How To Hire Telemarketers And Make Sure They Are Effective And Don’t Cheat On Their Billable Hours

How To Hire Telemarketers And Make Sure They Are Effective And Don’t Cheat On Their Billable Hours

Joe: Hey, this is Joe Crump. In this video I’m going to show you how to hire telemarketers and make sure they’re effective and that they don’t cheat on their billable hours and how to train them and how to get the best prices that you can and where to find them. When you’re in the Automarketer, it’s easier to do your job if you’ve got somebody who’s making your phone calls for you. Ideally, it’d be nice not to be making those calls. Remember, at the beginning when you’re just getting started, when you’re just learning this process, make the phone calls yourself. Put the time in. This is your training and it’s going to be vital for you to be able to understand how to do it and to be able to do it yourself, for you to be able to train somebody else. It’s not just about the head knowledge of how to do it. You have to know and believe that it can be done before you can teach someone else to do it. Because if they don’t see you doing it or they don’t see that you can do it, it’s going to be hard for them to believe that they can do it. So learn how to do it first before you find other people to do it. Plus, it gets expensive if you’re hiring telemarketers to do the work for you and they’re not closing anything. So make sure that deals are closing before you hire a team.

Joe: But once you hire someone, the first place you’ll probably want to go is to Upwork. You can either do this on craigslist or you can do it on Upwork. Go to UpWork.com and you can create your own account and then you can post a job on there and tell them what you’re looking for.

Joe: Next, go to another website that I like, it’s called Free Conference Calling and it’s exactly what it says it is. You can have a conference call for free and you can record those conference calls. Which means that when you hire someone on Upwork, you can have them come on to a conference call with you, no matter where they’re at in the world, they can log into it. They can log in through Skype if they’ve got a Skype number or they can use your log in using your Automarketer phone number, doing it that way. And then you can train them and walk through the process with them and you can record that training program. Because when you’re hiring telemarketers, the likelihood is that the first one’s not going to work out and you’ll have to train somebody else and somebody else after that. And even as you’re doing it, as you’re expanding, you’re going to want to use the same training over and over again, so you don’t have to do it every time. Once you record it, then you can just send them to the recording and the free conference calling will give you a URL that you can give to them and they can come in and listen to your recording.

Joe: Now, once you have them and you want to put them on your team management system, so you create a new team member and you add them to the system and you assign them a phone number and you’re going to get them a phone number by going into the phone system into this, and these phone numbers cost $3.00 a month. They’re not very expensive. But if you want to keep them, you have to pay $3.00 a month for it. You’re going to buy them a new number and you’re going to pick the area code of the area that they’re going to work. So, don’t get too broad with the areas that they’re going to work. If you want them to work in one area or two areas, get one number or two numbers based on the areas that you’re going to be working in. I live in Indiana so I use a 317 area code. But if you’re in Los Angeles, maybe you want to use an 818 or a 310 or a 210 area code. And you can look for those numbers just by typing in the area code and hit Find a Number and it’ll look for a number. And you want to keep scrolling through these until you find a number that’s easy to remember, on with lots of digits that are the same or repeating digits, that makes it easier to do.

Joe: One thing is you cannot go back to one. So as soon as you find one that’s close to something you can remember, this would be a fairly easy one to remember, then you can click Purchase the phone number and it’ll bill your account $3.00 and you’ll have a new phone number in your system. Once you have that phone number in your system, you can assign it a name and you can tell those people, I mean, you can put your telemarketer’s name on there so you’ll know whose number that is. You can edit the voice mail message so you can have them go in here and record a voice mail message so you can hit record, “Hey, this is Joe. Leave a message after the beep and I’ll get back with you as soon as I can.” And most of these people, you don’t want to put a business name on their voicemail, so just have them put their basic information on there. Then you can play it and listen to it and if it’s right, you’ll save it and you’ll close this.

Joe: If you want to, if you have somebody who’s working and moves around a lot, they can have their numbers forwarded to them. So if somebody calls, let’s say a buyer calls and you’ve got a buyer finder, it lets you just pick it up on his cellphone, you can have that number forwarded to his cellphone number, whether his’ in Canada or the US.

Joe: Also you can assign this number to multiple team members. So if I want to give it to Joe and to Tom, I can do that and I can give it to whomever I want to have it. If you have multiple people who are working the same area you can do that if you need to.

Joe: The next thing here is you can enable or disable recordings and right now, when you click on this it tells you is a legal and what are the local regulations on recording phone calls. And if you click this, it takes you to a Wikipedia page that explains local regulations and which places require both parties to have recordings. Now, it’s automatically the default that it records all the messages that come in. When they leave a message, that’s recorded. And those are recorded by default. But, if you can record the conversations that your buyer finder or your seller finder is having, you can actually use those recordings to train them, to make them better. And, by the way, if you don’t have somebody that you’ve hired to do this yet, you want to record your own calls just so you can go back and listen to them and start to realize just how bad you really are at this process.

Joe: So make sure that you record your calls if it’s legal in your area and you use it for training and you use it to go through that process and get better at it. You know, one of the things I tell my mentor students is, record these conversations, download them, and then listen to them on your phone while you’re driving in the car and when you hear the mistakes that you make you’ll cringe but you’ll also be able to say to yourself, “You know, I could have said this,” or, “I could have said that,” or “Maybe I’d be better at this,” and it’ll make you much, much better much, much faster. I really strongly encourage you to do it.

Joe: You can also enable or disable transcriptions. Transcriptions are automatically enabled. If they leave you a message it’s going to send you an email with a transcription of it and it’s going to put these transcriptions here. But they’re disabled unless, you know, for long conversations. You don’t really want to enable transcriptions for long conversations because they cost 5¢ a minute to transcribe and they’re not, the transcriptions aren’t very good. It’s fine with a short message, but even these short messages sometimes get to be a little funny, I guess, when you’re trying to listen to them.

Joe: Now, the other thing that you should look at, and I’m trying to cover a lot of information here in a very short period of time, I can filter by the phone number. So if I want to filter the phone calls from a specific phone number I can do that and I can put in the dates of, you know, whatever those dates happen to be and then I can search by type, inbound or outbound, so if I want to check on somebody who’s sending outbound calls and I’m going to send just the call logs and I hit Send and Refresh it’s going to give me a list of all the calls that were made. I can listen to those calls, I can download those calls, I can download the text from those calls if they were transcribed, and what’s most important for a telemarketer for us, is the duration of those calls. So if these are long calls, you know, we could add them all up and we’re actually going to add a little function here that allows us to add all those up for a specific time period. That way we’ll know how many hours our telemarketer put in. And the way we pay our telemarketers is we pay them 150% of the time that they’re on the call. Now we figure there’s a certain amount of time they have to make the call and find the lead and do all that stuff as well. But I want to pay them for the actual time they’re on the call. I’ve had telemarketers in the past, they would bill me for 10 hours and I would say, well, how many people did you talk to and they’d give me, you know, fifteen people that they talked to over a ten-hour period. And it’s hard for me to say, no, you’re just lying to me, when in fact I know they are.

Joe: So, what I do instead, now we can record their calls. We can see the duration of their calls and if that period of time that they’re being paid for shows that they did ten hours’ worth of calls then I’ll pay them for fifteen hours’ worth of their time. And we make sure that they agree to this before they work for us. And that’s even how, we even put that in our Upwork ad to make sure that they understand that before they talk to us.

Joe: This has been the biggest moneysaving feature that I’ve ever had in a system, to make sure what they’re doing. And it also allows me to listen to what they’re saying, to go in and spot check to make sure they’re not saying crazy stuff that could get me into trouble.

Joe: One thing to keep in mind when you’re dealing with telemarketers is, is they’re not doing the job on the days that they’re telling you they’re doing it, fire them immediately and get somebody else. Assume that you’re going to have to go through two or three, four, five and maybe ten people before you find somebody that you’re happy with. But I have found some amazing telemarketers that can work for very cheap. So give it a try and make sure that you interview them over Skype or over the phone and that they’re, they sound competent. They don’t, having an accent doesn’t really create a problem, but having, being fluent is very important. So make sure that they’re fluent in the language that you’re working in.

Joe: All right.