By Megan Hottman
What is outsourced telesales?
Outsourced telesales is partnering with an external organization to help sell your products or services directly to the customer by telephone. An outsourced partner can help transform the way your company gains market share while maintaining and supporting your current customer base.
There are several reasons a company may look at outsourcing all or part of its business. Some of the reasons include efforts to reduce internal costs, to have an increased focus on internal core objectives, to free up internal resources, and to help support or maximize and achieve overall growth objectives while increasing market share. It’s this last point that is important to call out and to take note of.
Yesterday’s outsourcing focused solely on reducing costs, with perhaps a dash of technology improvements. Today, outsourcing is all about collaboration with the right outsourced telesales partner that has the experience to help achieve and support strategic organizational objectives.
There are several ways outsourced telesales partners can help support increasing market share. Here are a few of those ways.
Outsourced Telesales Will Increase Contacts
That’s right. Outsourced telesales will increase the number of dials and contacts. The outsourced telesales team will be 100 percent focused on picking up the phone and calling someone to offer a product, solution, or service. It may seem obvious, but today too many salespeople rely on email, social media, and inbound leads. Think about it for a minute. Having a question answered, an issue resolved, or someone that took the time to listen to the person on the other end of the phone leads to higher customer satisfaction.
Now, what does customer satisfaction have to do with gaining market share? According to an article from Salesforce, when customers are satisfied, they are loyal to your brand and more likely to have repeat sales. They also point out that this helps reduce the costs associated with finding new customers, which speaks directly to market share.
The right outsourced telesales partners are not just skilled at outbound calls. They have the skillset, expertise, and capacity to support various functions that interface with customers. Other benefits of phone calls that help gain market share:
- Speaking to people, which is much more personal and leads to a two-way dialogue where callers can ask questions and receive answers
- Having the ability to check for understanding and clarify if needed
- Negotiating larger deal sizes and generating more sales
- Receiving feedback from customers/prospects live and in real-time rather than a web form
An Outsourced Telesales Team Will Generate More Leads and Opportunities
Telemarketing is one of the most effective ways to generate qualified leads. The landscape today demands that the process of lead generation provides high quality and relevant information, understanding what business challenge you’re addressing and being diligent with follow up—all while providing the best experience for the prospect. Organizations use outsourced telesales partners to help increase market share through lead generation services.
Lead generation is effective for companies of every size and helps support consistent growth when done correctly. Partnering with the right outsourced telesales partner that has expertise in lead generation will help achieve the desired results of gaining market share. The ideal outsourced telesales partner to support and drive lead generation efforts will:
- Demonstrate their capabilities of building a bridge between your organization and the prospect
- Help identify the right prospects by continually making suggestions to refine the process
- Serve as a true partner and act as an extension of your team
An Effective Outsourced Telesales Team Will Demonstrate Relevant Experience
Today, experience matters more than ever. An outsourced telesales provider should not just “talk the talk” but should be able to provide insight and give suggestions based on previous experiences and lessons learned with helping organizations increase market share.
Tapping the expertise of the right outsourced telesales partner can help mitigate potential costly mistakes. The best-outsourced telesales partners can help demonstrate their experience by:
- Being nimble and flexible. This is crucial as changes to market conditions or other objectives can change in an instant.
- Being objective. An outsourced telesales provider can view your company and operation from a different lens. Their fresh and unique perspective has the power to help model a successful outcome.
- Being willing to dig in. They can figure out what tactics, scripts, and resources will be most successful. Outsourced telesales partners should be willing to figure out what will work best to drive reaching organizational objectives rather than just saying something isn’t working.
Outsourced Telesales Will Make Your Business More Nimble
No matter the size of the business, speed to market really matters when looking at increasing market share. If you can’t get to market before your competition does, it doesn’t matter how great your product is. Slow speed to market is like handing over a giant competitive advantage to your unwelcomed competition. Time to market requires a strategic approach so you can get products in front of the desired audience as swiftly and organized as possible. Partnering with the right outsourced telesales provider can help increase speed to market, which in turn increases market share.
Conclusion
Outsourcing has a proven ability to deliver regardless of the size of business. For companies of all sizes across all industries, outsourcing can be a complete game-changer for achieving organization-wide objectives.
Megan Hottman is an operations manager for Quality Contact Solutions. Megan’s experience includes working as an outbound telemarketing manager for a Fortune 100 company. Megan has been both a client and an employee of QCS, so she knows firsthand the quality, productivity, and passion the team brings to work each day. You can reach Megan at megan@qualitycontactsolutions.com.