Virtual Sales Development Teams – How To Replicate Quality Conversations, Represent You And Your Brand Properly And Deliver Real Results.
We’ve all experienced it…the incoming call from an offshore call center, hard to understand, poorly spoken and a terrible attempt to sell us on their product or service.
Maybe you’ve been down this path within your own business before and had to deal with the fallout. Poor quality leads who have no idea who you are or why you’re calling them, the time you wasted trying to train the agents who just never “get” what you’re trying to say.
It’s not a good look for you and your business. In this day and age where establishing trust and credibility is so difficult and can be erased in a second there is a real risk when engaging with a virtual sales team that they’re going to do more damage than good.
The best case outcome you could hope for is to waste huge amounts of your time training agents, managing the process and sifting through all the garbage to find one or two possible sales.
The question then is – Why would you have a virtual sales development team if there are so many problems?
There are a lot of reasons which build a strong case for hiring a virtual SDR Team…here are the two which I believe are most relevant for you…
Reason For Hiring A Virtual Sales Development Team 1
Cost Savings and Flexibility! You can build a virtual sales development team for between 30% and 40% of the cost of doing it locally. The staffing costs are significantly less, real estate is cheaper and other services like electricity, internet and cleaning are all going to cost you a lot less. Importantly though, a Virtual Team based offshore gives you much greater flexibility to grow or reduce numbers as you need.
Reason For Hiring A Virtual Sales Development Team 2
They Want To Excel At Their Role! I’ve found a totally different mindset when working with our virtual teams as compared to local staff. Local staff see the time consuming, repetitive tasks as below them or something they’re doing for just long enough to get a promotion or a job they really want.
The problem this creates is you’re always churning new staff through your SDR roles. The time you invest in recruitment, training and managing this process all takes away from other productive areas.
Whereas, Virtual Teams have a totally different mindset and they relish the opportunity to have stable employment and be part of a great team so are far more stable in roles like this. Your employee churn rate drops significantly with virtual teams, giving you more time to focus on important areas.
But the question still remains unanswered…How do you replicate the quality conversations you need and deliver meaningful results?
When you’ve got a Virtual Sales Development Team which are supported by the right systems it should be that no-one knows they’re an offshore team.
We certainly didn’t start off this way. In the beginning we made just about every mistake you could possibly imagine. But it was through these mistakes where we eventually developed the systems we use today. And these systems have since stood up and worked in some of the most challenging sales environments with complex sales processes requiring a tremendous amount of trust and credibility being established.
The first principle I’d like to share with you which will help you achieve the same results through your business is Don’t Use Telemarketing. Instead create “Non-Voice” Campaigns which are far easier to replicate.
Over the past several years the results from telemarketing have dropped substantially and the skills required to get results through this strategy have increased exponentially. Whereas you can leverage Email, Direct Messaging and Chat functions plus a lot of other tools to engage with prospects and get improved results…all of which are far easier to quality control and replicate.
In times where a higher level of engagement is required, you can leverage Video’s, SMS and Voicemail to achieve the same results at scale while still ensuring the quality and consistency required.
Next, Have A Clear Activity Plan With Step By Step Instructions
A little time invested once will save you countless hours of training and instruction in the future. We use a simple project management tool to manage the daily activities of all our Virtual Team members.
In here we outline all of the activities they need to perform each day, breaking them down into simple, step by step instructions which they need to tick off as they complete. We’ve got as far as creating training videos for each of these instructions which we include in the task itself so they can watch if they ever need assistance.
What this creates is an environment where success is predictable. We can take agents with no sales experience and have them performing at the levels required within a few days.
More importantly, you can now measure activity and performance easily, making the entire Virtual Sales Department completely accountable for every communication they do.
Finally, Don’t Hire Home Based Agents.
There are so many reasons why hiring home based agents is a bad idea. Firstly, you’ve got to consider the reliability of essential services like Phone and Internet with the agents you’re employing.
Then there’s issues with Data Security, Questions over the equipment they’re using and whether they are working effectively and efficiently.
Also, you’ve got to ask yourself…how do you know it’s actually them working and not an underling they’ve contracted (Yes, this happens a lot)
When you hire agents in a center you know what you’re getting and you’re always going to get significantly better performance, better results and improved productivity.
Also, as your team grows, having them working together in an office environment builds a stronger team culture and will deliver greater accountability and results.
There are always going to be other principles you need to consider which are specific to your business, goals and requirements. We can help guide you through any challenges which you might be presented with if you need
