We’re back with portraying perfect support consultants for industries with their specific demands. Today, we will be examining a profitable, but still underrated telemarketing industry. Why underrated? Because it has been stereotyped for decades, as people saw it as boring, underpaid, and unassuming professionalism. In fact, good telemarketers are some of the most skillful and precious specialists.
Let’s not confuse telemarketing and telesales, because as similar as they may look, they still have different business objectives. Ideally, the final goal of telesales is closing a deal. Telemarketing, on the other hand, aims to draw a customer’s attention to an offer, inform them about a product, work with their feedback, and create an opportunity for a sale.
Telemarketing can be:
- Outbound customer support — assumes making “cold calls” to a list of existing or potential customers, offering products or services and describing their benefits.
- Inbound customer support — functions as an addition to traditional customer support, where a consultant resolves a customer’s request and navigates a conversation towards a commercial offer.
At SupportYourApp, we are familiar with inbound telemarketing, which means we expect our agents to be professional at customer support in the first place. We have already covered the main qualities required of a good consultant — customer-centricity, strong communication skills, problem-solving and analytical skills. Today, we’ll focus on more specific qualities we would expect from a perfect telemarketer.
Phone Communication
The primary duty of a consultant would be direct verbal communication with customers. During an interview with a potential consultant, we need to see a candidate’s perfect language skills, their manner of speech, and ability to handle a conversation so that a customer would feel comfortable.
Thinking Out of the Box
No matter how well-prepared and sophisticated our scripts are, there is no way they would work in all situations. An agent should be able to navigate a conversation according to a customer's mood and reactions, and tailor any offer individually. It would often require some nonstandard thinking, which can also be tested during an interview. We remember an iconic test shown in “The Wolf of Wall-Street” where in an interview, a candidate was asked to sell the interviewer a regular pen. The goal of such a test is not just to check whether a candidate knows some marketing techniques, which is great but not essential at this stage, but to test their ability to offer nonstandard answers.
Motivation
The most successful telemarketing agents know and strongly believe that the product or service they offer would be of genuine benefit to their customers. If the agents follow this mindset, they would achieve great results even without knowing complex sales techniques. Agents would also need a strong motivation because no matter how good they are, they would still face a number of rejections.
Persuasion
An agent, who would give up on making an offer after the first negative response, would hardly ever gain revenue. Their task is to encourage a customer to listen to an offer and consider it. This requires strong emotional intelligence and communication skills, as an agent should define the customer’s real needs, recognize their emotions, and appeal to it during the conversation.
SupportYourApp Experience
In our practice, we expect a candidate for a telemarketing project to be a good support consultant in the first place. Our perfect agent would match most such criteria: tech-savvy, logical thinking, ability to multitask, good communication skills, long-term commitment, and great customer orientation. This is a solid base that would give a consultant an ability to perform at a high level and build a successful career. While looking for agents for telemarketing projects, we pay special attention to how a candidate pitches their skills and experience at the interview. This would give us an idea of how they would be promoting an offer to customers.
