I'd like to pose a question at the end of all that tripe; how have you coped with a growing department? We're already wearing pants way too big for our skinny little legs, so what qualities have you found important in your existing and prospective employees? We're constantly stressing phone skills when we hire, but where have you found success in the search for people who are fearless on the phone?
I don't know if you've ever come across me saying a
BDC is a workaround in your lurking, but it is. However, a
BDC is one workaround I am a fan of. The reason I like
BDC's solely revolves around the phone. Sales Agents and Sales Managers, for the most part, are afraid of the phone. They were never properly trained on how to use it and even when they are that training is one of the simplest to forget. At its core a
BDC is a dedicated
call center of professional inbound and outbound phone talkers. That's all they do. A good
BDC will handle a call properly 90% of the time while the sales floor it supports handles a call well about 10% of the time.
Every market is different on where the best
BDC people come from. I had the best luck at two colleges and advertising the position on our dealership website. After a few years, when the rest of the dealership started to understand and see the benefits of the
BDC, almost all new
BDC employees were family referrals or transfers.
It isn't just the phone though. I was lucky to have an employee who was an insanely fast and accurate typist. He also grasped the idea that all emails should be short and end in a question. With him on board we rarely ever saw an average month's response time above 14 minutes. The key to keeping him fast was making sure he didn't get bogged down in the details. There is no need to spend 20 minutes researching a customer's history before picking up a phone or sending an email - just go!
It is a team effort. Go into your interviews for the "people who are fearless on the phone" looking at every candidate as a position to fill on the baseball diamond. Who's your starting pitcher, who's going to reach over the fence to stop the homerun, who's going to take some spikes in the shin for the out?
Figure that the average Internet Sales Rep can handle 100 to 150 Internet Leads a month. To start, this would be more like 75 as the follow-up compounds on top of one another over time. Divide the number of Internet leads you currently have by 75 and that will give you the number of people you should have just on Internet Leads. If you've been tracking phone calls then apply that same formula. Over time your people will get better at handling more and more volume so the initial investment will always be the highest. Eventually your job should be to find more leads and phone calls for your
BDC to work while making sure their skills are continuously improving.....or you could become more of an online marketer while finding another person to manage the
BDC.