What makes a great Telephone Sales person

What makes a great Telephone Sales person

In our experience there are 3 essential skills to look for when employing telephone sales people

1. Drive/Motivation - It is essential that you look for people with high levels of drive and motivation. This is going to ensure they come to work everyday. These people want to succeed and do well in the company. They usually have a healthy level of competitiveness with it. In the past recruiters have mistaken this skill as someone who has focus and tunnel vision, but we find that Drive and Motivation are not as narrow and people that have tunnel vision do not necessarily have the personality to truly inspire people to purchase.
2. Assertiveness - this doesn't mean bolshy or pushy. A good definition of assertive that describes what you are looking for is: Asking for what one wants or acting to get what one wants in a way that respects the rights and feelings of other people. Someone can still be quiet in nature but still act with assertiveness.
3. Resilience - This one is big. The ability to deal with all the NOs and keep that smile in your voice and keep calling. Lets face it, telephone sales is not an easy job. You get abused, you get hang ups and often see the worse side of human nature. On the up side, you get to speak with some very interesting people, who treat you with respect and it really is a great grounding. Its not just about objection handling, its about picking yourself up and having the strength to keep going.

To minimise the risk in hiring people CallCentre People Ltd have specialist inbound and outbound testing facilities that can determine a persons level of the above 3 skills plus much more. We don't leave things to chance - DO YOU?

What are you doing to ensure your callcentre delivers during flu season?

How are you dealing with sickness in your callcentre? A number of our clients have asked us how other callcentres are coping with this issue in the past few weeks.

Wintertime is upon us and it is always a challenging time for callcentres to maintain an appropriate level of staffing to ensure their grade of service is met or their sales conversions are met.

Flu and viruses love the callcentre environment and it's often a fine line between encouraging staff to come in when they are not well especially when you are already short-staffed and under pressure or whether you bite the bullet and encourage them to stay at home.

The callcentres that are dealing with this issue well seem to be taking a proactive approach. They know flu season is upon them and they have cross trained staff in preparation. They have kept these staff updated and their training recent by giving them a shift a week in the callcentre, or they have transferred staff from outbound to inbound etc for short periods.

Obviously they have encouraged staff to have the flu injection and even paid for it, and they do not encourage people to come in when they are sick and if the sick employee does come in they are quick to send them home.

To ensure they have more staffing options some of our clients have temporary staff "oncall" who have been trained and can come in with a few hours notice. This may be staff from an agency like CallCentre People Ltd or it might be staff who are on maternity leave or staff who have recently left the company to study etc.

What are you doing to ensure your callcentre delivers during flu season? If you would like to discuss some of the challenges you are facing in your callcentre please feel free to give us a call, check out our website at www.callcentrepeople.co.nz or email us at callus@callcentrepeople.co.nz