As long as there isn’t a strong upsell it doesn’t sound like telemarketing. But it does sound like cold-calling people and putting them on the spot, which can be awkward. If there was some way to warn the customers before calling, or just sending them some sort of survey I think you’d get better data. I know if I get called out of the blue I could be in the middle of 100 different things and don’t have the time or state of mind to intelligently discuss our $20 worth of transactions with your company.
I didn’t say you don’t know what your inside sales rep does; I said you don’t know all the details of what a company you don’t work for does. Likewise, the inside sales rep doesn’t know all the details of what the companies whose accounts they manage do.
Why you think I’m looking for a new job is unclear.
You’ll call that rep. Theoretically you might call the billing department with an issue if you felt like it, but more often than not the billing department will refer you to your assigned rep unless the problem is so trivial and so obviously resolved in your favor that there’s no point. If we need to call you on a serious billing issue, billing will contact the rep and tell the rep the problem; the rep will contact you to resolve it.
As long as it takes. The longest single call I can ever remember being on personally was about 3 hours; I know of at least two reps who work for me who’ve done longer ones. In that case, incidentally, I as the rep’s manager may adjust his or her productivity numbers for that day so they get don’t get zinged, though that’s often not necessary.
Also, good and ambitious reps–those angling for promotion to management or transfer to field sales–don’t stay in the office all the time. One week out of every thirteen they’ll do site visits.
That rep is going to be your go-to all the time unless she or he is on vacation (or of course until promoted, resigned, or terminated.) Of course, the customer might call the general customer service number on their own initiative; obviously we can’t prevent that. But the first thing a rep does when beginning a relationship is give the customer his or her individual number. If the rep is on vacation, he or she has a partner who covers. If they’ve been partners for a while and are doing their job correctly, you probably already know the partner’s name, and in any case their voice mail messages refer to one another.
Well, satisfaction is pretty nebulous, of course; they’re evaluated on maintaining income levels, productivity, not pissing me off, professional development, not pissing me off,* and teamwork. But I’d call Inside Sales, as our company defines it, as a species of Account Management.
- Yes, I know I wrote not pissing me off twice. I’m currently pissed at someone, but I will soon solve that problem.
Um, technically it’s telemarketing, but it doesn’t sound that bad really.
Reps do send out brochures that include their names and numbers. We have far too many services to list on a handbill, though. The general catalog of all our services is better than 200 pages long, printed out. There’s an option to opt out, but of course it results in poorer service for customers who use us regularly–since, by definition, there is no one in a regular relationship with that customer who knows the customer’s business.
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What phishing hallmarks do you see? In the introductory spiel, the rep only verifies that he or she is talking to the person who handles ordering from us, using the service we provide, or paying the bill. A sales rep never asks for things like credit card numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth, and so forth. If I overhear a rep doing so we’re going to have a quick and unpleasant conversation. (In fact, I think if I overheard a rep asking a customer for his SSN, the conversation would begin with "Tell me why I shouldn’t fire you.) In the second spiel, the rep was calling because the customer’s last order was missing an essential and usual component. Maybe it was intentional; maybe it was a mistake. Best to handle it before a problem arises.
And you’re wrong there. Well, sort of. If you’re a one-off customer paying by credit card, you can skip the phone number if you wish. If you have an account and are billed periodically, you have to provide one, since obviously Billing may need to contact you. You can opt out of having an account manager call you if you wish, but the customers we’re assigned rarely do that, because they want a specific person whose responsible for managing their account, not a random customer service person.
We don’t do any cold-calling; we’d never call a random business and say, “Hey, would you like to buy some torture devices?” Absent a hiccup in the system, we don’t call people who pay by credit card rather than by monthly account. We call (and are called by) businesses who use the service on a very regular basis and have periodic billing set up, aiming to forestall problems, be an immediate resource when problems happen anyway, negotiate new pricing agreements, and so forht.
I don’t think all your dancing is helping your cause. That you refuse to allow any one to call it that, at their employment, does the same.
They either do this, or they don’t. If they are doing this and using a phone, it’s telemarketing.
If it’s only 5% of the calls, and the rest are returning inquiries, selling to known customers, providing services, then while it’s still telemarketing it’s not what most people would think of, first off.
On the other hand, if 15% of the calls are to service, answer inquiries and sell to existing customers, and rest is ‘probing for new business’, then yeah, it’s exactly what everyone routinely calls ‘telemarketing’.
Shunning the word, and dancing around, aren’t going to convince anyone. We can all see how invested you are in it not being ‘telemarketing’ already, no need to remind us.
I don’t get the impression that Skald is “dancing around”, but just explaining his position and responding to other people’s questions (you might disagree with him or with his explanations, but he’s answering them honestly). And he already said upthread that he doesn’t “refuse to allow” employees to call it telemarketing because it would look bad. Rather it’s because when training new employees he wants to give them a clear idea of how they should conduct themselves (I would imagine at least some of these new employees may have previous experience working in telemarketing that involves cold calling and hard sales pitches and other annoying tactics often used by telemarketers).
I answered the poll as “it’s not telemarketing” as I think that it doesn’t sound like what I think of when I think of telemarketers. The characteristics I associate with telemarketers are: outbound call center, cold calling individuals or businesses who have no prior relationship, or only an old/not current/or very small amount of business together, and high pressure sales tactics. I don’t think that Skald sounds like his employees are doing any of those thing.
This.
The only question I have for Skald that might tip my decision from “not telemarketing” over to “it is telemarketing, but only somewhat and maybe, but not necessarily, in a bad way” is what percentage of calls to customers are solely or primarily made to “probe for new business”. If your reps are almost always calling about an issue with a current order or to solve a billing problem, and they happen to mention some products the client might be interested in (with n o pressure), then I wouldn’t call that telemarketing.
But if the reps sometimes or often call customers only to probe for new sales opportunities, or if they use a thinly veiled pretext as a “reason” to call and then quickly segue into a sales pitch, then I would call that annoying and telemarketing.
Based on your description, one could technically call them telemarketers, but as pointed out upthread, it may be technically true, but it’s certainly not how most people use the term and doesn’t describe the core of what they’re doing. An average person uses the term telemarketer to describe someone cold-calling a person at home. The job you describes is not cold-calling and they’re not calling people at home, they’re calling established business clients.
While I could certainly see one objecting to working as a telemarketer, not wanting to disturb people in their private lives and not wanting to be the target of their hostility. However, any moral or ethical objections fall flat within the context of that established relationship. So, I’d say your friend is not only a moron for classifying the job as telemarketing, but also a moron for asking for help finding a job and then finding a petty reason to turn down the sort of job that, since she knows what you do, she had to know would be the type of job you’d likely be able to offer. It’d be like asking a guy who works for Microsoft for help buying a smart phone and then being upset when they recommend a Windows phone over an Android or iPhone.
That is exactly the sort of thing that phishers ask. See the related thread about sleazy callers in the Pit. For instance “Hi, Ms Bodoni, how are you today? I understand that you are in charge of purchasing all the games software in the Bodoni household, is that correct? And you bought the latest Fallout from us. Are you having any problems with that?” That’s what would happen if I were foolish enough to fill out a software registration form. Now, it might be that the caller knows how to solve that pesky problem that I’ve been having…it’s also likely that the caller wants to sell me more software or services. Which is what your callers are doing.
This is marketing by telephone. It’s telemarketing. And most people will be polite enough on the phone, but the recipients of these calls generally don’t want them.
This is a somewhat complicated question. In a sense, every call is probing for new business, in that the reps are trying to get the customer talking and listen to for opportunties. But a rep should have a specific, customer-beneficial for every call, and he or she should avoid the hard sell like the plague. In my experience, the most beneficial inside selling process is this:
- Rep calls to introduce self to relevant persons at office, sends cards to same. If possible, and RESPECTING THE CUSTOMER’S TIME ABOVE ALL ELSE, rep engages in conversation to build rapport and get a sense of what sort of business customer is engaging in. (Not what they’re buying from us; we already know that. What they’re selling to their own customers.) Almost never any selling at this stage unless the customer initiates it.
- Rep periodically sends useful information – brochures relevant to the sorts of things that customer does, maybe a holiday card, almost never a birthday card-- and calls to check for problems and concerns, not to try to sell anything. The idea is to have the customer think of that rep’s name when they think of our company in particular and the services we provide in general.
- Customer sees a need for a sort of service we provide but about which he knows few specifics. The rep has done his job, so the customer calls that rep, not the general customer service number.
- Rep & customer engage in conversations to figure out what the best solution to their new need is, how much is a fair amount in that customer’s mine to pay, what technical issues need to be addressed, etc.
Sales pitches are generally counter-productive. The reps aren’t looking for a single sale. They’re looking for someone who is going to use service X on a regular basis. A hard sell may accomplish the former, but not the latter.
The call would never go as you describe. For one thing, we rarely call people at home (only home-based businesses) and don’t aim for families, so we’d never use the word household. For another thing, we don’t call because someone bought a particular product; we call because they have an account for periodic billing and either are already spending $50-$200/day regularly with us, indicated that they would be spending that much, or asked for an account manager to call.
hat initial call is going to be more like, “Hi, Miss Bodoni, this is Skald from Habiliments Inc. I’m the account manager assigned to you. If you have a pen, here’s my full name, phone number(s), & email. and I’ll be sending you my card to your billing address unless you say to send it elsewhere. Do you need anything, or can I let you get back to work?”
Here. Dancing.
So are you saying the ‘probing for new business’ is never cold calls, only calls to existing customers? Because you didn’t include ‘cold calling’ in your break down. So which is it?
What precentage of the days calls are to upsell or coldcall? I think, for a lot of people, that would be the deciding factor, even after admitting there are definite grey areas to consider.
I would consider it telemarketing. Yes, it’s not cold-calling, but you’re still calling someone up who hasn’t asked for your time or to be contacted. Personally, I would find it annoying if the company is calling me out of the blue.
How often do you call the same customer? If it’s a one-time deal near the start of the relationship (hi, my name is XYZ, I’m going to be the person assigned to take care of the account you just set up…) with a call maybe every year or so to check up, that’s fine. I see you said they call every few months - that’s probably borderline, more than that would definitely feel annoying.
The fact that your employees are judged even partially by sales also leans me to say that yes, they’re telemarketers. A purely customer service job is judged entirely based on aiding the customer - meaning someone can do a wonderful job without ever selling anything.
(I voted #2 as I think it’s still telemarketing, though not necessarily soul-crushing since it’s not cold-calling).
Okay, first, what are you defining as a cold call? To me, that means a call to someone with whom you have no business relationship with the express purpose of selling something, but I have the sense you mean something else. Am I correct?
None of our calls are cold calls. The closest we ever come to a cold call is occasionally calling someone by accident, which always proceeds to an apology and a quick hangup, as that call is pointless for our purposes. Anybody my reps call has an account for periodic billing and is using the service regularly.
As for the rest of your post, you clearly ignored the rest of mine. I already defined the ideal process – what we want the reps to be doing; it was in the part you snipped. But I’ll add a little. Reps are probing for new business in every call in the sense that they are getting the customer to talk, not bringing stuff up out of the blue.
Pretending again that my company is Habiliments Inc. Middle-Earth’s prime supplier of mercenaries, inquisitors, torturers, and pasty chefs (and supplies for same), Rep Gloin calls Eomer of Rohan because his eored buys an average of 100 arrows a month, 20 new bow strings a week, and 50 barrels of mead. Rep X makes sure all the deliveries are getting there on time; you don’t want a recurring mistake to happen and Eomer to slowly get annoyed. That’s the semi-monthly call. Also Gloin makes sure that they’re going to the best locations for Eomer (is he getting them all that delivered to Meduseld and schlepping half to Helm’s Deep himself? We can split up the orders for him at no additional price, since we do delivery in the HD region anyway.) In the process of making sure the ongoing service works in the best way for Eomer, Gloin earns about his troubles on the border with Isengard and that occasionally the Eorlingas go off and hunt the Wood-Woses. Knowing this he sends brochures on orc repellent and forestry gear. When Eomer decides that he needs to include crossbows and bolts and rabbits and cucumbers for the nightly hasenpfeffer, he naturally thinks of Gloin and calls him to set it up.
Where did it look like he thought you were looking for a job?
Is it telemarketing? Sales over the phone = telemarketing. Is it annoying? Shrugs that’s up to the individual client. I will say that in my view, unless the additional service is literally new, i.e. that it has just sprung into existence, the time for discussing additional services is at the initial meeting where I set up my account. If someone comes to me after and says, by the way, we have product X that we have had for years but never told you about, that doesn’t make me feel like a valued customer.
I was on the fence until this “to probe for new opportunities and close new business”. Calling people to sell them something is telemarketing. As far as her not wanting the job; I don’t think that makes her a terrible person. Some people aren’t comfortable in sales and the rejection that comes with that type of work. At least she was honest about it and didn’t attempt to do a job she knew she couldn’t be successful at performing.
Why are they paid based on sales, if they are ‘servicing’ and ‘touching base’ mostly?
That doesn’t seem to make sense.
How is the rep paid for this call, if he doesn’t make a sale?
As a manager, I do get B2B cold calls from time to time. In 24 years, only one of them has ever gone anywhere. I don’t like them, but they are not as obnoxious as calls made to my home phone.
How do your reps find people who are currently doing $0 of business with your company?
I’ve never said they were paid solely on sales. They get paid a base salary based on several markers, and a twice-yearly bonus based on the overall performance in their territory. The base salary is the majority of their compensation.
This isn’t piecework, man. They get a monthly salary based on showing up to work and doing their jobs, not payment per call.
The three-hour phone call I mentioned doing above wasn’t to close new business. It was servicing the account and dealing with a number of different problems. I got paid for it in the sense that I was at work to do stuff like that.