In business, telemarketing firms are the ones often faced with the most negativity. Among all the different marketing strategies, the most stereotyped as “anything but benevolent” is – without a shadow of a doubt – telemarketing. Cold calling has earned such a notorious reputation that most people find it “scary”. But telemarketing is not only a negative term for the consumers, even the agents themselves are constantly stressed because of the bad image that their profession has earned. Because of this, even respectable professional telemarketers are having a hard time reaching their quotas.
These types of negativities are extremely detrimental for business, so telemarketing firms and small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) who hire telemarketers should actively find and implement ways to keep employee morale up.
How can these types of negativities be avoided?
On the subject of reaching quotas, the biggest factor that decreases an agent’s morale is not so much that they were not able to reach their quota, but rather the embarrassment that often follows. Telemarketing agents are often grouped into teams, and the competition to reach quotas can be fierce. The receiving end of this pressure is of course the agents. Team leaders, managers and business owners can help reduce this stress and pressure by not criticising an agent in front of his peers when he fails to reach his quota. By pointing out both the good and the bad results of the agent and then teaching him about how to improve on those shortcomings will help motivate him to do better, instead of deflating his morale.
Furthermore, SMBs and telemarketing firms should consider if they are asking for realistic quotas from their telemarketing agents. As with any type of business work, when the goals are set too high that they are basically unattainable, the employees lose the drive to make an effort to even deliver a satisfactory job. The management should not set their agents up to fail. Instead, they should establish challenging yet realistic goals that will encourage their agents to excel.
With regard to telemarketing’s reputation, changing the public’s attitude towards it is really a huge task and understandably difficult. However, all big things can be completed by starting with tiny steps. SMBs who employ telemarketing campaigns should educate their agents about the best practices of this marketing strategy. These practices must be strictly implemented, so that telemarketing agents will understand which actions are right and wrong. By doing this, SMBs can help other upstanding telemarketing firms to slowly change the public’s perception of telemarketing.
The bad reputation of telemarketing is the work of unregulated and uninformed telemarketing firms who are desperate to get sales leads using any means necessary. However, this type of mentality should be completely abolished, and telemarketing should be recognized once more as the most efficient direct marketing strategy for all types of lead generation. The task of removing the negativity associated by consumers and redeeming telemarketing falls in the hands of the telemarketers and telemarketing firms themselves.
This post originally appeared at Sales and Marketing Strategies