day, I am a Smith & Co. representative, we have been producing the best hair curlers on the market since 1900…’. This is an explicit demonstration of what the term means.  

We discussed the difference between inbound and outbound call centers in the previous article.

Why is outbound calling important?

A successful outbound calls strategy isn’t all about an immediate sale, it’s more about the boost of client knowledge about your company or a certain product or service you provide. To be more precise, your goal is to break the ice, handle a prejudiced client opinion, and figure out whether they need what you suggest at all. 

How many calls should an outbound agent make?

This depends on certain agents we are talking about. In order to find out a ‘proper’ cap of calls for your particular business case, analyze at least 1-2 records of a concrete employee and assess how successful their results are along with their moving in work from one client to another. 

How to Optimize Cold Calls Further?

As you can see, elaborating your own working outbound call strategy is a responsible task requiring a good share of effort, dedication, and a good level of professionalism on the side of operators. To avoid hiring new call center employees or increasing the workload for your current staff of experts (demanding them to boost qualifications previously unknown for their fields of telemarketing), we’d recommend turning to an outsourcing company specializing in the work with clients through the phone. 

In particular, you can start your search for profitable offshore companies in Ukraine. There, you get low rates for high-quality work and sufficient English-language communication (with Ukrainians being among the most literate nations of the world as a whole). Thus, you can save your company budget from colossal office expenses without any risks involved as well as shift responsibilities for processes as complex as potential client interaction to the shoulders of highly-qualified specialists.