News from Sales OverDrive!

Before we get to this weeks Sales Acceleration Topic, let me share some exciting news about what’s going on at Sales OverDrive.

We are very excited to welcome Carrie Chitsey to Sales OverDrive as our Contact Center Partner-in-Charge.  Carrie is a recognized Call Center and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy innovator, operator and thought leader. She has a great deal of experience the field, including founding and growing Red Leaf Capital, as well as six years at KPMG/BearingPoint in the financial services practice as a Leader in the Call Center and CRM Solutions practice where she sold, structured and managed a large number of complex projects and solutions for Fortune 100 companies worldwide. Carrie has worked with clients such as Chase, Bank of America, NASDAQ, New Century Mortgage, Accredited, AT&T, Nextel/Sprint, Hartford Insurance and many others. We are very happy to have Carrie on our team.

Secondly, this quarter we have significantly expanded our worldwide capabilities in contact center operations with the addition of new or expanded centers in the Philippines, Guatemala, Jordan and the United States. Our people are university educated, dedicated teams of professionals in fully managed environments. We focus on serving companies requiring small to mid-sized teams, and we can do this on an hourly or performance-based model in some cases.

This quarter we also launched “Jump Start”, which is a set of four high-impact, cost-effective services tailored specifically to assist Small to Medium Sized Businesses ($0 to $100 Million in Revenue) grow sales and new customers much faster. These services consist of 1) Rapid Diagnostics and Sales Process Improvement, 2) High-Impact Lead Generation and Appointment Setting, 3) Recruiting and Retaining Great Talent and 4) “No-Strings-Attached” Hourly Consultation.

Now down to business…

So how are some of the best performing companies managing to do well with sales in these uncertain times?  The answer is that they’re doing a lot of things right in the six key areas essential for rapid sales growth.  For the next several weeks we will be expanding on one of those key areas – Effective Lead Generation and Appointment Setting. I’m hopeful that this series will be especially helpful to those who manage an inside sales or customer service groups.  After that we’ll delve into staffing and share with you a very revealing look at the challenges and also the resources available for Attracting and Retaining Great Talent. 

Effective Lead Generation and Appointment Setting

People often say to me “How can I be sure our inside folks are doing all they can to get good quality leads over the phone?”  Mike Garzillo, an OverDrive Advisory Board member, did a great job in breaking the answer down into ten key areas managers and calling professionals must focus on. I’ve paraphrased them here:

1. Resetting your mission objectives and priorities daily
2. Fine tuning your thinking and your talking points
3. Understanding, respecting and managing the customer and yourself
4. Envisioning and controlling the call parameters
5. Avoiding ten terrible traps
6. Optimizing the physical environment, considerations
7. Managing the psychology of the day
8. Maximizing Efficiencies
9. Exhibiting the best character and personality traits
10. Performing to your best behaviors

So let’s start with #1 above - Resetting mission objectives and priorities and ask ourselves ten questions about our calling operation that will shed light on where we might make some important changes on becoming a great performing organization.

1. Do we have good quality metrics and are they specific enough to be meaningful, e.g., are we making calls or contacts?
2. Do we know what really happened yesterday before we begin today?
3. Are we measuring the callers’ performance incrementally by time blocks?
4. Do we have specific, written and measurable and realistic daily goals?
5. Does the customer hear a melody or is it just noise? i.e., do our people sound conversational even if they are reading a script?
6. Are they taking legitimate breaks or just stalling?, i.e., avoiding making the call?
7. Do our people work together to learn from each other?
8. Is rapport being developed around the listener’s MVO’s or is it chatter?
9. Moreover, are my people having business meetings or just conversations?
10. Are we talking about features or benefits?

If you’re like me, you already know the answers to these questions and will be most interested in making improvements in these areas. If not, find out. So this week, let me suggest that we all take a few moments to think about our daily objectives and how we can make them clearer, more specific, measurable and actionable.  And next time we’ll review some great talking and thinking techniques you can use.

Please contact Irene at +1 (888) 899-9511 to request a 1 hour briefing so I can learn more about your challenges and priorities in this area.

Bob Howard, CEO
Sales OverDrive, LLC

About Sales OverDrive, LLC

Sales OverDrive is a leader in the end-to-end sales acceleration and outsourcing markets worldwide. The company helps large and small organizations achieve significant increases in sales, margins and market share very rapidly. This is done by providing customized consulting and hands-on delivery of targeted services and outsourcing programs. Bob Howard and his OverDrive team offer many years of sales leadership, experience and insight. Combined with OverDrive’s proprietary processes, the firm has delivered unmatched results to many companies over its 12 year history. For more information visit www.SalesOverDrive.com.