A personal snapshot in the life of a successful outbound sales dialing manager. What it was, and why it changed.
Michael Velardi is the former Senior Vice President of Resource Marketing Corporation. In this guest blog, he talks about the struggles and triumphs of his experience managing an outbound call center’s dialing campaigns.
Running a dialer requires an extensive number of actions that become compounded by added expectations…usually coming from the top. Outbound lead generation and operating a predictive dialer is very tough. Trust me. I have extensive experience running a predictive dialer on a level that most have not seen.
A day in the life
Jump back a few years.
It’s just 60 minutes into the day, which for some people is just one hour.
But when running a predictive dialer, each minute of success ties into another issue and the waves of up and down feel excruciating. I’m continuously worried whether I might be off pace.
So I diligently check the screen, scanning for an indicator to what my gut is telling me. I see that I need to make some minor and some aggressive moves to help solve the seemingly endless problem…
…to maintain acceptable contact rates for agents so we can produce more and more sales.
Each day I manage to solve the immediate issues I encounter which include long wait times, low sales, and low converting data (to name a few). But as I fix one problem, another one almost simultaneously replaces it. And this goes on throughout each day.
In an outbound dialing company, my score is determined by more than just sales. But at the end of the day, being profitable comes from using the predictive dialer to generate income for the business. Honestly, that’s the only question that really matters: How many sales did we get today?
The impact of expectations (or, “That predictive dialer prints money, doesn’t it?”)
Basically the task handed down to me from the top of the company is to get this amount of sales and get that number of sales per day.
Does this sound familiar? In your boss’s mind, the formula is simple: You have X people and Y leads, multiplied by an amazing tool called a predictive dialer. Go make it rain!
I’ve spoken to dozens of people running a predictive dialer who say the job can be thankless, mundane, and stressful. But the thankless part is not from disrespect. It’s from a lack of understanding. Most people have no idea how a predictive dialer operates, neither in theory nor logistics.
I have been on both sides of the fence, and I can tell you that handing the orders down is waaaaay easier than receiving them. But just know this: In the times when I’ve done a Q&A about requests, goals, or quotas, the responses make it clear that management is unaware of the compounding actions it takes to achieve what they have requested.
A reluctant solution
So one day my boss comes to me saying, “We’re changing the dialing company we use.” Stress, anxiety, and a whirlwind of emotions surge through me. My CEO and CFO are excited, because they think this new dialer is going to be cheaper and that it will be better for the company.
I’m incredibly skeptical. I need to transfer everything I do to an entirely new predictive dialer platform. Then I begin to fathom the depth of what this means: the leads, the statuses, the call count, and the many many factors essential to daily operations all fly through my head. Where do I start? How do I even begin to plan for something this huge?
You are not alone
A phone call changed everything. “Hi, my name is Jen. I’m your Convoso Rep. I’ll be your point person to support your onboarding experience and get you optimized on the dialer.”
This is the day that changed everything for me.
Convoso Support became a household name and relief came fast. I had a resource, a go-to accountability partner. My perspective shifted from doom, gloom, and anxiety to excitement and energized curiosity to learn. My experience transformed to a glorious adventure.
The transition was smooth and I was able to easily take control of processes, automations, and systems, and program them into how we do business.
In Part Two, I’ll talk more specifically about how these new solutions transformed both my day-to-day experience and the outbound dialing strategies I use as a call center admin. The results are worth it.
