You will first need to assess if your business – or some part of your range – lends itself to telephone selling. Suppose, for example, that you decide that only repeat purchases suit telesales. This is how you might proceed:
- Analyse how much of your sales revenue comes from initial purchases and how much from repeat business.
- Group your sales visits into three categories:
- visits associated with making an initial sale
- necessary visits to key accounts to build relationships
- visits associated with getting a repeat order
Assuming that visits associated with getting a repeat order will be transferred to telesales, calculate how many salesperson days you will save.
- Decide whether to reduce the size of your direct sales force, or to keep the same number but insist on a higher quota of new business from them (since they will have more time to generate it).
- Now look at the issue of repeat purchases. You know the target required, but your staffing calculation is complicated because the number you require to reach it depends upon:
- the expertise of those doing the work
- the uniqueness of your product or service (the difficulty in selling)
Throw science to one side. Put one or two people on telesales and monitor carefully the progress they make. On the basis of what they do and the results they get, decide on your staffing level.
- Back to the existing direct sales force. If your choice was to increase sales, then an additional task of telesales will be to arrange more scheduled meetings for them with prospective customers. You must ensure that they keep enough work in the ‘pipeline’ to ensure future success. For example, suppose you calculate that every nine initial contacts leads to one new customer, with an average sales value of £X. The additional number of new contacts required each week can be calculated as:
Target new sales per week divided by £X multiplied by nine.
If these new contacts are not made each week, regardless of any other telesales activities, your new sales pipeline will dry up.