There are plenty of avoidable mistakes that business managers make when managing their telemarketing teams. The allure of gaining new clients or customers and achieving high revenues can lead business owners to disregard proper management practices that eventually add to the negative image of professional telemarketing. To get better results from this direct marketing channel, here are six suggestions on how NOT to manage your telemarketers:
- Hiring telemarketers en masse – hiring a large number of telemarketing people within a short period of time means you spend less time evaluating the skills of each person. This will only jeopardize your business and require you to pay people for work that they are not qualified to perform effectively.
- Giving them a calling list that includes…just about everyone – your telemarketers receive the full force of rejection and anger from irate sales leads everyday, strive to reach quotas and yet still manage to assume a happy disposition for every call. The least you can do to help your professional telemarketers do their job properly is to arm them with a well-targeted list to give your telemarketers a better chance of reaching their quotas and limit the number of unrelated, irate calls, effectively reducing stressors.
- Setting unrealistic goals – setting impossibly high quotas that your telemarketers could never reach will cause a huge blow on their morale. Eventually, they’ll just stop trying to get even one successful sales lead because they feel all efforts towards reaching your absurdly high quotas are useless . On the other hand, giving them realistic goals will encourage them to strive harder and even surpass the limits you’ve set, which means more sales leads and higher revenue for your company.
- Undermining a telemarketer’s free will – give your telemarketers some space to actually use their own God-given skills to solve problems. Hawking over them to monitor every little detail of their work will only increase their stress levels, which means they are not in optimal shape to qualify leads, handle technical support issues or even sell products and services.
- Eagerly promoting top performers to management – do you really expect your sales leads to soar by removing your best telemarketers from the production floor? Unless you are confident that your top performers have the skills to become great managers, you might want to keep them burning the phone lines a little longer.
- Scrimping on additional training – experience beats training, you might argue. But keeping your frontliners regularly updated with current trends in telemarketing best practices will help improve their overall work performance in the long run.
