Empowering ghost sales
Posted on February 21, 2009
Filed Under Trends |
Probably the first idea that comes to mind when thinking about outsourcing some of your processes abroad is related to customer support. Who hasn’t experienced calling to your customer/provider X and getting attended by a person with that interesting British accent that Indian gentlemen usually have?
And, well, I guess that if I would ask you what’s, from your point of view, the only reason to hire a team abroad to do what your guys where doing at home you would rapidly think “cutting costs”. Am I right?
The proposal would be now mixing the best of both packages: Indian customer service and virtual teams. Of course, this option offers much more than the reason pointed above. One of the latest trends is not just outsourcing your call centers or support teams but also your -whole!- sales team.
In short, you could think about creating your own Indian virtual sales team in order to:
- Use some of the top sales people that prefer to work from home -or a café- in order to distribute their time in the way they prefer.
- Obtain a focused group of people - no company politics or chit-chatting to decrease productivity.
- Scale your workforce depending on your needs - a pink period or an aggressive sales campaign will need a bigger staff that can be later replaced when the strategy changes.
- Reduce your recruitment costs. India has an incredible high number of professionals ready to start working for you.
- Eliminate unexpected expenses - no sales, no costs. The virtual team does not need to have a daily schedule or fixed salary: if no new revenues are generated, the company will not experience any costs related to human resources, as the team will earn depending on their performance.
- Avoid administration costs: only one invoice per worker must be disposed. Host employment issues disappear, as well as office space and material costs.
At the same time, establishing this type of team is quite easy, and you just have to investigate few interfaces, such as:
- use of VoIP , e-mail and fax for communications;
- creation of a web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, in order to track efforts and results;
- criteria in order to select your sales force, and focus they have to follow. It is important to find passionate members that are eager to transmit your message and even seduce other interested members in order to become part of your team (besides increasing revenue growth, of course).
The question is, basically, “are you ready to forget the traditional structure, losing the physical link, and learning a new management model, where you have to fully rely on a phone or a web cam video?”.
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