Amongst the likes of digital marketing and social media, telesales might seem a little old hat. But even in this day and age, such a traditional form of marketing remains an important part of many industries’ operations – one that has the power to create healthy profitability across your business.
Getting the most out of your offline sales channels, however, might be a case of using the right business software, and using it effectively. After all, if you’re using the same telesales techniques that worked in the past but are proving fruitless in the present, then you might be putting your time and energy into the wrong areas.
Here, we’ll look at how software can help you to streamline and track offline sales by offering up several B2B telesales tips below.
How can business software improve offline telesales?
As a business, adapting your approach and making yourself open to incoming innovations can be crucial to your continued success. And it’s no different for your offline telesales either.
An ERP system can provide you with the speed and efficiency to support your telesales team across their duties. As part of our Intact iQ Telesales Module, you can use the following capabilities to greatly improve the management of your telesales.
Pro-active telesales call schedules
There are certain times of the day when prospects won’t want to be bothered. And as frustrating as it is for them, phoning them up during these inopportune moments is also a waste of your team’s time. Scheduling calls, on the other hand, makes the most of everyone’s precious minutes.
By conducting a bit of research ahead of time, you can establish the right time to call customers and prospects. With this criteria to hand, our telesales module will then automatically create a list of customers that your telesales can get in touch with.
These lists include information on any deferred calls they need to catch up with, while inbound calls are also taken into account – so none of your customers receive unnecessary calls to distract them from their day.
And when your team are on calls, all the customer’s key information, such as contact details, preferred call times, and designated telesales point of contact, remain in view. Your team can even rank their call list by your customers’ preferred call times for more efficient workflows throughout their day.
Adapting call frequency
As well as choosing the right time to call, deciding how often you call your customers is a big part of call management. Too often a frequency might end up irritating those you want to contact. With iQ, you can adapt your call frequency to your preferred sales/replenishment cycles.
This lets you and your team set customer call-backs at a time that works for everyone. Whether it’s a certain day of the week, sometime during the month, or every few days, your team know when to touch base with the people that matter most to your business.
Plus, you can even take holiday periods, excluding certain dates so that they don’t appear in your call schedules.
Identify lost sales
A drop in sales can be disheartening, but without business software, tracking down missed opportunities is going to be a challenge. Using iQ, it’s possible to configure the system to highlight drops in sales from certain customers, before flagging them as priority contacts for your team to call.
It’s even possible to combine these priority calls with promotions as a way of encouraging them to repurchase products once again. And crucially, it’s then possible to analyse the results of this approach to see if your promotional efforts were a success.
Improved upselling
The mark of any strong telesales team is their ability to upsell to customers and prospects. But without the right information in front of them, those on the other end of the phone could remain unconvinced by your team’s efforts.
However, with instantaneous on-screen access to all the live information they might need, your team have a bank of alternates, supersessions, popular products, and promotional items right in front of them, providing plenty of opportunity for enhanced upselling. Our Telesales Module will even highlight any important alerts or rules, so your team can avoid providing incorrect information, which could lead to confusion later on.
Maximising efficiency
The right business software has plenty of tools that can help you optimise your team’s efficiency throughout the day.
With iQ, you can spread out the daily call list across multiple users, dividing workloads to your team in your preferred way. You can also reassign calls should certain agents be unavailable due to sickness or based on their performance throughout the day.
This is especially key if you’re looking to default certain telesales agents to key clients. You can even configure call schedules in ways that benefit your delivery routes.
The access to on-screen information also lets agents carry out additional tasks such as returns, credit requests and other customer queries, speeding up processes for both your team and your contacts alike.
With business software like iQ’s Telesales Module, your team’s time is put to better use, reducing slow, inefficient processes and replacing them with streamlined and efficient methods that, ultimately, mean greater telesales management and improved profitability across your company.
Along with flexible, proactive telesales management, Intact iQ offers an enterprise-wide solution designed to future-proof your business. Looking for more information? Head to our dedicated page or get in touch with us today.
