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Whilst it may produce some money grabbing opportunities, I feel in the long run it's going to destroy telephone sales, as an effective sales process.
What is that going to do to industry in general never mind the Internet.
In comparison to timeshare sales the search engine people are quite meek on the phone.
The reason that telesales is hated so much is that it is an intrusive sales technique rather than a passive sales technique. We have a name for them in our office 'phone spammers'
SEM, billboards, newspaper ads can be classed as passive advertising, they wait for peopel to see them. Telesales, Commercial Faxing, Email spam are all intrusive sales techniques, they go out to provoke the recipient into looking at the ad.
IMHO passive advertising is much more acceptable than intrusive advertising.
until he invented the 2nd one.
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It's always amazed me that as such an intrusive form of sales, why it is still practised. Phone sales would be better suited to being done once a first contact has been made - and to develop further business only. Once a business relationship has been cemented of course.
When any company hires it's staff, I wonder how thorough the recruitment process is - do they bother checking on a person's skill in using the telephone?
I say no.
Now moving on from your opinion of telesales what methods do you consider to be worthwhile using to generate sales in a very competitive market of search engines and directories where everyone is after the same chunk of money from a business or company to advertise with them.
ncw164x
1. Direct Mail/Newsletter, with permission based email and a follow up phone call.
2. Any form of sales using photos/other images with description to help sell whatever service/product may be.
3. Press Releases from time to time.
4. Reciprocal linking on related websites.
Advertising in specialised magazines is highly targted, and has a wide circulation.
The biggest mistake to be made with telesales, is the wrong people are hired to do it in the first place.
Most sales staff actually hate doing sales, so it can't be surprising when they fail to make many sales, and annoy the person on the other end.
This is why companies get a bad rep. I did it for 12 months and it drove me nuts - and I'm quite experienced at it. Most people leave the profession cos of boredom and lack of results. (not their fault).
Problem is companies can't be bothered to monitor their staffs effectiveness, they just want a body to sell something.
Often to their detriment!
A couple of years ago they had about 200 staff between them all out bound cold calling selling anything from domains, web hosting, basic seo (if you could call it that) and even broadband. Yes that is right they even cold called people for broadband.....
The sucess rate must have been very poor and i guess they would be lucky if each sales person got one or two new customers a week. The customers they did get were usually given a fair amount of "spin" on the phone and promised the earth. The service as described was hardly ever delivered with a ratio of technical / support staff at about 1 for every 50 telesales staff.
As you can imagine result was a lot of unhappy customers / chargebacks on credit cards and quite a damaged reputation because of the cold calling tactics used.
However both these companies survived and have now aquired other smaller isp's and web hosting companies. They buy smaller companies so they can have the customer base for cold calling staff to try to extract more money for inferior service, with lots more spin from sales peoples....
They have an added bonus....the job adverts say they do not cold call anymore.
I guess what i am trying to say is no matter what sales method is used it all comes down to the way the management of the company run the show, and with telesales the sales costs are so high there in not much left in the pot for other costs like the actual product / staff to provide the service.
I used to run a CV writing business - took the site down and well basically forgot all about it. Yellow Pages still left my details in their directory, anyway got a call from some company I never even heard of (claiming to be some major kingpin or something lol), they went into a very lengthy pitch about my old company needing SEO, and that I'm going to croak without it, they said they had looked at it and that my keywords weren't right or something, so when I told her she couldn't have seen my site, as my web designer took it down years ago, she went into one etc.
What drugs are these idiots on? How can a 'major' company make a mistake like that.
lying to a potential customer and making up some BS in order to make the sale. Hardly professional is it.
Anyone else had similar trouble?
