When a customer calls a call center, there are so many times that the sales simply don’t get made. This isn’t due to lack of motivation on behalf of the customer or a lack of skill on the rep’s part, but often a lack of clarity when it comes to closing the sale. For reps who have probably cut their teeth on cold calling, having an inbound call turn into a sale can make them feel a little like the dog who chased the car and caught it. Now that they have it – what do they do with it? Let’s cover some inbound call center sales techniques that will help you to close that sale right.

How Do I Do a Cost Per Lead Calculation?

The answer is not exactly simple. The first thing you need to do is factor in the cost of obtaining your lead. Leads can come from a number of sources, and can be of varying quality. As with any system, if you put a garbage lead in, you will get a garbage lead out – and you’ll still have paid for it. There are any number of sources all competing to sell their leads. Let’s break some down, because obtaining a true cost per lead calculation not as simple as taking your total ad spend and dividing it by your total lead intake.

Getting in touch with customers via telephone used to be easy. You call, they pick up to find out who’s calling them. Caller ID complicated things, simply because unless the caller’s number was recognizable, the person you’re calling might not pick up. So, when full ID with the name and number of the business showing turns up, the person you’re calling sees an toll-free or out of area number and again decides not to pick up. Whether you are calling a cell phone or a landline, you’re looking at the same thing – no contact, or straight to voicemail. If you can’t reach the people you need to reach, you are not going to be in business for very long.

Inbound call centers are still the mainstay of many operations across a number of industries. Despite what you may have heard about IT and customer service replacing live people with digital tools, inbound call centers are still a force to be reckoned with in sales, customer service, financial services, and other industries in which customers still require a human voice and the personal touch. Writing off an inbound call center as a relic of the 20th century would be as much a mistake as writing off email as a marketing tool. Certainly, a modern call center looks very different from the cubicle farms of 10 years ago. It also functions very differently.

In terms of calling technology, the predictive dialer was a huge advance for outbound call centers. It dialed more numbers, faster, and more consistently than any human fingers could manage. However, the drawbacks of the old analog machines were myriad. The older machines had no way to differentiate between the voice of a live person and the voice of a recording. Agents were also left sitting idly if the dialer reached a number of bad numbers in a row. The next step in the evolution of the dialing system was the progressive dialer.

If the progressive dialer and the predictive dialer are good productivity tools, then the fully loaded Cadillac of dialers is the preview dialer. This dialer puts information in the hands of the agents on the front line – or rather, on their screens. The preview dialer prepares to call by putting the information in front of the agent and even allows the agent to “bump” the call from their queue. It’s no wonder that another name for this dialer is “power dialer.”

Preparing to activate a call center takes a lot more than just picking a provider buying some equipment and getting everything going. There are some unexpected nuances that owners, managers, and supervisors need to think about. One of the most important decisions is deciding what kind of dialing mode will work best with your operation. Whether you have a mixed-use call center with both inbound and outbound calls or an outbound call center with a separate customer service inbound line, choosing the best dialing mode solution for your business needs is a pretty big deal.

One of the key factors to calculating your profits is calculating your cost per sale. Unless you know what it’s costing you to make a sale, you can’t adequately get a grip on what kind of profit you are making. A number of factors go into calculating that cost. At the baseline you have your facilities costs such as rent and utilities. Above that you have your payroll costs, including costs for bookkeepers and payroll service. Finally you have your telco charges and the costs that you are paying to obtain leads for your agents to call. All of these factor in to the cost per call, and are multiplied over the number of agents, and measured against the number of sales that result.

With all the bright and shiny ads touting predictive dialer software, you would think it could be the answer to all your problems – instead it might become a bigger problem than you can imagine. There are some hidden costs to using dialers, no matter which one you elect to use. In today’s blog we are going to take a look at one of the biggest hidden costs - your leads. One of the reasons your leads costing you money – instead of helping you rake it in – is the failure to scrub your call lists or to secure high quality leads.

Establishing remote call centers is increasingly a necessity. As operations expand, space may be limited in your primary location due to several factors.