Growing "online" Sales in India (Part 2)
You've started to hire a few Sales Reps in an office space - now what? How do you track progress? How do you conduct reviews? What is the Iceberg Effect?
In Part I of Growing “Online” Sales, I covered Org Structure & Compensation and Location & Infrastructure.
In this part, I’ll cover Process & Reviews
Topic #3 - Process
Your Tele-Sales process has 3 inputs - People, Data & Quality. Process is the sum total of Data & Quality.
Data
Data consists of 3 parts:
A list of drop-down values to describe the call activity (“Call Dispositions”)
Logic which describes how calls are auto dialed (“Churn Patterns”)
Basic reports about Sales activity (“Agent Productivity Report”)
“An army marches on its stomach. A Tele-Sales team marches on its data.” - adapted from Napoléon Bonaparte
Imagine being in a world where you know exactly how EACH Sales call went. Feels magical? Turns out, this is possible - IF you define your Call Dispositions well and train your Reps to use these correctly
Once a call placed via a dialer software ends - most dialers require the user to “dispose” of the call with a “status tag” (drop down menu) and “call remarks” (free text responses)
If you see the above list - it covers ~90% of scenarios that a Sales Rep could face.
Your disposition list depends on your business context. E.g. we have an AHP - Already Have Policy disposition to capture renewal dates for prospects who were just “viewing” since they already are insured but would be interested in being contacted closer to their renewal date. 3% of our Sales come from these “AHP” cases
Most dialers would come pre-programmed with a Call Back disposition to allow your Rep to schedule a call back to the customer. This is the main reason WHY I believe a dialer is superior to handphone dialing. 25% of our Sales can be traced back to call back requests.
You’ll need to train your Reps on what each disposition means (they’ll become masters in 14 days)
These dispositions primarily help you in deciding HOW to churn (i.e. re-dial) the data
Imagine a world where your dialer knows WHEN to dial a customer. Sounds crazy? Don’t worry - this is where churn patterns come in
Churn patterns can range from elementary logic (what we apply) to insane mathematical optimization (what Policybazaar employs)
Your dialer vendor would ask you for churn logic - you’d simply need to specify HOW often and WHEN do you want numbers tagged with certain dispositions called by the system.
As you might have guessed - poor churn logic is a major reason for customer frustration (e.g. HDFC Bank Credit Card)
You want to always have some STOP logic in place e.g. we do NOT permit a customer to be dialed more than 15 times per month from our dialer.
You want to make sure that DNC - Do Not Contact (frustrated or uninterested prospects) CANNOT be dialed by your Reps.
Ask your dialer vendor to give you the APR (Agent Productivity Report). Most dialers provide an elementary version of this for free - it contains the following metrics Rep Wise:
Total talk time (aim for > 3.5 hours)
Total break time (aim for < 1 hour)
Average call handle time (varies by process)
Number of calls placed (varies by process)
Quality & Training
In part I, we had covered the Quality Analyst (QA) job profile. Your first QA hire would require some help from you (the founder) to figure out the Script, FAQs and other basic items (this Founder Led to Process Led Sales transition was covered in a previous post here)
If you have hired a QA - there are just 4 activities you need to work with them on:
Daily call listening activity
Create a simple checklist with what you’re looking for from a good Sales call. Assign a total of 100 marks between these attributes.
Now, hear 2-3 calls per day yourself and let the QA hear 10-15 calls per day
Classroom training for new Reps
Covered in a previous post on L&D for Sales Org
Don’t forget - someone needs to explain the Call Dispositions to your Reps
Certification exam for new Reps to start calling
Same as above.
You want to make sure a new Rep knows about your company, your product & your customer BEFORE they start dialing.
Weekly / Ad-hoc training of existing Reps
If you make new releases - you would need your QA to explain this alongside a member of your EPD team
Further, as part of (1) - your QA might discover a particular Rep is weak in a given skill. So the QA might do some 1-1 coaching with them.
Okay, now you’ve got some form of a process around Data and Quality & Training; now what? Well, turns out Sales is NEVER truly done - you need to conduct reviews.
Topic #4 - Reviews
Reviews are very high leverage activities which you can perform as CEO/Founder at ALL stages of your Tele-Sales process (from 5 to 100+ members).
At a high level - you should do 3 types of reviews:
Spot checks
Tech issues: Go around your Sales floor asking your Reps about any dialer or CRM issues (you’ll be surprised by the rich & graphic feedback you get)
Quality checks: Pull out your reports & look for obvious errors
e.g. I sometimes see a call tagged as a Call Back with < 1 second of Talk Time - it is NOT humanely possible for a customer to give a call back appointment in 1 second. Turns out new Reps think “Call Back” means “when should I next call this customer?” versus “when did the customer ask to be called back?”
Literally don’t hesitate to ask one of your new Reps questions about material from their classroom training
Weekly reviews
Sales, Marketing & Finance should sync once per week to discuss:
Lead flow requirements & planning
Team size requirements to match lead flow
Whether team size <> lead flow is sufficient to hit the End Of Month target?
Do a supervisor review each week to go over:
Latest product changes
Operational issues (e.g. dialer problems, report errors, Rep feedback)
Any funnel metrics which come to mind (check out the IQOO framework)
Monthly retrospectives
Slightly longer 2+ hour meeting where you would review last month’s metrics to diagnose scope for improvement
Confirm the targets for this month with ALL mid to senior Sales Org members
Confirm 3 to 5 “focus” areas (get as specific as possible)
e.g. for Feb ‘23 - one of our focus areas is to get our Call Back <> SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) metric from ~25% to > 30% (to build a bigger Sales pipeline for March ‘23)
Closing thoughts
If you are NOT a process lover - then scaling a Tele-Sales team will feel like a huge drag on you. I personally love the weekly iterations - small fixes that go unnoticed by most team members & customers.
The “Iceberg Effect” best describes Online Sales in India. Most outsiders pass snide comments like “oh, {XYZ} is just a website”. Sure, anyone can spin up a website & funnel traffic to the website.. But, what comes next is NOT within everyone’s capacity?
Hiring 100s of Sales Reps, configuring a dialer, repeating the SAME material everyday, figuring out cheque pick-ups etc is NOT something for everyone. But, if it is something you need to do as an entrepreneur - you will love it.
Hopefully, this 2 part series has given you some insights into what steps you need to take in order to build a Tele-Sales Org to grow your online Sales.
Happy to hear your thoughts, comments & feedback. Until next time!