Top 10: How to Staff the Contact Center for Consultative Sales

A great consultative sales force is key to success for companies that sell big ticket items in an outbound online environment. Some companies that immediately come to mind are Quicken Loans and Countrywide in online mortgage, Kaplan and UOPX in online education, e*Trade and Schwab in financial services and CDW in direct IT retailing. The big challenge is how to develop such a salesforce. Below are 10 things to think about when staffing up call centers for consultative selling:

1. Experienced versus Young and Hungry. Should I hire experienced and skilled consultative inside salespeople or should I hire young people with the right profile and train them to be great. Of course, you have to pay the experienced folks higher base and commission off the bat...

2. Urban versus Rural Call Centers?. Do I staff my call center in an urban area with lots of job opportunities or are there some mid-size cities and rural areas where I can actually source people with strong sales skills. It could be hard to find good sales folks in some rural communities, but if I find the right people a rural area would allow for lower labor costs and lower attrition. See a great piece of research on site selection from call center expert Jon Anton.

3. Virtual Call Centers? With broadband, VPN and call monitoring technology, managing people working from home is much more feasible than it was a few years ago. Wes Hayden, CEO of Genesys Telecommunications, does a great job explaining how a virtual call center can vastly increase the size and skill level of your potential labor pool in an article in CRM News. You do lose some element of team cohesiveness/corporate spirit under this model but does the vastly greater labor pool you can recruit from balance this out?

4. Size of Call Center. You can squeeze a lot of efficiencies out of a 300-500+ seat call center in terms of IT costs, ability to hold face-to-face meetings, etc. But small centers of 100-120 seats have a huge advantage in terms of culture building and agent development

5. Selling Your Firm to People with the Right Personality & Skill Profile. Take highest and lowest performing people and try to find some common threads. There are many profiling firms out there that can do this for you and then offer some online screening tools to use early in the recruitment process. It is then important to sell your firm effectively to qualified candidates. The "For Employers and Recruiters Blog" features an interview with a firm that called Improved Experience that claims it can measure on an ongoing basis potential employees' perception of your company. Employment Technologies makes a cool simulation tool for call center environments that can help separate good performers from simply good interviewers.

6. The Temp to Perm Model Has Some Advantages, but It's Not Worth It! Some people prefer to use a temp to perm model where an outside staffing agency is the employer of record for a few months. The upside here is if an employee is underperforming, termination is much easier with the staffing agency than with an internal employee. But are you going to attract high level consultative salespeople through a temporary employment arrangement? Absolutely not!

7. Compensate Recruiters Based on How Their Candidates Perform Rather than for "Buts in Seats." Even if you use an outside staffing firm to source candidates I tend to prefer to have an in house recruiter responsible for each candidate. To ensure that you get the best people, measure your recruiters' performance based on how their recruits pan out (their attrition, sales, customer retention).

8. Alternative Career Pathing - Sales vs. Management. I have always marveled at how quickly some organizations promote their best salespeople to management. Every one of those promotions is high risk as a great inside salesperson could be responsible for $1 million+ in revenue. They better be a great manager! You need to offer a career path in sales as well, and one that is lucrative enough to keep people motivated enough to stay on the floor.

9. Frontline Management: Promote From Within vs. External Hires. For cultural and motivational reasons, you need to promote a good number of managers from within. But if you fail to bring in outside talent into the management ranks, you could end up with a homogenous and static management style and a constant recycling of old ideas.

10. How to Set up Training. In setting up any training organization, you need onboarding that trains folks on the key skills required to perform on the job (product knowledge, CRM system, procedures and sales). The CRM Mastery Blog highlights these issues in a nice article by Elizabeth Millard, Getting New Reps Up to Speed with CRM. On an ongoing basis, you need a knowledge management infrastructure that can identify which workers have gaps (usually via call monitoring and QA), a way to train them on these gaps (via in-person training or computer-based trainings) and a way to measure whether these gaps have been closed. Most importantly, you need the result of the training to be higher agent performance. More on training in later posts...

Comments

[Clayton]

I agree with everything you're saying. I would add one more. Make the place fun! I'm at Quicken Loans and we honestly have fun at work. We just launched a blog about our culture, what we consider important, and how we have fun! And our goal is to get good recruits who agree with our culture and philosophies. Please take a look and let us know what you think. www.whatsthediff.com

[Sheewon]

Some choices are more critical and determinate of others in the 10 dimensions you write about. For example, if you choose to go with the "young and hungry" staff in dimension 1, I'm guessing that developing and defining a career path in dimension 8 may become much more important. Similarly, rural or suburban call centers tend to lack a younger talent pool. And I'm sure there are a ton of other examples.

This is based on my various experiences with call centers (yes, I worked as a dreaded telemarketer for a credit card company back in the day)!

=o)

[Jason Stoffer]

Sheewon, very true. All these points are interdependent and you cannot simply "flip the switch" and choose thumbs up or thumbs down for each. A well defined operating model is one where the chosen Top 10 elements are aligned without inconsistencies (e.g. a younger sales force requires a more robust investment and focus on the training organization...).