Question to the cold calling experts

I would call that adequate. Manual dialing has limitations. Calling B2B means the phone is answered more frequently so its hard to get serious call volume in.

As for whether they should set appts or sell services is a tough call without knowing what their level of expertise is. If they arent adept and don't know the nuances of your business I would have them stick to appts where they can set up the appts and your sales people can knock em down.

A Script would def be necessary or they simply will have no idea what to say...

let me ask... does your friends have any sales experience? i ask cause about 2 weeks ago i fired my friend. After that i might not hire one again. I'm building a call center for a contracting company... But to give you some advice... I'd have them set you up with the "one call close"...

I wouldn't hire your friends unless:

a) your friendship will survive having to fire them

and

b) they are temperamentally suited to cold calling.

As you have no doubt seen in this forum, not everyone wants to or can do cold calling. I'd set them up on a trial basis after going over the facts very clearly.

I would make 500 hundred dollars. That will enable you to test up to 5 telemarketers at 10 hours apiece. When you find a good one, he will make all your money back the first day.

Or take one hundred of it and place a 14 day monster ad and get a significant amount of applicants, and test only 4 at ten hours apiece.

You may also consider a $100 cash bonus at the end of the day via paypal, for their first sale. To help them break the ice.

Commission might work if they could get 100 dollars per sale paid daily/or 10 per hour , whichever is greater..

Either way, friends or not, you need to add some security plus incentive to kick them off and get them to prove to themselves that they can do it.

Give them a small hourly, even $8.00, and a bonus for performance, and tell them they have ten hours apiece to show they can do it. Thats about 900 calls.

I read all the other posts and its hard to disagree w/the advice saying do not hire friends. The length of time each poster recommends, well, to me that is an individual thing. I know I can stay on the phone for 8 straight hours but I'm a fruitcake when it comes to the phone. I want to get in as many calls as I possibly can in those 8 hours.

Have you had a heart to heart w/your friends about telemarketing? It ain't easy making 150 calls the first day for someone who has never done it. Plus, if you don't have a script that shows them even a wee bit of success in the first two or three hours you lost them.

Of course YMMV and your friends are such good friends that failure, tedium, being hung up on, threatened and called a few names won't bother them. Then again...

I wish you good luck.

Tom

P.S. John Durham wrote:

"Or take one hundred of it and place a 14 day monster ad and get a significant amount of applicants, and test only 4 at ten hours apiece."

This is very good advice that probably has saved more friendships than we know about.

Do not hire your friends. This is a real business and you will be setting yourself up to fail. Heck 95% of the people who apply are worthless when it comes to cold calling.

I was a telemarketer for some bogus loan modification company. These guys are smart, they use terms on the script that have actual meaning behind the script what they made us to say.. they also had questions to answers that were brought up all the time. Then they leave people hanging and then a different person will be a closer.

They also made us think they were giving us fresh leads, but they were used about 20 different times..I was about to be a closer in a couple days, but until I realized the morality of what I was doing I just quit because of the ethics..

1) you need a script
2) you need breaks 15 mins breaks
3) you need closers who are experienced

@ Jay,

I think your plan sounds flawless and perfect. Keep it simple.

FYI, my overseas (Filipino) telemarketers make about 125 calls each a day on a very tight, short script. It is a B2B call that is trying to generate a warm lead for me or someone else to close. They always load the list I buy from zapdata, infoUSA or similar into a predictive dialer. Since they get a lot of voice mails they have one script for a live person and another when the leave a message.

Friends make much better friends than workers in most cases.

A script is essential and I would try different scripts to determine which is the most effective. If I were hiring two friends, I'd base their wages on appointments made, rather than phone calls made. Otherwise it could get a bit fraught, because you might be paying them for very little, if any return!

Let's say you are selling merchant accounts and the first business that wants to know information asks how much the business can save on transactional costs or what monthly fees are included or how much for an ATM machine...etc and now your cold caller doesn't know the answer or how to address what the business is actually looking for and you have lost a potential client.

I would have your callers set appointments since you are the expert. The more time they spend on appointment setting, the more appointments you, the expert, will have, thus, the more sales made.

A few things with this thread I want to comment on.

First.. why are you making them dial a certain number of companies each day? Whats the goal here? What you should really figure out is how many appointments you need to really close a deal. Then you can find out how many appointments they need to set each week to hit your sales goals...
Dials is just a terrible metric.... its misleading and the easiest to fake or become distracted by.

Unfortunately its also popular.

Let me give you an example. I have been lucky enough to set some records in very large corporations for both sales and lead gen functions.

In one of my larger lead gen roles, my goal was to set X number of appointments each week for my team of outside sales guys. There were other lead gen guys (usually some of the worst or the average joes) making 100+ dials a day.

You know what 95 of those calls sounded like.
Is Mr.Johnson in? Ohh he's not, okay I'll call back later...
Or ohh you're not intested... K thanks bye...

Pick your poison on which is a bigger waste of time. I would make half that number of calls and I would engage people in conversations. If you need a sales team to sell something, then its not a commodity yet. If its not a commodity its a unique value add and it needs human presence to relate that value through questioning and real conversations.

This process CAN NOT be done by a human being 100+ times in a day. It would take much longer than any standard work day. In fact the days I had the highest number of dials were always my WORST days. That just means I'm getting voicemail after voicemail.

BTW to address your first question it's probably a bad idea to hire your friends unless you pay them based on number of appointments, and give them a list of questions they need to answer for it to constitute an appointment. You make no promises and tell them they seriously may not make a penny. If they are still in, then go for it.