Our Book
The following is the first chapter of the book “The Complete Guide to Telemarketing Management”, written by the Phone for Success founder, Joel Linchitz
All people in business today have phones they use every day-to listen, to obtain information, to persuade. I view those business phones as resources. And used pro-actively, every phone in your organization can be a profit-making resource. This book explains how.
Telemarketing is no longer new, and many fine books on the topic are available today. But most deal with telemarketing as if there were only one way to go about achieving success. The Complete Guide to Telemarketing Management is different; it shows that the design and implementation of your telemarketing program are determined by your specific application.
Although its main focus is on business-to-business telemarketing, the Guide also covers the full range if inbound and outbound telemarketing applications, including business to consumer. If the more complex and sophisticated requirements of high-ticket, business-to-business telemarketing are understood, then the same principles can easily be transferred and applied to low-ticket and consumer marketing programs.
There are tested, fundamental principles of telemarketing. Years of “trial and error” telephone selling have given way to controlled, systematic methods. Today, telemarketing means being in control-of your message, your market, and your costs. This book is for business leaders, marketing and sales executives, and business owners who sense that they can use this type of telemarketing and what that kind of control.
Currently, over 57.8 billion a year is spent on telephone marketing, placing it firmly in the upper ranks of a major marketing media. Two factors have primarily fueled this growth trend.
First, while costs of all other marketing media have risen dramatically, telemarketing costs have actually gone down. Second, new development in telephone marketing have made it much more attractive than conventional marketing methods. This is particularly true when telemarketing is employed in conjunction with conventional methods, as part of your overall marketing plan.
The Complete Guide to Telemarketing Management provides fundamental telemarketing principles, using a step-by-step, “how to” approach. It answers these key questions:
• How can I use the telephone to increase sales and profits?
• What information do I need to achieve that result?
• What are the tools my people need to achieve that result?
Part I of the book concentrates on the first question, providing basic concepts needed to understand how a successful telemarketing strategy achieves a return on investment (ROI) of $20:1 (or better). It explains why telemarketing is not telephoning. To some readers, Part I may seem unnecessary or “too theoretical”. Nothing prevents them from skipping ahead, of course, though the following fact should make them hesitate: Fifty percent of all telemarketing programs fail with six months-fail to produce projected sales, fail to support the marketing plan, fail to generate black ink. Knowing at least some of the theory and the psychology of telephone communication (and how to make it work for you) can make the difference in sales dollars, market share, and your bottom line.
Part II takes the fundamentals from Part I and shows how use them to plan and develop a systematic telemarketing strategy. The focus is primarily on outbound, business-to-business telemarketing, for two reasons:
1. Outbound, business-to-business telemarketing presents the most complex challenge.
2. The other type of telemarketing (consumer sales, inbound sales customer service), though less challenging to develop and manage, can be built on the same basic principles.
Case histories and examples culled from nearly fifteen years of telemarketing management and development experience are used throughout Part II. They demonstrate clearly how clients in a range of industries use these fundamental principles to increase sales, market share, and bottom-line income. Equally important, the case histories document the pitfalls the unwary can stumble into and show how to avoid them.
Part III is devoted to one of those pitfalls: the critical issue of scripting. More than any other factor, lack of a good script can kill an otherwise solid telemarketing program because your script is the key to controlling the medium. Most marketers-including many ad agency professionals-are not comfortable writing telemarketing scripts. Their scripts tend to be too wordy and end up being unbelievable. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a telemarketing call-and by now most readers have-knows just how phony many scripts sound. So I devote four chapters to this topic and walk you through the process of developing scripts for both inbound and outbound calls.
Part IV concentrates on specific knowledge and skills telemarketing staff must have to carry out a telemarketing strategy and achieve its objectives. For managers, it offers detailed guidelines for making key decisions about hiring, training, compensating, and motivating telemarketing personnel. Examples of checklists, training exercises, forms, and procedures are provided so the new telemarketing manager can adapt them easily.
One of the key issues in telemarketing is training. This book emphasizes how to teach the important skills of probing and paraphrasing because without them, your telemarketers cannot control the call.
In addition, I address the problem of “fear of phoning”-particularly common in programs that involve getting outside salespeople on the phone to generate appointments. However, every telemarketing manager must confront and manage this fear or risk declining profits. How do you get telemarketers to handle fear of phoning, stay on the phone, and overcome it? My solution to his common problem is detailed in Part IV.
The focus in Part V is on key implementation issues, with practical advice on how to approach automation, telephone equipment, and long-distance services, and the major legal and ethical issues that telemarketing technology has raised.
Telemarketing isn’t a cure-all for sagging sales or a quick fix for product quality that doesn’t meet the competitions. But properly planned and executed, telemarketing does deliver your message-to people who are ready to buy-and convert them to customers effectively and predictably. The Complete Guide to Telemarketing distills what I’ve learned about this amazing medium and shows why it can work for you.
Chapter 1
Getting the Most Out of Every Phone You Own
“I hear! I hear!”
- Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, upon first communicating by telephone, 1876
Today most people smile at Dom Pedro’s exclamation of amazement. With nearly 273 million telephones in the United States alone-including over 70 million business phones-most Americans now take instant telephone communication for granted.
“Everyone”, it seems, has a phone these days. At home, at work, in the car, even on airliners anyone can punch a few buttons and call cross-town or across continents. But does “everyone” really know how to get the most out of this powerful means of communication? The answer is no. Using the phone the way most people do is like using a powerful computer to perform simple, one-time calculations. Used properly, computers increase productivity. Used properly, so can your telephones.
Start with the three essential characteristics of telephone communication that follow:
1. It summons a response.
2. It is audio only.
3. It is interactive.
These characteristics differentiate the telephone from every other communication medium. Knowing them, and their special advantages, is your first step toward getting the most out of every phone you own.
THE TELEPHONE IS A SUMMONS
Have you ever settled down after a long day to relax, maybe read the newspaper, only to have the phone ring? Many would be tempted to let it ring, but most people get up and answer it most of the time. Why is a ringing telephone so hard to ignore?
Clearly, it’s the power of curiosity at work. (Think of the extreme case of the passerby who answers a ringing public phone-a call that can only be meant for someone else.) The summons of the phone is nearly irresistible because it raises questions:
• Who’s calling?
• Why?
• What’s in it for me?
In addition to arousing curiosity, the summons of the phone makes us stop what we’re doing to answer it. It interrupts us. Though we may idly doodle while on the phone, it is close to impossible to do anything very substantial. At least initially, we give the phone our undivided attention.
Other media, such as radio or television, rarely makes us focus on their message to the same extent. Perhaps only during “live” broadcasts in times of crisis or coverage of major sports events are we riveted to the television in quite the same way as we are during the first few seconds of a phone call.
No matter what your business purpose in dialing, this summoning property of the phone puts you in a supremely powerful position. If you have the means to satisfy the curiosity of the person you’ve summoned to the phone, you’re closer to achieving the purpose of the call. If you know how to sustain the call recipient’s attention after the first few seconds, you’ve begun to make your phone, and potentially every phone your business pays for, a revenue producer.
But the opposite also holds true. If you call people, you’re interrupting them and grabbing their attention. If you’re not prepared to satisfy the questions your call immediately raises and keep attention focused, then you’re missing opportunities-for sales, leads, information, or whatever the purpose of the call is.
THE ENVIROMENT OF THE TELEPHONE
Communicating on the telephone means conveying your message in a solely audio environment. You must shape your message to fit the requirements of this environment. If you compare the solely audio environment with other environments, you can see why different approaches are needed. In the move theater, a hush falls over the audience when the lights go down. As images fill the immense screen and the sound track begins, the audience is swept into the film’s reality.
Watch the same film on television and it doesn’t have nearly the same effect. The space is much smaller, and the screen is, too. The quality and volume of the sound are much lower. Frequently, some segments of the film may be cut to meet network requirements. In total effect, the film is much less of an encompassing experience on television.
Movies combine both audio and visual media to convey time, place, characters, and their interactions. When a competent director makes a movie, he or she creates a “world” that envelops the audience.
Within this world the director can shape the audience’s senses to achieve a specific emotional state. A fine movie will not only accomplish this, but will also affect the audience in some permanent way. Lower quality movies are more easily shrugged off-“It was just a movie.” Their emotional effect-whether pity, fear horror, or some other-is temporary.
Compared with films, television generally lack this capacity to envelope the audience and produce a sustained emotional state except perhaps when it is conveying real events as they happen. Radio comes closest to the telephone in the environment it provides for conveying a message. It is an intimate, audio only environment. Just a few decades ago, leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt were identified largely by their distinctive voices, as transmitted by radio. Marshall McLuhan best described the impact of the isolated, amplified human voice:
If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures…All those gestural qualities that the printed page strips from language come back in the dark and on the radio. Given only the sound of the play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action.
The classical example of the power of the human voice in this environment-its power to arouse, excite, and inspire action-occurred one evening in 1938. That night, the great actor/director Orson Welles threw the entire New York metropolitan area into a panic. Welles announced over his Mercury Theater radio program that an army of Martians had just invaded New Jersey. Using the device of the news flash, he created a graphic scenario of extraterrestrial attack. The response of his audience is history. Hundreds ran from their homes, seeking protection from the unseen army. Telephones lines were jammed with calls for help. Some even reported sightings of the creatures. All of this resulted because of the human voice.
Like the radio, the telephone provides an environment for the human voice to create a scenario and convey a reality. In the vacuum created by this single focus, the importance of voice quality is enormously heightened.
When you listen to a voice on the telephone, you inevitably “see” with your ears. You are stimulated to supply the missing data the medium does not convey. The sound of the message you receive is as important as its sense.
Clearly, a key to communicating well in an audio only environment is the voice quality of the communicator. Tone, rate, and inflection can create an image in the listener’s mind and inspire action. And though you don’t need to be a Churchill or Roosevelt to communicate well, you do need to make a conscious effort. A good telephone voice differentiates professionals from amateurs.
The audio only environment of the phone also means you must choose your words carefully. You don’t have eye contact and body languages to help you convey your message. And you can’t see your listener’s expressions. You may see this as negative. What it really means, though, is that the medium imposes a special requirement on you-to script your calls.
Looked at another way, the nonvisual aspect of telephone communication works for you. Your appearance or taste in clothing can’t detract from your message, and your aides, such as scripts, cannot be seen.
THE TELEPHONE IS INTERACTIVE
Like direct mail, the phone allows you to get a direct response from each individual you call. But unlike direct mail, the phone doesn’t limit you to an initial response. Even when the response on the phone is negative, you can still interact and probe for the reasons behind it. You may even be able to turn the initial negative response into a positive one. At the least, you can get valuable information.
• Does this person have needs our company can meet, either now or in the near term?
• If so, when should we call again to receive a positive response?
• If not, let’s remove this name form the “live” file so we can concentrate on more likely candidates.
The telephone allows you to have an individual dialogue on a mass scale. Think about the following:
• Five people on the phone (two, four-hour shifts) can make an average of 200 presentations in a single business day.
• That’s 1,000 a week and 4,500 each month.
• Five people on the phone calling consumers at home between 5:00 and 9:00 can make seventy-five presentations per hour.
• That’s 300 per evening, 1,500 per week, 6,000 per month.
Clearly, the telephone can be used as a mass medium. Yet because it allows for individualized exchange, it is both less alienating and more flexible than other mass media.
How can you get the potential of this interactive mass medium to work for your business? How can you get the most out of every phone you own? There are two main points to remember.
First, whether you use the phone as a mass medium or not, every call you make should have at least two planned objectives. The key word is planned. Without planning your call objectives, you can’t have a dialogue because you don’t know what you’re looking for. One objective is always primary: a sale, an appointment, an agreement of some kind. The secondary objective(s) may vary, but often they amount to information-about timing, needs, other useful contacts-that bring you closer to achieving your primary objective.
The second point to remember is this. A dialogue is a give-and-take process. You listen and respond. If you (or your callers) are not prepared for this process or don’t know the techniques it requires, you won’t be getting the most from every phone you own.
SUMMARY
Three characteristics make the phone a unique communication medium:
1. It is a summons.
2. It is audio only.
3. It is interactive.
Each of these characteristics imposes special requirements on you as a communicator. If your calls meet these requirements, you have begun to get the full return on your telephone investment.
The summons of the phone means it arouses curiosity and focuses attention. As a communicator, you must be able to quickly satisfy that curiosity and sustain that attention.
The audio-only characteristic of the phone means that the sound of your voice and the words you choose to convey your message are all you’ve got to create an impression. So telephone voice quality can and must be enhanced, and careful scripting is essential.
The interactive characteristic of the telephone means that you must be prepared for a dialogue process when you call. This means knowing in advance what your objectives are and knowing how to use dialogue techniques to achieve them.
