Relying on Appointment Setting Services to Reduce Payroll
Some executive assistants earn six figure annual salaries. Typical work tasks executive assistants perform include preparing statistical reports, conducting research, greeting in-person visitors, telephone callers and scheduling meetings. A good portion of assistants’ time is filled dealing with internal and external clients. This applies whether assistants support senior managers or sales managers.
During the great recession, business managers looked for ways to reduce costs, particularly payroll expenses. Forbes shares, “In tough times, you can’t help scrutinizing your biggest expense. But it is possible to reduce wage costs without laying off employees”.
Call centre worker by alanclarkdesign, on Flickr. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
What is the Impact of Laying Workers Off?
As positive as it was that some employers where able to find ways to reduce costs without laying employees off, laying workers off was a hard but necessary decision that some employers had to make. Those unfortunate decisions had negative consequences. For example, some companies that laid workers off, employees like executive and sales assistants, struggled to meet sales goals.
After all, even the most talented sales professionals only have 24 hours a day to do cold calling, connect with prospects and keep in-person meetings with potential customers. If sales professionals are forced to perform appointment setting tasks, in addition to preparing sales material and answering business customers’ questions, as well as responding to their concerns, the number of sales they close could lower. This impacts a company’s overall profitability.
What are Appointment Setting Services?
One way these sales professionals have managed to work with fewer employees is to start using appointment setting services. Increases in outside and inside sales are results sales professionals have seen while working with appointment setting services. To achieve these positive results, professionals turn to sales 2.0 solutions, sales automation solutions, outsourced appointment setting services and integrated customer relationship management (CRM) dialers and solutions.
Markets appointment setting services are built to support included software and technology and financial and business services. Government is another market that the services has worked well with. Because appointment setting services are using cloud, they can be accessed by sales professionals in a matter of seconds, with the click of a button.
BookBabe / Pixabay
Technological components of the services range from Oracle to Nuance to Salesforce and Dialogue. Product delivery platforms and services offer proactive support tools, continuous integration and reusable components. This means that enhanced service features can automatically be deployed to platforms sales professionals are using to contact their prospects.
What also sets these services apart is the support they offer. For example, some appointment setting companies wait to connect with sales professionals should an emergency arise. Top companies set weekly and monthly meetings with their clients, checking in with them to ensure they are getting the most from the services and fully understand how to use dashboard and analytical reporting features built into the systems.
The services aren’t designed to replace assistants. What they do is reduce the need to hire workers and take on more payroll expenses to schedule calls to prospective business customers. Additionally, the services reduce the need to track and record the results of sales calls using manual tools like spreadsheets and complicated databases.
Joe Pinkman wrote this article.
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