In its broadest sense, telebusiness is any activity connected with conducting business by telephone. Its closest synonym being telemarketing. Many people, however, do not fully understand telemarketing and still confuse it with old-fashioned telesales techniques. Those who have yet to get to grips with the entire sphere of marketing itself think telemarketing is merely a way of conducting research by phone!
The standard sound signal analogue network of telephony has been enhanced and telephone lines are no longer used just to transmit voice information. Voice and data is increasingly being sent via lSDN (integrated services digital networks) which has improved the speed, security and cost of transmitting information. ISDN allows an organisation to link all of its national and global sites simultaneously.
This chapter addresses the many factors which combine to create the dilemma of successfully integrating the activities of external and internal sales functions so as to best serve the customer’s needs. Although this is an achievable goal, many issues — and often entrenched views — need to be evaluated and addressed to create change and ensure success:
Academic marketeers will claim ‘The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The goal is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service sells itself’. It would then follow that teleselling is redundant if telemarketing is accurately conducted. A client recently asked me the question, ‘We are about to recruit a telesales person, what do I need to consider ?’ The way I answered him introduces the question ‘Telesales or Telemarketing’.
Customer care, customer service and customer relations are business practices which have been familiar for some time. However, the reality of customer experience in many instances suggests that a customer service policy is something to which numerous organisations still only aspire.
On more occasions than I care to remember a client would complain when a role was being badly performed that the culprit was ‘never right in the first place’. On many of these occasions training was the successful answer; however, if the process of recruitment had been accurately performed in the first instance, problems later on could be avoided.
Telephone calls are either taken (inbound/reactive) or made (outbound/ proactive). Typically, in a sales sense, inbound calls comprise customer enquiries, leads from advertising, or freephone numbers and orders. Outbound calls comprise order-taking, lead and proposal progressing and appointment-making. Inbound and outbound calls can, however be of any nature ranging from cash collection to customer satisfaction surveys. Organisations with high volume ‘traffic’ often set up dedicated call centres with associated computer support, larger and well-known examples of these being banks, building societies and credit card companies.
The mark of how well an organisation communicates its objectives through management to staff is in how much responsibility is taken by an individual in performing their job. Sadly, the attitude of many customer service personnel is still ‘it isn’t really my problem’. As the link in every chain is equally important, so is every individual job function. Personnel who are proud of their role are a rarity. Those who are make excellent ambassadors.
The Pareto principle states that 80 per cent of any effort produces 20 per cent of the results, and vice versa. It is a natural law which can be applied to many situations. 20 per cent of a football team score 80 per cent of the goals, and vice versa. 20 per cent of our clothes we wear 80 per cent of the time, and vice versa. 20 per cent of a sales team produce 80 per cent of the orders, and vice versa. If we apply this rule to a customer base, then in most organisations we would discover that 20 per cent of the customers produce 80 per cent of the business, and 80 per cent of the customers produce 20 per cent of the business. In other words, most companies have a few major clients producing large amounts of revenue and numerous smaller clients producing small amounts of revenue. It should also follow that the large accounts bring in most of the profit although that is not always the case. Poor account management means that vast discounts, premium service and customer-led negotiations often erode profit margins.
Stereotypical scripts are those we have experienced when being used by the unfortunately notorious double-glazing telesales person. Stilted questions and robotic responses used in this way approach contact with potential customers as nothing more than a numbers game. Throw enough mud against the wall and some of it will stick! Whilst this approach is still used by some, the days of unqualified mass contact are being replaced with more selective, market-segmented methods. A set of structured, scripted questions asked of an existing customer at the end of an order-taking call, to introduce a new product or entice purchase of an associated or additional line, can be very successful.
It doesn’t matter whether you sell a tangible product or an intangible service — or whether you sell something worth a hundred pounds or a hundred thousand pounds, the common thing for all sales people is the need to encourage another human being to make a decision in their favour. Selling is presenting in a manner which people find acceptable, so that they decide to buy. Consider the word ‘presenting’ — it applies to the company and the product but primarily to the salesperson. One thing for certain is that people buy people before they buy products or services.
