Outbound and telesales

Why leads are left sitting

In the organizations where I built outbound, there were nearly always enough leads. They still were not called enough. The reasons were the same two every time.

Without a dialer the time goes into dialing

Dial by hand, wait for the ring, reach an answering machine, note the follow-up somewhere. Out of an hour of working time, little talk time is left, and after two weeks nobody knows who is due for another call and when.

As a side task, outbound loses every day

Lead outbound is often meant to be handled alongside by a team that already does inbound, correspondence or administration. Then there is a good reason every day why today is not the day. The annoying part is that every one of those reasons is true.

What helped

The same thing every time: a dedicated team responsible for this and nothing else, and a dialer so that the time goes into the conversation. After that it comes down to how calling is steered. Lead age, call order and reachability windows decide the outcome before the first sentence is spoken. And only then does coaching work, but then it works well.

Insourcing

In one case the entire lead qualification sat with external providers who were performing below what they could do. We brought it in-house within six months. After that the number of advisory appointments booked was three times as high, with fewer people. I do not read that as a case against outsourcing, but as the question of which part of the chain genuinely belongs outside. Price per minute does not answer it.

Technology

Dialer, contact center software and the connection to the CRM. I led the selection and owned the rollout, including the uncomfortable phase in which both systems run in parallel.

Pay models

Telesales pay rewards the wrong thing quickly. Pay only for the close and you get appointments that do not happen. The metric has to sit far enough down the chain that it does not work against quality.