Like life, telemarketing is full of ups and downs. At times you dial a number, reach someone you need to talk to and get chatting like you’ve known them forever. You just connect in a way that works for you, and them. When this happens, your questions yield perfect answers, and the buyer peppers the discussion with all the things they need from you in order for you to work together. Hence you’re able to present your company’s products and services in a way that dovetails their needs as a business. Almost by magic, your sparkle generates a relationship that can endure over time. You feel valued, and your work holds meaning and reward.
On another day you might dial and dial and dial until you reach someone. When you finally do, you ask the same questions to strike up a dialog, you use the same introduction and features, but the call just flops. So you try again. And again. And again. To no avail. Then you’re left with a feeling that you’ve somehow failed, no one wants to talk to you, people are not interested, nobody is even there to take your call, and telemarketing doesn’t work. You feel the harsh stab of rejection and your job sucks.
Deep breath please
Newsflash! It’s normal to have bad moments in telemarketing. Actually, it’s perfectly normal to have moments that make you want to turn tail and flee, screaming for the hills. Hopefully, the big fat highs you get from the good times are easily worth the bad ones. Nevertheless, there are things we can do to help minimise the rejection we experience during the bad times, and there are things we can do to mitigate the effect of rejection when it does inevitably feature. Next time you’re faced with a situation where your telemarketing gave you a sense of rejection, take a big deep breath, sit up straight, and fix your mind back to the last great call you had. What happened in that call? How did you feel? What did you do that was special? Make time for these kinds of reflections regularly. Unfortunately, people have a shocking habit of remembering and talking about their horror stories, far more than their successes. This makes the negative recollections far bigger and more prominent in our minds than they deserve to be.
Resilience
By shifting your focus away from the negative situations, and firmly towards the positive ones, you’ll quickly shake off the effects of rejection. The great news is that these behaviours are habit forming. Over time your ability to switch away from the negative and towards the positive will happen naturally. We refer to this as resilience. As your resilience grows, the ability to flip your thinking will kick in automatically. Another huge positive is this, the less you allow destructive emotions to dominate your thoughts, the more your internal dialog shifts to ‘expect’ great things to happen. Instead of thinking ‘this is going really badly, no one wants to talk to me’ you’ll think ‘I’m going to have a really good conversation now’. If you expect great telemarketing to happen, you’ll make calls that are laden with possibility and potential, as well as mitigate the effects of any rejection that does manage to sneak into your day.
Re-frame
In fact, if you can learn to accept and label rejection differently, it can actually be really good for us, our mental health and our work as sales professionals. At Blue Donkey, our teams are making calls across many different projects all day long. It’s all we do and we’re a centre of telemarketing excellence, so every dial is measured, benchmarked and reported on by way of the contribution it makes to a paid for campaign. The graveyards of low achievement that in-house telemarketing teams can sometimes experience just cannot happen at Blue Donkey because they would pose a threat to the business. Therefore we see rejection as a signpost. Metrics are carefully monitored for the number of times a call receives anything other than a ‘positive outcome’.
So the simple ‘not interested’ results or rejections are carefully measured and reported on for each hour of telemarketing that takes place. Two things happen with that data. Either we can use it to reassure a team member, because it’s common to overestimate how many negatives and underestimate the number of positives if we’re having a bad day. Or if the number of negative outcomes is unusually high, it indicates the messaging should be adjusted. So it’s not the caller, it’s the call that’s being rejected.