ESTABLISHING A TELEMARKETING DEPARTMENT
You need to make two more decisions once you have definitely decided to set up a telemarketing unit within your agency. The first is whether your system will be automated or manual. The second is the number of telemarketers you will hire.
Automated or manual? This decision will greatly affect your budgeting, hiring, training, and monitoring efforts. Currently there are several software systems on the market designed to automate your telemarketing system. The software performs many functions for your telemarketers. The simpler systems store prospecting information; more complex ones may track every telephone call from the first dial to the sale. You can monitor how many times your telemarketer dialed, connected, and spoke with the contact, and then track how long it took to make the appointment and whether a sale was made.
Some software packages offer features such as autodialing and automated scripts. Autodialing allows you to activate the computer to dial a list of numbers automatically-when one number is busy or no one answers, the computer hangs up and goes on to the next on the list until it gets an answer, at which point your telemarketer can take over. An automated script allows the script to appear on the screen and, as your telemarketer encounters various objections, he or she can refer to the automated script to offer answers to specific objections.
A fully automated telemarketing system will be more expensive initially than a manual one. You'll have to buy the software, and you might even need to invest in some hardware if you don't have it already. However, automation can help you recover the costs more quickly. An automated system should result in increased productivity, decreased staffing needs, decreased training time, and more efficient monitoring.
Before you decide to go with automation, look carefully at your needs and your budget. If you have in mind hiring one or two part-time phone people to get X-dates for you, a full, automated system probably isn't necessary. You can probably handle the training and monitoring systems in paper form without too much trouble. However, if you're looking at a full telemarketing department with 10 or more on staff, and you want the program to increase your business significantly, you might look to automated telemarketing as a good possibility.
The second decision you must make is how many telemarketers to hire. If you have decided to go with an automated system, especially one that dials numbers for you, you'll need fewer people because each person will spend less time in dialing and following up.
So how many do you need? The answer can range from zero to a dozen or more. Zero? Yes-you can establish a telemarketing center without any people. You need an automated telephone device that dials either pre-programmed or randomly selected numbers (within a certain area). The machine plays a pre-recorded message asking for an X-date or appointment, then allows time for the prospect to leave a message. Although this may seem too high-tech without any high-touch, these systems have worked for agents. One IMMS member agent had to disconnect such a machine after a few weeks because he had more Auto X-dates than his staff could handle.
But most agents will choose the more conventional approach and hire people to do the agency's telemarketing. Here's a method for calculating how many people you'll need:
1. Determine the size of your marketplace. For example, say you want to contact 20,000 clients or prospects.
2. Now, figure there are 260 working days in the year, of which 30 will probably be taken off due to sickness, vacation, or training. This leaves 230 actual working days.
3. Estimate the number of hours per day your telemarketers will spend on the phone. Will they be part-time or full-time? For our example, we'll use full-time telemarketers, who usually spend about six hours per day actually on the phone. Multiplied by the number of days from (2) above, that equals about 1,400 hours per telemarketer per year.
4. The average telemarketer can make four to five contacts with decision makers every hour, which equals about 7,000 contacts per year, per telemarketer. Thus, to reach 20,000 prospects in one year, you would probably need three telemarketers.
Telemarketing needs will differ from agency to agency. You are probably wise to be conservative when first planning your operation. You can build on it from there.