Imagine planning a visit to a part of the world where diseases are rampant, but a vaccine is available, and you aren’t going to take it.

This is what it is like to go into telemarketing without a thorough understanding of its challenges and dangers.

I can tell you from vast experience, having built and improved countless units, that it’s a jungle in there, and to the unwary, you can easily get lost, or worse.

Specifically, here’s what you need:

(1) Dedicated Management.

A tele-sales unit won’t run on its own. You can’t imagine how callers will get caught up in each other’s business and distractions without someone there to get them back to work. Management by committee probably won’t work. You need to appoint a main supervisor or manager.

(2) Training.

I’ve written at length about how most callers are ignorant of the Three T’s: Text, Tone & Timing, and how to use them. It’s not intuitively obvious. They need training to know what to do and not to do.

(3) Complete Scripted Materials.

A main presentation, answers to objections and common questions, along with “clutch closes,” need to be supplied. And it should be really GOOD!

(4) A Rational & Motivational Compensation Plan

Want the worst people available on the market, today? They’re easy to find, and they’re all you’ll find if you pay the lowest wages. An attractive salary, commission or bonus structure, and typical benefits will get the best people to look you over. Your benchmark isn’t clerical or customer service work: it’s field sales compensation.

Let’s say your minimum outside seller earns $60,000. Then, a part-time job should pay telemarketers $30,000. That’s about $28 per hour, factoring in salary, commissions, and minimal benefits. In major urban areas, you’re looking at the salary portion being at least $14-16 per hour, to get people in the door.

(5) Expect Turnover

You won’t develop a nucleus of people until you have moved through several “people turns.” You’ll have to recruit, train, supervise, critique, and terminate several people just to get a few that will stick with you for several months.

You’ve heard the expression that the ABC’s of selling translates into “Always be selling.” To build your tele-sales unit, you always have to be recruiting, training, and turning over, to get what you need, a profitable and semi-stable unit.

These are significant challenges, and they won’t be solved though cleverness or short cuts.

But once you have a productive unit, it is something of which you can be proud, because it didn't just fall into place.

You made it happen!

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone®, You Can Sell Anything By Telephone! and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service, and the audio program, “The Law of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable,” published by Nightingale-Conant. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC's Annenberg School, a Loyola lawyer, and an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. He holds the rank of Shodan, 1st Degree Black Belt in Kenpo Karate. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com.