The Simple Guide on How to Increase Sales at Your Call Center

Navigating the world of call centers can feel like a juggling act. With so many balls in the air—leads, strategies, and sales targets—it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But what if the secret to boosting your sales wasn’t in adding more, but in taking a simpler approach to what you’ve got? 

Dive into our guide on how to increase call center sales and explore easy-to-follow strategies that can help your team hit those sales targets without the headaches.

Want to Make More Sales? Start by Simplifying Your Call Center Sales Strategy

Let’s make no bones about it: running a modern contact center can be difficult. Managing a team of many agents and a hopper full of leads can be chaotic. It’s full of challenges, from lead to list source management, and from contact rates to compliance. And without the right strategy to set it all straight, it can be downright crazy-making.

Setting up a winning outbound calling strategy doesn’t have to be so hard though. Yes, once you’re up and running, you can fine-tune your approach and optimize until the cows come home. But let’s start by taking a step back and thinking: What exactly do you need to do to get your call center agents to make more sales?

Answering in the most straightforward terms, we can break down your call center sales strategy into three areas of focus and improvement:

• Make more sales calls
• Make more contacts
• Make more sales

These call center sales tips will help you improve the quantity and quality of your operation, from outreach to contact to conversion.

Make More Sales Calls (and Texts and Emails)

If you have a lot of leads, you need to be able to match quantity with quantity. You simply can’t afford to run with a call center sales strategy that leaves leads languishing. Because inactive, uncalled leads are ultimately going to be wasted leads. And wasted leads mean wasted costs. 

And wasted costs? Well, that means fewer profits and less growth. 

An important disclaimer though: When we talk about how to make more sales calls, we don’t mean peppering (or pestering) leads and customers with call after call after call. There’s a big difference between knowing how to make more sales calls and making too many calls. A strategic approach to your cadence is critical.

So, how is it done?

Penetrate Your Lists with Dialer Power

In today’s hyper-competitive sales environment, having the right dialer software is more than just an added convenience—it’s a necessity. With long lists of leads to get through, manually dialing or an inefficient, unreliable dialer isn’t going to cut it.

You need to anchor your sales tech stack with a predictive or power dialer option that elevates dial rates and makes the most of your agents’ time.

Leverage Other Channels

As important as your dialer is, the age of solely relying on calls to increase sales is behind us. In a digitally connected world, the best contact centers’ approaches tap into the power of omnichannel marketing. Texts and emails and calls can work together, increasing available touchpoints for leads and customers, often at their convenience. 

By incorporating these channels into strategic cadences, teams can nurture leads more effectively, set up timely follow-up calls, and foster an experience that encourages callbacks. When used in tandem, these channels combine to create a seamless experience—one that gives your business more opportunities to engage and streamlines the path from lead to customer.

Lean on AI to Get It All Done Efficiently

If adding and coordinating multiple outreach channels sounds like a lot of work, know this: it really doesn’t have to be. Not anymore. With the help of conversational AI, teams can pass much of the repetitive work over to an intelligent virtual agent (IVA) and focus more on the real work of selling.

For instance, Voso.ai from Convoso powers text and voice conversations at scale. It engages prospects in realistic human-like conversations to qualify and transfer leads, set appointments, schedule callbacks, and more. It helps you make more calls and texts without adding complexity.

Make More Contacts

The tips above will dial up the quantity of your outreach. But all that added volume won’t translate to increased sales if you don’t also improve the quality of your strategy. These tips can help you improve that all-important outbound metric—your contact rate—and generate more conversations with potential customers.

Prioritize Your Freshest Leads First

While it’s crucial to penetrate your lists with ease, your dialer’s raw power needs to be balanced with strategic intelligence.

Choose a dialer that also lets you adopt a “last in, first out” approach. This ensures that your team is always reaching out to the freshest leads first.

By increasing speed to lead and prioritizing these warmer leads, agents will get more leads on the phone. As a bonus, they’ll also be able to capitalize on a lead’s current interest and significantly improve conversion rates.

Manage the Health of Your Caller IDs

Regardless of how quickly you reach out to leads, it won’t matter much if your caller IDs are showing up as Spam Risk or Scam Likely. To protect the reputation of your phone numbers and increase your contact rates, follow these best practices:

• Don’t overdial your leads: If you don’t want your phone numbers marked as spam, don’t dial your leads too much. Use a dialer with workflow automation tools to rest leads after initial attempts and recycle them at the right time.
• Register your caller IDs with carriers: Each major telco carrier possesses its own registration process to help validate your call traffic. Be sure that your numbers are registered, including your newest DIDs. Better yet: work with a dialer partner who does it for you.
• Monitor which DIDs are flagged or blocked: While the right call patterns will limit your flagged numbers, you still need to know which DIDs get caught up in the carriers’ webs. A caller ID reputation management solution like Convoso’s ClearCallerID™ will give you the ability to monitor which numbers are marked by which carriers so that you can take action before your contact rates start falling.

Filter Out the Voicemail Messages

This one’s especially simple, but so often overlooked.

Every second your agents spend listening to or dispositioning a voicemail they reached is a second they could be talking to a lead instead. Equip your contact center with accurate answering machine detection that works alongside your dialer to filter out voicemails and maximize your team’s productivity.

Make More Sales

So, you’re making more sales calls and getting more leads on the line. Now it’s time to bring it all together and bring that sale home. Here are some tips.

Focus on the Right Leads (in the Right Way)

In order to keep things straightforward, the call center sales tips we’ve presented so far take something of a blanket approach. The truth is, though, that you can’t treat all of your leads the same and expect to get top-notch results. 

To increase call center sales, you need to make your decisions as you go based on hard data. Still, this doesn’t have to be difficult. There are solutions available to help you train your efforts on the right leads and do so in the right way.

For starters, leverage reporting software that helps you understand which of your lists and campaigns are performing well and are profitable—and which aren’t. Plus, you can utilize lead scoring tools that help you change things up and personalize the sales experiences.

Use the Right Scripts

Set all the dialing and the data aside and call center sales comes mostly down to one thing: conversations between your agents and your leads.

Boost your chances of a sale by making sure your agents are equipped with the right message and the right rebuttals every time they get on the phone. Create call scripts that reflect the wealth of experience and talent you have at your contact center—and ultimately lead to more sales.

Learn from Experience

Driving better performance doesn’t just happen before and during your outbound calls. To increase sales at your contact center, you also need to harness post-call insights that help your agents improve the next time around. Use QA tools and call analysis solutions like Balto.ai to fuel more effective agent coaching and close more sales over time.

Stepping up your call center game doesn’t need to be rocket science. As we’ve broken down in this guide, sometimes it’s the simple tweaks and straightforward strategies that can make all the difference. With the right contact center software, a clear focus, and a dash of persistence, your call center can soon be a sales-making machine.