You are currently viewing 13 Tips for Building an Outbound Call Strategy

13 Tips for Building an Outbound Call Strategy

An outbound call means an outgoing call from a company to the business partners and customers to encourage them to purchase their product. It’s used to promote business, sales, and telemarketing. 

Building an outbound calling strategy is crucial to your business. You can convert potential customers to buying customers and make lots of money using phone sales techniques. If outbound calls are so critical to the survival and maintenance of a business, how do you build your outbound call strategy to convert to sales and customer loyalty?

Tips for Building an Outbound Call Strategy

Your first step to building an outbound calling plan is to learn more about the entire process. This is easier than you think. Here are 13 practical tips to help you create a good strategy for your outbound calls.

1. Set Your Goals

The importance of outbound calls is to get across to your customers, vendors, or business partners to push a sale, do a prospect survey, etc. To achieve this, you have to ensure every team member is on the same page. 

Set a general goal that everyone is working towards in the company. For instance, you can develop a plan for the number of sales you hope to make in a month. You can also set a goal for the number of old customers you hope to reach and the number of prospects you wish to convert into new and loyal customers. 

It’s equally important to analyze and measure staff compliance and performance in line with the company’s goals. You can do this by employing the key performance indicator, otherwise known as KPI.  

You can measure the KPI of each team member by examining the following things:

  • The Length Of Calls Made

The length of calls made emphasizes how long a call takes before a customer becomes convinced. The number of minutes or hours it takes to convince a customer shows how persuasive the team member is. It could also indicate how well they know the product they’re prospecting to the customer. A longer convincing time may also mean poor marketing skills. 

Using a virtual phone system like Call Cowboy can help you maximize the number of minutes you call.

  • Number Of Resolution Made On First Call

The number of resolutions you can make on the first call suggests how good you are with your resolution skills. It can also help you track your marketing campaigns’ success to know which areas to improve.

  • The Rate Of Conversion

The rates at which each call converts to sales speak volumes about your strategy, too. A low conversion indicates that the outbound strategy needs to be worked on.
Examining each of these indicators will help you know if you are getting closer to your set goals or not.

2. Have The Right Set Of Call List

It’s not just about making calls to random customers. You must plan your call list and ensure you target the right audience for your product. Do your homework thoroughly and carry out market research that reveals what your prospective customers like to purchase. Allow your marketing and sales team to work together to generate sales leads. Check here for some marketing tips from experts.

3. Invest In Training Your Team Members

When you train your team, you are investing in your business. All your teams need to undergo a series of training to turn them into efficient sales agents. This will ensure they are doing the right calling strategies that will generate results. Keep a record of all the calls made, so you can review them and help fine-tune calling techniques.

4. Don’t Walk Alone

For any business to be effective, you have to join a partnership. In a partnership, every team leverages its strengths for a better output. You can partner your marketing and sales teams together to generate better sales. The marketing team knows how to ensure the right audience purchases your product. The sales team knows who this right audience is. If you combine the two teams, you’ll enjoy better output, results, and a significant boost in your business.

5. Study and Analyze

To always ensure improvement, you have to study and analyze how your call strategy is working. Is it generating the needed results? Your KPIs will work well in this situation, making sure that you have the right tools for your analysis. The result of the analysis can then be optimized.

6. Incorporating Dialing Strategies

Your dialing strategy should be such that it doesn’t waste your calling time and resources. It’ll help you identify the exact time your customer will be available to pick your calls. This will prevent answering machine replies or a busy tone. The only time the call will be made is when the customer is around to pick up.

7. Have a Scheduled Call Back

Most customers will love to be reminded about their appointment, product availability, product purchase, among others. To improve call productivity, you can schedule a call back feature with your dialer to remind your customers about their appointments. This will ensure a higher turnover rate, as it boosts your customers’ sense of importance. 

8. Analyze with Data

Using real-time data to analyze your outbound call strategy will help you identify your campaigns’ loopholes and strengths. It’ll also help you make informed decisions based on the information you could gather from the data. 

To make this possible, get outbound call software. This will ensure you get essential data from the call details report, abandoned call report, and agent productivity report. With this, you can measure the efficiency of each team member. You can also use the data to analyze customer satisfaction and behavior, as well as call patterns. The result of this will help you structure your outbound call strategy to generate quality results.

9. Help Customers Understand

It doesn’t benefit your business if your customers don’t understand what you sell or understand the services you have to offer. It’s better that you speak and explain the products to customers in layman’s terms. If they know what the products are meant for and the benefits of using such products, they’re more likely to purchase.

10. Befriend the Gatekeeper

A gatekeeper is a person who’s usually in charge of keeping cold calls out and screening all incoming calls to a company or top executive. Sales reps generally think they have to bypass the gatekeepers to get their messages across; this strategy is likely to backfire and put you on the no-call list. 

 It’s easy to think of the gatekeeper as an enemy. But it’ll be quite profitable if you think of the gatekeeper as someone doing their work. Instead of avoiding them, you can befriend the gatekeeper and explain what they stand to gain if they accept your proposal. Who knows, they may be the ones that’ll give you the needed connections. You can easily handle the gatekeeper by being smart and proactive.

11. Don’t Bad Mouth Your Competitors

Admittedly, it could be a huge temptation to bad mouth your competitors, but it’s advised that you shouldn’t spoil the competition’s reputation. Doing this can cause more harm than good as your customer may lose trust in your brand and even check out the so-called competitor. 

Besides, negative campaigning is just downright ugly and shows that your company lacks integrity. It also tends to cast a negative light on your industry, which means everyone loses, including you. Your customers’ time is precious, so instead of wasting time on negative campaigns, you should spend time talking about your brand and what it can offer and giving reasons why they should buy from you.

12. Disseminate Only Needed Information

Bombarding your customers with all the information you have at a time could cause your customers to stop listening. Always remember less is more when giving information—share only what is absolutely necessary, and refrain from sharing all at once. 

It’s equally good to keep the suspense and make beautiful surprises sometimes. You have to watch out for the type of customer you surprise, though. Not all customers will appreciate one.

13. Empower and Entice Your Customer

Your customers are king. You should always find means of keeping their interest in your products. Entice them with bonuses and a loyalty reward system. Engage them by demanding their opinions and feedback. 

You don’t need to manipulate or trick them into doing anything. You can create great relationships that allow you to know them enough and the products that will fit them. Allow your customersspace to think before making any purchasing decision. 

In enticing your customers, make it a priority to find the right information about them, such as their full name, where they reside, their wedding anniversary, their birthrate, their choice of grocery items, and even their health status. You can put out a survey form to obtain this information and use it to improve your outbound call strategy.

Skills An Outbound Call Agent Needs

Here are some skills to keep in mind when you’re building your team of call center agents:

  • Confidence

There is a way confidence speaks louder than words. Besides, customers feel safer to discuss and buy products from a person they perceived to be confident. Confidence speaks boldly and authoritatively about a product. You should sell the authenticity of your product with confidence. 

The customer can easily pick up the signs if you show any doubt in your product or services for just a minute. Lack of confidence will show in your voice and body language, and customers can easily pick the vibes from you. This can affect your conversion rate.

  • Be Yourself

As a marketer, it’s possible to be under pressure not to be yourself. This will show in the voice you use when placing an outbound call to your audience. Make sure you don’t sound too robotic in your calls, rather stay natural. This will further compel your customers to trust you more.

  • Be attentive

Being attentive means you can listen well to your customers. Your ability to listen includes the ability to listen to their words, body language, and signs. More than selling your products, be ready to listen to what the customers say, even if they are not saying it with words. 

This will help you know things like if you’re calling at the wrong time or if the person on the other end is uninterested and just being polite. That way, you can quickly end the call without aggravating the person further.

  • Engage in Interesting Conversations

If your conversations are engaging, empathetic, and provide solutions to customers’ challenges, then you can be sure that your outbound call strategy will generate more sales. This is because more customers will be interested in listening to you and trusting you enough to buy your products.

Great Practices For An Outbound Call Center

Outbound Call Center

Here are some great practices to implement in your outbound call center:

  • Integrate Your Agents

Give your agents access to customers’ behavioral patterns. This will help the quality of calls made as they can use the personal interaction to gain customers’ trust and loyalty. You can easily do this by sharing the contact software with your agents.

  • Record Calls

Recording calls will help you as a manager to monitor a call and measure call quality. You can also use the recorded call to train new agents. Aside from recording calls, you can sit in and listen to a live call. This will help you monitor your agent’s pitch, voice inflections, behavioral patterns, and mood. 

Most of these things may not be observable in a recorded call, but you’ll notice them clearly in a live call. An advantage of this is that you can make instant corrections and give immediate training against the next call.

  • Request Feedback

With feedback, you can measure your growth, listen to your customers and analyze what to improve on. You can select a team to do this. Work on the feedback to create a better service for your customers. Happy and satisfied customers will enjoy patronizing you again. 

  • Work On All Your Leads

It’s essential that you don’t leave any lead unexplored. Make sure you explore all leads, especially those missed calls. In case you haven’t been keeping track of the issued calls, start today. They’re potential leads that could become real and loyal customers. 

Conclusion

You need to build your outbound call strategy if it’s not generating the intended results. You can develop your outbound call strategy by setting a goal for your team, measuring team members’ performance using the key performance indicators, incorporating a dialing strategy, investing in training your team, and building strategic partnerships. 

Outbound agents need to be polite, resourceful, and know your customers and products. Overall, outbound calling is very promising if rightly utilized. You can leverage social media and digital marketing to research your high-end customers before calling them.