Here are several excerpts from Henry Canady's article, Make Contact - How changing technology assesses call center operations, from B-to-B to new teleweb centers, that recently appeared in SellingPower.com:

The telemarketing operation of yesterday has given way to the call center of tomorrow. How does your call center stack up? Let’s compare. If your customers cannot easily and quickly reach your organization at any time from any point on the globe, and at no cost, your call center is in trouble. And your customers will soon be looking elsewhere to do business.

The best companies in America understand. They operate in the electronic world where distance is irrelevant: they transform in-person transactions into customer contact ‘touch points’ by telephone, email, fax, kiosk and the Internet.

In the process, call centers are changing. They have become a kind of multimode, 24/7, 360-degree search engine enabling companies to reach their customers and customers to learn about or buy whatever they want from companies.

It’s not complicated. In fact, some university professors are collecting data on call centers, tracking results and explaining such changes every day. Best of all, you can access this information from your own computer.

Measuring Peer Group Performance:

Dr. Jon Anton at Purdue University maintains that no matter what you sell, your customers should be able to reach you – anytime, from anywhere, in any form they want, for free. Anton teaches at Purdue’s Department of Consumer Sciences and conducts research for Purdue’s Center for Customer-Driven Quality. Although junior colleges often train supervisors and agents for call centers, Purdue is the only four-year university with a program devoted specifically to call centers, customer contact centers and general customer access options.

True to its vision of the 21st-century marketplace, Purdue hosts what might be called a customer contact center for customer contact managers. The center’s Website allows companies to sign on and become subscribers. A wide range of research papers and studies are available on best-practice call center techniques, some for free and others for a fee based on the number of seats in your center.

This Website features an even niftier tool: benchmarking. Simply enter your own call center’s data and you can obtain a comparison of your performance with that of other call centers, including a peer group of companies similar to yours.

Purdue collects data on two basic types of call-center measures: 1) the efficiency of each center’s operations and 2) its effectiveness in bringing in revenue for the selling firm.

Of course, the complexity of customer contacts will affect the pure efficiency measures. For example, technical support or claim-adjustment contacts take much longer to handle than simple requests for prices or standard product information.

Purdue thus allows its subscribers to compare themselves to a set of companies having equally complex customer contacts. Each call center is profiled by the types of customer contacts it handles. For example, inbound call centers are described by the portion of calls they receive in 12 different categories, from simple call routing all the way up to technical support for business customers.

This analysis enables you to compare your operation to other companies that do similar work with a similar budget. Call center efficiency is measured in a wide variety of ways, including speed of answer, cost per call and service level. Effectiveness is measured by customer satisfaction, revenue per shift and cross-selling opportunities and closes.

The Purdue Center’s Web tools then take the analysis further. The gap between your center and the average or best-in-practice center in your peer group is calculated for each measure. A financial report is provided showing where you may be able to improve and how much money, in saved costs or increased revenues, you might make from the improvements.

The collection of good data on relevant peer group performance allows Purdue to highlight potential areas of improvement for each subscriber. For example, you can compare your customers’ time-in-queue with the average queue time for companies that do similar work. The Purdue Finance Gap Analysis will estimate the dollar cost of lost business from excessive waits. Similar estimates can be made for spending too much to bring a TSR on board, having low call productivity, sloppy data entry or below-par customer satisfaction.

Of course, these figures are just rough estimates. But they can be very useful for focusing your efforts on the most rewarding areas of improvement. And the more you know about your competitors, the better you can assess the effectiveness of your own customer contact units.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The real selling starts with the first 'No'"

Somebody repeated this old sales cliche to me last week.  It's stuck in my brain because it is one of those examples of "old school selling" that just seems to have stuck around even though it seems completely wrong to me.  It's the sales equivalent of an "old wives tale".

If you analyze this statement logically, you pretty quickly see that it's wrong.  "The real selling starts with the first 'No'" This statement implies that you want your prospect to object to your offerings.  Your goal is somehow to get as many "no's" as you can, then you can start selling for real.

My experience is quite the opposite.  Sure, there are ways to handle objections when they arise but I certainly don't want them.  The real selling starts on day one when you figure out the basic value proposition of your company or offering.  It continues as you research and understand your customers' industries and businesses.

When you are prospecting, or sitting in a meeting with a prospect, you ask questions based on having a deep understanding of their industry, company and individual situation.  In this scenario you don't get many "No's".  The prospect respects you for doing your homework and responds to your questions. You unearth opportunities for you to work together to fix problems or generate improvements.

Selling starts day one.  Do your homework, ask questions, develop solutions and you will generate sales - not "No's".

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

The longer I am involved in sales the more I come to believe that one of the most important skills is time management.  Yes, boring old time management.  Not the "gift of the gab", not being a "people person", time management.

It's coming up again this week.  Both for me, my clients, and my colleagues.  I have noticed we are all faced with a similar challenge: preparing for key sales meetings on important pipeline opportunities.  And I notice we are all spending a lot of time preparing.

In fact in some cases we are spending so much time that nearly everything else has stopped!

I think as sales people, sales managers or entrepreneurs we need to think about this carefully for a moment.  Nearly everything else has stopped!  This is serious business.  All the other projects (and opportunities) we could work on are receiving almost no attention.

I have written several times about the importance of preparation for sales meetings.  I believe this to be totally valid.  If you do not prepare, you will not win (or only by blind luck).  But here's the flipside: good preparation takes a lot of time.

So be very careful which opportunities you choose to pursue.  Make sure they really fit for you and company.  You will spend a lot of time preparing for sales meetings and you will inevitably forgo other projects and opportunities.  Make a wise selection and don't fall into the trap of trying to take on everything that comes your way. 

Too many "hot prospects" will quickly burn all your time.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In The Right Stuff for a Liberated Salesforce, Razi Imam, President & CEO of Landslide notes the following:

If Willy Loman carried a BlackBerry instead of a briefcase, could his demise have been prevented? Maybe not, but you'd be hard pressed to find many traveling salespeople today who don't rely on their BlackBerry, PDA , cell phone or laptop to support their daily activities. So why does software directed at salespeople completely ignore their day-to-day selling lives?

The software industry has done an admirable job of automating and streamlining processes for accounting, finance, human resources, customer service and shipping. Meanwhile, one of the most important functions within the corporation -- sales -- has been overlooked.

Sure, there are dozens of CRM (customer relationship management) and SFA (sales force automation) solutions claiming to improve the lives of individual salespeople. But a look under the covers shows that they are focused on contact management, reporting and forecasting -- activities much more important to executive management than everyday salespeople. In fact, these solutions tend to add more work for salespeople and keep them from doing the most important part of their job -- actually selling.

It is this human factor that ultimately drove early CRM/SFA solutions off course. Salespeople watched in frustration as rigid data entry routines were imposed on them and number crunching became the norm. Many simply ignored them or waited until the end of the quarter to update data. It is no surprise that these traditional selling solutions, which ironically force salespeople to report on their progress rather than engage prospects, continue to suffer from low user adoption rates.

Eleven percent of CRM implementations fail to go live, reports analyst Rob Bois in a recent note from AMR Research . He speculates that the actual failure rate could be two or three times higher and points to two reasons:

Salespeople are slow to adopt software tools and technologies that don't add immediate value to their ability to sell.
Applications are too often deployed as glorified contact and account management systems specified and selected by sales management or IT -- not by the salespeople who will actually be using the system.
"The key to SFA adoption is a combination of choosing the right tool, aligning it to the right business processes, taking a multifront approach to selling the project to users, and closely monitoring adoption," Bois continues.

"If the tools are easy to use, mirror the actual processes sales people employ, and give the rep value back in the form of reduced administrative work or better customer insights," he adds, "long-term value can be derived."

It's time to usher in a new breed of selling solutions that gets back to the salesperson. If any software geared for the salesperson is going to stick, it must perform the following functions:

Eliminate Data Entry,
Increase High-Touch Selling,
Provide Step-by-Step Guidance During the Selling Process,
Maximize Productivity and Profit, and
Maximize Productivity and Profit.
If this article strikes a cord with you, then you should definitely check out the Landslide's Sales Workstyle Solution. I recently completed a 25 page Landslide Technology Briefing Report which is available free by contacting Landlside directly via their website or by calling 1-866-450-8522. Here's just one small tidbit from this comprehensive report:

"We've never seem such a clever combination of technology and complementary support services so geared to making sales professionals more effective and efficient. Most importantly, although there are other solutions in the marketplave that offer various forms of selling process automation, the Landslide solution offers the most practical approach to implementing and managing "best-practice" selling processes that we've ever seen."

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)