If you haven’t already discovered, cold-calling is a big part of what we do here at Gungho, and over the years we have picked up more than a few tricks and tips to effectively achieve the outcomes that our clients are looking for.
Gungho is well known within the RegTech industry for appointment setting, lead generation, and consistently delivering a high standard of service to our clients. There are many telemarketing companies across the globe, but we firmly believe that a lot of our success is down to the quality of service we provide for our customers. Take a look yourself!
Where possible, we promote from within, in fact, all our operational workforce has been on the phones at some point during their Gungho journey, and the majority of our management team started working at Gungho as one of our superstar Business Discovery Agents!
Previously we have shared some top tips on cold-calling, but what does it take to successfully run a team of cold callers? Here are 5 of our top tips:
Keep Team Morale High
We consider morale to be one of the most crucial areas to focus on. At Gungho, we strive to create a happy workplace environment and pride ourselves on our team of 110+ business discovery agents who come to work with a smile on their faces, enjoying what they do.
There are some days which require a huge amount of patience, discipline and determination to be a successful telemarketer. Unfortunately, not every cold call is going to end in a calendar acceptance. If your team are feeling discouraged from one particular call, it is immediately apparent in their tone of voice. Your prospects will sense this, and they will be turned off over the phone.
At Gungho, we put huge amounts of effort into ensuring that morale stays high for our team who are not only in the office but also working from home. These are some of our top tips and ideas to keep your team happy and engaged at work:
- It’s the most obvious but most often overlooked; recognise and reward a job well done. As leadership, it is vital you reward your team and praise them for their consistent hard work!
- Create a linear progression path. Identify those in your team who want to progress and work with them to upskill and reach their personal career goals.
- Upskill and develop your team to work at the highest standard. Providing a depth of training and resources to ensure all team members have the tools needed to succeed.
- Games, incentives and competitions. We run competitions every week to keep morale flowing and promote cross-team communication.
- Team events. At Gungho, we have monthly charity days where all staff get involved, and it’s for a great cause! You can read more about our charity days here.
We’ve noticed a huge improvement in happiness and morale since focusing on these areas. Off the back of this, we have also seen an improvement in staff retention and appointment quality.
Setting Clear KPIs For Callers
When building and running a successful cold-calling team, it’s crucial to set KPIs. To set effective KPIs for the team, it is important to look at which areas of the business you’re interested in measuring. These KPIs will help management quantify and objectively analyse the performance of each team member against the benchmarked targets.
These are some of the KPIs we would recommend:
- Feedback from clients. Client satisfaction is a huge measure of success within outsourced lead generation.
- Quality of leads. The quality of the appointments set by the cold-calling team is the most important KPI, ultimately, it’s high-quality appointments that lead to ROI for our clients!
- Volume of outbound activity. Monitoring the output of your team is a great KPI as it can often highlight inefficiencies in workflow.
- Quantity of qualified leads. Monitoring the number of high-quality leads is another crucial metric for any cold-calling team.
Whilst KPIs are extremely useful, and we are big advocates for having targets, it’s important to make these achievable. The saying ‘aim for the moon and you’ll land on the stars’ isn’t overly transferable when looking at employee satisfaction, morale and retention rates. Make it possible for your team to achieve success!
Mitigating High Staff Turnover
Compared to other industries, it’s well known that many cold-calling or sales roles typically have a high staff turnover.
This churn of new hires can easily put a burden on other areas of the business resulting in teams having to balance their day job with training new team members, whilst still striving for their targets.
Recruitment, company ethos and staff retention rates are all areas we have put a huge focus into bolstering, with the addition of new full-time support roles. When benchmarking against the industry average, Gungho have a lower churn and much higher staff retention rates; this is, in part, due to the following tips we have implemented over the last few years:
- Be selective during the interview process.
- Ensure high achievers feel valued.
- Provide career opportunities. For some employees, knowing that promotion and development within an organisation is possible, means they’re far more likely to persevere in their role and stay with the company long-term.
- Develop company culture. By promoting a healthy company culture, employees feel more valued, and this can align both the company and employees to the same ethos, in turn, improving staff retention.
Without a dedicated team of Discovery Agents staffing the phones, none of this would be possible, so it’s vital to recognise and reward the hard work and dedication of the team.
Don’t Shy Away From Picking up The Phone Yourself
At Gungho, every Operational Manager calls alongside their team, at least once a week. All our managers started their Gungho journey as a Business Discovery Agent, and they got to where they are today by ultimately smashing their targets on the phones! We’ve found keeping some ‘skin in the game’ to be hugely important and has a range of benefits, including:
- Noticing inefficiencies within processes.
- Double checking the data. When calling yourself, you will better understand the workflow your team is using and by working through the data yourself, be able to spot any gaps.
- Understanding how your team operates. Having more contact time with the team will help you understand how they work and identify positive behaviours.
Another benefit of calling yourself, as a manager, is the morale boost. Putting yourself in their shoes gives everyone a huge boost in confidence and motivation whilst you’re calling with them!
Upskilling The Team With Constant Coaching
It’s no secret that in any cold-calling or lead generation business, the employees are the asset. Our Business Discovery agents are at the top of the sales funnel for our clients so they must be receiving the training needed to drive results for themselves and the client!
There are various ways to offer training and development to your cold-calling team:
- Courses and exams. Utilising high-quality external training resources is a great way to expedite the learning process and avoid burdening the L&D team with content creation.
- Mentoring. Having a mentor or team leader to be working closely with is a great way for new hires to get real-time feedback on their workflow, pitches and efficiency.
- Call shadowing. By listening to experienced agents on the phones, we have seen our new talent get up to speed much faster and be able to handle complex objections straight out of the gate.
- Classroom sessions. Hosting classroom sessions where a group of new hires can all pass their ideas around is another way we have expedited the learning process. We work together as a team!
- Call coaching. At Gungho, we have an in-house team of highly experienced callers, specialising in picking apart calls and highlighting any areas for improvement. There is no such thing as a ‘bad’ cold call!
At Gungho, with the help of our new Head of Learning & Development, we implemented a thorough and structured training program for all our employees at every stage of their Gungho journey. From this, we have seen new talent learning quickly performing well against KPIs much faster than ever before!
For any business looking to scale its cold outreach campaigns and skyrocket its growth, having a team of highly trained and specialised discovery agents is going to be an integral part of the growth plan.
In Summary – How Do You Run A Successful Cold-Calling Team?
These are our 5 top tips for running a successful cold-calling team and alleviating many of the challenges you and your team will face along the way.
At Gungho, we have seen exponential growth over the last 15 years by doubling down on these areas and implementing the action points mentioned above!
Interested in working with Gungho Marketing to grow your pipeline? Get in touch today!
