We recently held a webinar on “How to Outsource Your Cold Calling to Work-at-Home Agents,” and you can find a video and slides from that webinar here.
Why it Makes Sense to Outsource
It is probably not a hard case to make to a salesperson or business owner that they should outsource their cold calling since it is one of the least desirable sales activities.
Not only can it be a pain to make cold calls, but there is also a good business case for outsourcing cold calling. It is a very grinding and time-consuming task, and there could be better ways for a salesperson or business owner to spend their time.
Here is a breakdown of how your time can be spent when cold calling:
- Phone and CRM Stuff 30%
- Sending Emails and Leaving Voicemails 30%
- Talking with Gatekeepers 30%
- Talking with prospects 10%
Most of these tasks and steps require a fairly low skill level, meaning not only can they be delegated to someone with fewer skills than you, but also that your time is too valuable to be spent doing this grinding work.
Challenges With Outsourcing Your Cold Calling
But even if you agree with all of that and want to outsource your cold calling, it is not simple, and you can expect some challenges.
Finding a good caller
If you want to get someone to do your cold calling, you are going to have to find this person, and it is not easy to find someone open to performing cold calling as their main task or job.
It is not impossible to find someone, as there are definitely people out there who need and want this type of job. However, you will have to post a job to find interested applicants and interview them to pick one that you think might fit. This can take some time, but we will share some tips in the webinar to help decrease this challenge.
Teaching them what to say
If you are going to put someone on the phone on your behalf, you will need to teach them what to say. This is a significant challenge, but the most straightforward step is to provide your caller with some sort of sales playbook.
Making sure they work
We are talking about hiring a work-at-home agent here, and one concern that you will have is whether they are working for the time that you pay them. The good news is that cold calling makes managing productivity a little easier, as their main activity is making phone calls. If you put them on some sort of phone system where you can see a call log, you should be able to have a decent view of how hard they are working.
Getting them to produce results
Making sure the caller works hard for the hours that you pay them for is not the only thing that you will care about, as you also need them to produce results. Making a ton of calls will not do you much good if they do a horrible job on each call.
To decrease this challenge, provide the caller with some sort of sales methodology that provides logic and direction for cold calling, dealing with objections, getting around gatekeepers, closing appointments, etc.
Protecting your time
One of the keys to being successful with outsourcing your cold calling to work-at-home agents is to protect your time. If you hire someone to do 10 hours a week of cold calling, but you have to spend 10 hours a week dealing with them, then you are not going to be getting the return for all of the trouble.
Some small things you can do to decrease the time you spend on this include automating training and onboarding, decreasing turnover, being selective with how you spend time with the caller, etc.
In the recording of our webinar on “How to Outsource Your Cold Calling to Work-at-Home Agents,” we outline tips for decreasing all of these challenges and more.