Hosted Call Centers Bringing Customer Service Back to U.S. Soil
31 August 2010 — Steve Watts
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NPR recently ran a fascinating news article on the the return of call center outsourcing back to the U.S. through distributed, home-based service reps.
And for once, it was nice to see that something we’ve been evangelizing for a while now is coming to fruition: that hosted telephony and call center services increasingly provide value for companies who want to save costs on customer service and support, but want to keep reps based in the U.S.
The article states that the primary reason for the shift back from international call center outsourcing to U.S. domestic is very simple: it increases customer satisfaction, leading to longer-term customer loyalty and higher sales . . . .
20th century Canadian scholar and media theorist Marshall McLuhan once stated that when it comes to communication, “The medium is the message.”
In his mind, it was not always the content of the message that mattered, as much as the the method in which it was delivered.
For example, a television set can deliver a broad variety of messages through the media of video and sound—sitcoms, “reality” shows, newscasts, the NFL, talk shows, cartoons, full-length feature movies, and Shark Week. However, we often forget what TV can’t control—the fact that the recipient has to receive those messages under a very specific set of conditions.
The viewer has to be in front of a television screen, tuned to the right channel, able to hear the audio portion of the broadcast, and have a minimum level of outside distractions.
Have you ever considered just how much time, money and energy we dedicate to having a “maximized TV watching experience”? If the “medium is the message,” based on its use conditions, the message of the TV medium is that it’s a big deal. An investment. An experience compelling enough for us to plan our living arrangements around its very existence.
And here’s the kicker:
A sales phone call is no different. . . . .
Take a look at this list of anecdotes of people making egregious blunders on sales phone calls (thanks to Trish Bertuzzi at The Bridge Group for the link).
Aside from the sheer hilarity of some of these ingenious ways to screw up a sales call, I noticed a surprising trend:
Even in this incredibly small sample, the caller often still closed the sale, in many cases because of the “screw up,” rather than in spite of it.
Why? Because the blunder showed the prospect that the caller was human.
Now obviously I’m not suggesting that sales reps make a social faux pas on every call to increase sales. But it does demonstrate that all of us, in every profession and vocation, respond to something real, something relatable.
We don’t like talking to automatons. We don’t like getting “pitched.” Insincerity is about as valuable as a useless management meeting . . . .
Inside Sales: Two Hidden Metrics of Prospecting That are Hurting Your Sales
14 July 2010 — Steve Watts
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Most of the common marketing and sales and metrics—click-throughs, impressions, sales cycle, revenue per deal—don’t really need an explanation. But there are two metrics where a lot of companies we’ve worked with have holes in their sales process.
How soon after a new Web lead comes in does a sales rep make the first contact attempt, and how long after it came in did they actually make contact? Every single piece of data we’ve ever researched shows that for Web-generated leads, immediate response is crucial . . . .
As always I want to make things clear, and today I’ve set my sights on some acronyms that are used a lot in remote sales: B2B and B2C. What do they stand for? ‘Business to Business’ and ‘Business to Customer’ respectively.
Some may argue (and do if you read some of the blogs out there) that there are virtually no differences in the sales processes targeting these to groups. B2B and B2C become arbitrary classifications to these people. Instead of tallying up the many ways they are the same, I want to highlight some of the key differences between the two categories and explain why that warrants a different sales tactic.
Quantity: There are two major differences in quantity between B2B and B2C markets: a difference in number of clients, and a difference in size of their budget. There are millions of individual customers while some B2B operations struggle to have customer bases creep into the thousands category. But what businesses lack in shear number they more than make up for in how much each individual customer is able to spend. Because of these differences each sale to a B2B customer has more […]
Welcome to The Insider.
I’m Ken Krogue, President and co-founder of InsideSales.com. Our customers and industry colleagues have asked us to post best practices, research, tips, and tricks for the inside sales industry for so long that we decided to pull the team together and start The Insider, the official blog of InsideSales.com. We hope that The Insider will become a valuable source for key information for remote sales professionals.
We will post articles, essays, executive summaries, and actual tested scripts, and campaign strategies from our internal sales and lead gen teams as well as those of our customers to help everyone in the inside sales space to improve and do better. You should see valuable new content almost daily on The Insider.
We will also be launching Insider Insights soon, an opt-in eNews service that will make you aware of any new research, best practices, tips and tricks and quickly summarize them, then guide you back to more in-depth information on The Insider, www.LeadResponseManagement.org, my personal blog at www.KenKrogue.com, and much more. Watch for Insider Insights on our home page soon.
The best place to browse the research that has been done by InsideSales.com in partnership with Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Sloan School of Management […]
