5 Key KPIs for Telesales: Driving Success Through Metrics

Sales representatives hate making cold calls, and business owners hate getting them. 

But still, why do we keep going through the process? 

Because cold calling can be effective when done correctly. Cold calls are one of the staples of the modern sales process, yet their future is unclear. In a world filled with artificial intelligence sales tools and advanced omnichannel marketing tactics, is there a place for cold calls?

Cold calling has endured since the inception of telephones, where sales professionals dial prospective clients with the hope of sparking a meaningful conversation that leads to business growth. Amidst AI-powered tools and sophisticated marketing strategies, the relevance of cold calls may seem uncertain.

Cold calling has been around as long as telephones have. Salespeople looking for opportunities to drum up business have spent years dialing prospective customers in the hopes that someone will pick up and let them talk past their introduction.

And it’s all in the spirit of growing a business.

But why are telesales metrics important?

Tracking KPIs in telesales is crucial for several reasons. KPIs provide a clear picture of performance, highlight areas for improvement, and help in setting realistic goals. They also serve as a motivational tool for sales reps, encouraging them to meet and exceed their targets. 

By understanding and managing these metrics, organizations can enhance their telesales strategies, improve customer interactions, and ultimately drive sales growth.

Challenges of telesales

Telesales, while an effective sales strategy, comes with its own set of challenges. Understanding these challenges is crucial for developing strategies to overcome them and ensuring that telesales teams can perform at their best. Here are some of the most common challenges faced by telesales teams and organizations:

1. High competition and employee turnover

• Intense Competition: Telesales is one of the most competitive industries. Sales reps face immense internal and external competition, which can lead to stress and disengagement.
• High Attrition Rates: The nature of telesales work often results in high employee turnover. Reps may move to other companies for better pay or less stressful environments. High attrition rates disrupt team cohesion and increase recruitment and training costs.

2. Disengagement and job satisfaction

• Disengagement: The repetitive nature of making cold calls and facing rejections can lead to disengagement. Sales reps may feel disconnected from their peers due to the competitive environment and lack of interaction.
• Low Job Satisfaction: Dealing with rude or dismissive customers can significantly lower job satisfaction. This, coupled with erratic work schedules and night shifts, can further reduce morale and motivation among telesales reps.

3. Reliance on manual processes

• Manual Commission Calculations: Many telesales teams rely on Excel sheets to calculate commissions. This process is prone to errors and increases the turnaround time (TAT) for payouts, causing dissatisfaction among reps.
• Lack of Automation: The absence of automated systems for tracking performance and calculating incentives leads to inefficiencies and inaccuracies, making it difficult to maintain transparency and trust.

4. Dynamic targets and focus areas

• Changing Targets: In telesales, the focus products and target geographies can change frequently, sometimes even monthly. This constant shift requires reps to adapt, which can be challenging and stressful continually.
• Adjusting Strategies: Sales reps need to adjust their strategies quickly to align with the new targets, which can lead to confusion and reduced performance if not managed effectively.

5. Organizational challenges

• Scattered Workforce: Telesales teams are often large and spread across different geographies. Managing such a dispersed workforce can be challenging, especially in maintaining consistent performance standards and communication.
• Third-Party Employees: Many telesales teams consist of third-party employees, which can lead to a lower level of control over their performance and engagement. Ensuring these reps are as motivated and aligned with company goals as direct employees can be difficult.

6. Technological barriers

• Outdated Systems: Some telesales teams may use outdated technology that lacks the features needed to track and analyze performance effectively. This can hinder the ability to make data-driven decisions and optimize strategies.
• Integration Issues: Integrating new tools and technologies with existing systems can be complex and costly. Organizations need seamless integration to ensure that all systems work together efficiently.

Understanding these challenges is the first step towards addressing them. By implementing the right KPIs and leveraging modern tools, organizations can overcome these obstacles and create a productive and motivated telesales team.

5 key KPIs for telesales teams

Here are five optimum KPIs for telesales teams. The idea is to inspire you in what to visualize and how to visualize it on the telesales performance dashboard.

1. Number of calls

This is obviously one of the most important KPIs in telesales. But you’ll need to know how many calls you have and how to count them. There are different outcomes of calls; for example, voicemail, dead number, receptionist, and decision-maker (customer). You should take these outcomes into consideration: What outcome do you want to measure on?

This is an absolute, but you need to know calls are being made and how many. This tells you about the level of activity and momentum. Calls per sales agent define how often your agents are on a task. This will tell you the level of activity among your employees. This information can help you determine when it is important to motivate your teams with a sales contest.

Key metrics:

• Answered calls
• Duration of answered calls
• Number of calls made by each sales agent

2. Sales

Naturally, sales are also one of the absolutes. You can measure your sales vs. a target in order to motivate your sales agents. When assessing success on this metric, you’ll need to know how to measure this percentage; on a daily basis or monthly. However, the monthly target can seem a bit overwhelming at the beginning of the month. You may consider showing the daily progress and thereby create a better overview for your employees.

The most immediate statistic in telesales is to evaluate sales in absolute terms.

Key metrics:

• Renewal sales
• New sales

3. Conversion rate

The Sales Conversion Rate metric measures the effectiveness of your telesales team at converting leads into new customers. However, this is a tricky one. The usual assumption for telesales teams is that most leads generated are from cold. That isn’t always the case, though, as some may be leads generated via the website, a directory or some other source.

However, if a generalized percentage of conversion is to be arrived at, a few factors to be considered are:

• How speculative or warm is each appointment?
• How compelling is your proposition to the prospect?

The questions will ultimately answer how good a telesales agent is at selling.

Key metrics:

• Number of cold calls converted to warm calls
• Number of warm calls converted to hot calls
• Number of hot calls converted to clients

4. Calls per result

Calls per result is a useful benchmark. It essentially determines how many calls it takes to get a result. This is the hit rate and can be used to define how successful the calls made by your telesales teams are. It is calculated by dividing the number of calls by the number of sales, appointments, answered calls, demos booked, or an absolute metric of success.

Calculating these ratios will help understand the calls required to achieve different levels of success.

Key metrics:

• Number of calls converted to warm calls
• Number of calls converted to hot calls
• Number of calls converted to clients

5. Calls per hour

Calls are, in some cases, an absolute metric indicative of performance but not so much in the rest. It usually depends on the industry and what is of paramount importance for the business at this hour. Call rates in typically high-value products or products with longer sales cycles are not as important as the quality. It depends on the business, services, and marketplace.

You don’t want lots of low-quality short calls to CXOs in Fortune 500 companies. Likewise, you don’t want to see 5 calls per day to B2C customers. Benchmarking against past performance and outcomes should be considered for the real acid test.

Key metrics:

• Number of calls per hour per day
• Quality of calls per hour per day

Brand awareness

Calculating brand awareness through telecalls is slightly intangible. However, if you are a new business or a new product in your marketplace, calling to introduce your services makes potential buyers aware of you. This makes it incredibly important that your telesales teams represent your business properly. 

The worst-case scenario is brand reputation damage. You will struggle to reverse that. 

So, make sure callers represent your business in what they say, their approach, and their tone. To measure this, you could run a survey over time or send out a lost sales questionnaire. However, telesales calls should be enhanced and not detracted from the brand's reputation.

Research shows that in 2007, it took an average of 3.68 attempts to reach a prospect. Today, it takes 8 attempts.

Cold calling can be tough and demotivating, so your employees need to be persistent and determined. But it can be hard to stay motivated if they reach a voicemail, a dead number or get rejected over and over again.

Driving B2B growth: Denave's strategic telesales transformation

Denave partnered with a globally leading OEM brand that faced challenges in maximizing sales conversions from inbound and chat queries, converting SMB customers into repeat buyers, and reaching new startups.

Challenges:

• Low Conversion Rates: Difficulty converting inbound and chat queries into sales.
• SMB Customer Retention: Inability to upsell accessories and other products to existing SMB customers.
• Market Reach: Challenges in reaching new startups to promote computer products.

Solution execution:

• Integrated Approach: Deployed district managers across 6 locations to gather market intelligence, qualify distributors, and present business propositions effectively.
• Account Management Enhancement: Assigned dedicated account managers to SMB customers to improve relationship management and drive repeat sales.
• Performance Tracking: Implemented rigorous training, quality control measures, and a dedicated MIS team to monitor and optimize daily performance.

Services offered:

• B2B Telesales Services: Utilized CRM for managing inbound calls and customer data, along with an in-house tool for handling website chats.

Impact generated:

• Achieved 7.5% conversion rate from inbound queries.
• Achieved a 12% conversion rate from chat queries.
• Handled 38,000 chats and 24,000 inbound calls quarterly.
• Fulfilled 7,300 orders quarter-over-quarter.
• Generated $315,000 in revenue per quarter from startups.
• Delivered an average revenue of $7.8 million over the last four quarters.

Denave’s B2B telesales strategy successfully addressed the client’s challenges by improving sales conversions, enhancing SMB account management, and expanding market reach to startups. 

Through integrated district manager deployments, dedicated account management, and robust performance tracking, Denave significantly increased revenue and operational efficiency, demonstrating the effectiveness of strategic telesales in achieving business growth objectives. 

How can Compass help improve telesales team performance?

Compass focuses on the underlying fact: Sales acceleration is about re-engaging with the telesales teams for enhanced accountability and performance by using levers that they crave - meaningful and timely rewards, lucrative commission plans, and instant payments.

Running contests isn’t a novel concept. Managers have been rewarding top-performing employees with trips, tickets, and dinners for decades. Who can blame them? Contests are a great way of grabbing attention and focusing your team toward a common target while creating an engaging and competitive atmosphere.

The logistics of running a contest, on the other hand, aren’t as simple. You have to notify your team, create excitement, keep the contest top of mind, track and broadcast the standings. For many companies, this means whiteboards or Excel spreadsheets.

This is where Compass helps.

With Compass, create a culture of support, collaboration, and achievement.

With Compass, you can select game templates from a plethora of options, define KPIs, and create logic with rules, variables, and conditions without coding. Drive behaviors that power business results with engaging sales programs. Compass is an unorthodox product built for orthodox problems in the most orthodox function, sales.

With Compass, you can easily build logic with a number of variables where your only input is defining the variable and Compass will take care of your incentives no matter how complex. Apart from easy incentive calculation, Compass helps you motivate your sales reps with gamified sales contests and a library of templates from which to choose. 

Compass was also created to handle complex tax implications across geographies and tax brackets and enable seamless payouts. With real-time KPI dashboards, you can keep track of your agents' performance across geographies.

Motivating sales teams have been and will continue to be an effective ongoing management tool for organizations to improve performance. But with Compass, you won’t have to worry about them at all.

Leverage the Compass advantage today!

That’s exactly what Compass is built for. Want to know more? Book a Demo with our sales team now!

Key takeaways

Effective management of telesales teams hinges on the identification, tracking, and visualization of key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Visualizing KPIs can have a significant impact on telesales performance by:

• Identifying bottlenecks: Visualization helps identify areas where performance may be lagging, such as times of low call activity or low conversion rates, allowing managers to address these issues promptly.
• Improving decision-Making: Data-driven insights from visualized KPIs enable managers to make informed decisions about strategy adjustments, resource allocation, and training needs.
• Enhancing accountability: Transparent visualization of individual and team performance fosters a culture of accountability, as sales reps can see how their efforts contribute to overall goals.
• Boosting motivation: Seeing progress in real-time can boost morale and motivation among sales reps, encouraging them to maintain or improve their performance.

By understanding the importance of KPIs, overcoming the inherent challenges in telesales, and leveraging modern tools for visualization, organizations can drive their telesales teams towards greater success. KPIs not only provide a clear measure of performance but also serve as a critical motivational tool, ensuring that sales reps remain engaged, productive, and aligned with the company’s goals.