How Outsourced Telesales Services Help Businesses Reach Consumers

Telesales is an effective strategy to turn prospective leads into customers. The sales strategy sells a product or service directly to the customer over the telephone. It can be an efficient strategy for businesses to directly reach interested customers and persuade them to buy  products or services.

Telesales And Telemarketing

Usually, telemarketing and telesales are used interchangeably. However, there is a basic difference between the two terms. Telesales takes a sales order over the telephone. For businesses, telesales can be executed as a growth strategy, creating a high volume of relatively low value orders. For example, mobile phone telesales executives are trained to contact customers at the right time in order to up sell packages. Many times, they use executive team building exercises to get going quickly. On the other hand, telemarketing is a considerably more complicated process, requiring increased communication. Instead of taking orders, it creates leads by generating interest among customers. Based on this interaction, the sales team can learn about customers and develop sales plans accordingly. To be clear, telemarketing and telesales are two related terms that serve different purposes in business.

Telesales is one of the most efficient direct sales methods used by businesses once they start accepting credit cards. Many times, sales personnel use this approach to convert prospective leads into customers. Additionally, non-profit and social organizations use telesales to raise funds similar to how a business sells products. Clearly, this can be beneficial for most types of businesses.

Outsourced Lead Generation

Telesales goes further than just telemarketing by acting as outsourced lead generation strategies. Typical telemarketing efforts are just the beginning of generating awareness and leads. Telesales goes one step further in the conversion process than just prospect profiling. Telesales services look to create the b2b sales appointment for your sales team to close the deal. This is much more tangible than general telemarketing services, which may generate leads but not qualify them. This is an important advantage that telesales services have over traditional telemarketing services. It is important for business owners to consider this before they decide what types of outsourced marketing and sales strategies to utilize.

Telesales Representative Job Description

To determine whether or not telesales is what your business needs, it may help to understand what a telesales representative actually does for you. There are four main components to this position: generating leads, direct to customer sales, processing orders and, of course, customer service. These sales professionals have a bevy of lead generation tools that will help you to generate new leads and then also help you close on them, as well. Telesales reps may also perform the actual order processing for you, as well. And, of course, they do all this while also providing great customer service. These are four huge tasks that a telesales representative can help take off your plate.

Main Benefits Of Telesales

There are quite a few advantages of telesales calls. The two biggest benefits are its convenience and cost-effectiveness. In a given period of time, telesales executives can contact more customers with business greetings than door-to-door sales personnel. Talking to more customers, telesales makes it easier to gather customer preferences and habits. Moreover, telesales technology reduces the cost of overhead because executives can sell products from the office. As you can see, telesales is beneficial to most businesses, saving time and costs.

Important Telesales Disadvantages

However, telesales has disadvantages too. The primary disadvantage is making effective contact. Since sales executives are not present face-to-face, it can be difficult to interact properly. This communication results in a high rate of rejection. Additionally, even when contact has been made, it is difficult to make proper judgments without seeing the customer’s face. Secondly, if the customer is not in front of a computer, it is impossible to show them company charts, marketing materials or infographics. Certainly, telesales has a few challenges for telesales executives to work around

Overcoming Telesales Challenges

On the bright side, these disadvantages can be overcome in a few ways. If the right prospects are contacted, the rate of rejection can decrease drastically. If people are interested in your products already, they generally require less persuasion. Secondly, outsourcing telesales can effectively offset disadvantages to telesales. Instead of investing in time and money, trained outsourced telesales executives can sell products more efficiently, gaining more customers for you to use your customer retention strategies on. Lastly, great products are always easier to sell anywhere, including over the phone. If your company has something great to offer, telesales will be much more productive. Of course, these are just a few great ways to overcome the challenges of telesales.

As mentioned, telesales can be a tricky business operation. It is certainly one of the most cost effective sales strategies. However, if executed unprofessionally, telesales can hurt the company’s reputation. To be successful at telesales, understand the difference between telemarketing, the benefits to telesales and how to overcome its disadvantages. Doing this research should help you maximize the impact of telesales on your business success.