Some funded and free training is now available through Train to Gain. Our friends over at To Market who specialise in training and development work with customer service, telesales and telemarketing tell us they’ve got hold of some training funding for you. 

Partially funded customer service training - through Train to Gain

At the moment they are looking to offer both free and partially funded training to organisations In Leicester, Northampton, Cambridge, Bury St Edmunds, Coventry and Birmingham as well as wider parts of Northamptonshire, Leicestershire plus East Midlands, West Midlands and East of England. If  this is of interest to you, follow this link to http://www.tomarket.co.uk/blog/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=51. This gives details of the East Midlands training, the West Midlands and East of England will go live we are told over the next 2 days.

But this really is a chance not to be missed so have a look at the details and sign up ! Maybe you’ll even get to hear some of the material on the audio CDs you will find on this site.

It is so important.

Many organisations who have telesales or telemarketing teams will have a good idea about what results they produce each. This may be appointments or sales etc. However do you also record the amount of activity that produces those results ? By this I mean the amount of calls, the amount of times they get through to the right person (i.e. the decision-maker) and what proportion of those ’selling opportunities’ they turn into the desired outcome.

Without understanding this profile how can you identify how they can most easily improve ? Where the weakest link in their personal chain is ? How can you support and motivate them ?

Furthermore they need to be recording these results for you themselves so that there is a degree of personal ownership. The audio CD Measure, Monitor, Motivate in the phone team management section of the website covers this subject. Click on this link to get there directly http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=26 Some organisations will record activity remotely and electronically and will perhaps feed it back to the team on a monthly basis. But if the team hasn’t been recording the results themselves and haven’t got an idea about what results they are generating, they can’t do much to influence it can they ?

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Yes act quickly – but not in haste !

In any phone team environment things move quickly, and if you manage that team it is important you respond to events quickly. You won’t need me to tell you that someone who is bright, happy and positive when they come into work in the morning can change instantly. One horrible customer on the phone or an order that you were counting on, that has now been indefinitely postponed can test the motivation of even the best phoner !

So when managing your team keep an eye on them as much as you can. So limit the amount of time you spend in meetings, and keep your office door open if you sit near to your team. 50% of your management decision making should be based on the numbers, the facts, the cold hard undeniable evidence. The other 50% should be based on your intuition, your feelings and pure gut instinct. If something feels wrong, even if you can’t put your finger on it, research it, gather facts and then act. Because in many cases your gut instinct will at least be valid. There is an audio CD specifically aimed at telesales, telemarketing and customer service supervisors, team leaders and managers. The link is http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=2

There is also a training course being run in January 2009 for phone team managers. Find out more details by checking out the To Market website at www.tomarket.co.uk. This Midlands based course has previously seen people attend from Birmingham, Cambridge, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Solihull, Leicester, Northampton, Kettering, Corby and Milton Keynes. One lady even hopped on a plane from Scotland.

Right now, many organisations are facing varying levels of decline in business. And because of the speed of the downturn and the severity of it, these are times when your business model has to be critically reassessed. Things that you may never have had to do before, will have to be considered.

Good will come of this, as it will make all of us take stock and appreciate the business we do get.

But if there was ever a time to make your business more proactive, this is it !

You will need to make a much larger volume of calls and approaches, and the sales team that you have involved in field selling, or a phone team dealing with incoming enquiries will need to lead this process.

So make sure you have a quality list or database for them to work from. They will also need training (possibly) to help them adapt to a different role, and they need a robust process to operate. So for instance they need to be able to store notes (on a computer) about each person they call, some notes of the conversation, and equally importantly a field to mark the next contact due. This makes intelligent use of the sales database. Remember that knowledge is power !

We have an audio CD on setting up and managing a telephone based team which covers the issues mentioned above on process etc http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=2 is the link for this product.

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Of course management of teams should be about using a mix of intuitive observations as well as raw statistics. The intuitive bit you get from the well established principle of MBWA – management by walking about. The quantitative bit is fairly straightforward and is based around just 4 key criteria. And if you ensure you look at each of these 4 numbers daily for each of your team, and in depth monthly you will find you’ve got a handle on what you need to know. The CD http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=26 explains this in more detail : how to set it up, what to measure and the short cuts and tricks to help you stay one step ahead of the team.

The 4 key measures are ;

1.  How many outbound dials they make per hour (over a given period) 

2. How many decision-makers they speak to per hour

3. How many of these decision-makers they convert into the desired outcome (sale, appointment etc.)

4. How many sales/appointments they make per hour

Understanding these numbers will help you with target setting for your team, and it will help you understand each person’s performance profile better (because not every person achieves their results in the same way.) It will also know what to address if somebody is off target and how best to help them