How a WMS can bolster your telesales strategy

Telesales is one of the most challenging aspects of business. At times, it can feel like the road to a sale has been deliberately littered with hurdles. Gatekeepers. Spam filters. Caller IDs. Compliance regulations… The list goes on.

And that's before you even connect with a lead. Once you do, rejection is the most likely response – and if you do keep the caller engaged, you have to do so without helpful visual aids.

That said, no business would soldier on with telesales if it didn't work. And the businesses with the most successful telesales strategies tend to be those that embrace technological solutions.

Of course, not all these problems can be solved in one fell technological swoop. But it's indubitable that technology can play an important role.

A great example of this is the part that a cloud-based warehouse management system (WMS) can play in bolstering a telesales strategy.

As well as providing you with invaluable administrative tools, a WMS gives you end-to-end visibility into your inventory and customer histories. This helps make phone calls with the customer more natural, more flowing and more profitable.

How can a WMS bolster your telesales strategy?

Perhaps the biggest selling point of a good, cloud-based WMS is the visibility it gives you into your inventory. At the fulfilment end, this increases accuracy. And for telesales, it allows callers to think on their feet and provide quick answers.

Why? Because a familiar challenge in the telesales world is a disconnect between seller and inventory. A sales rep can offer a product that's unavailable or inaccurately stocked, leading to frustration on both sides.

With a WMS, they can confirm availability immediately – and if an item is unavailable, they can quickly and confidently offer alternative products.

Similarly, inventory visibility means they can manage delivery expectations accurately. Taken together, these benefits increase sales and customer satisfaction.

But the benefits of a WMS for telesales aren't limited to inventory visibility. They also relate to customer history information.

How integrated customer history information can bolster your telesales strategy

Many people are reluctant to take sales calls at all – and when they realise they're being sold to, they often react badly. This is typically because they feel that the desire to sell has replaced the desire to help.

In other words, you're likely to encounter resistance if the tone of the call is, "What can I sell you today?"

An effective cloud-based WMS gives you instant and round-the-clock access to your customers' purchase histories. This helps you personalise the tone of the conversation, increasing your chances of holding their attention and closing the sale.

With this information at your fingertips, "What can I sell you today?" can be replaced with a more nuanced, natural and helpful question. Now you can refer back to what the customer has bought, when they bought it and how frequently.

This makes the interaction more human and more helpful and allows you to tailor sales recommendations. And because of inventory visibility, you can check availability instantly and not waste the customer's time.

Deciding when to make outbound calls

Done badly, telesales wastes everyone's time. This is often because calls are made to people who have bought too recently.

A good WMS will include reporting and customer service features. These can help you quickly identify customers who haven't ordered recently or are approaching the time they normally reorder.

Armed with these stats, sales reps can make calls that are more likely to result in sales, moving from guesswork to proactive, fact-based calls.

Increase reliability

Businesses have to make promises – promises about what can be sold and when, along with promises about the service the customer can expect. A WMS can help make a business more reliable and better able to fulfil its sales-to-delivery promises.

After all, the success of a telesales strategy hinges on its ability to deliver once a sale has been made.

Because a WMS provides real-time insights into inventory status and streamlines picking, packing and dispatching, sales teams can sell with greater confidence and fewer service errors.

Keep the customer satisfied

No telesales strategy can succeed without customer satisfaction. And what customers want most of all is answers.

These include answers to questions like "Is it in stock?" and "When can it be delivered?"

If the caller can answer these questions immediately and accurately, customer satisfaction is bound to go up. This is another area where a WMS can make a tangible difference to your strategy.

Oh, and a good WMS can also help you schedule calls at a time convenient to each customer – another way in which it can tailor and customise your offerings.

Drive telesales with data

A good WMS will come with powerful reporting capabilities.

Once upon a time, you would have had to get an in-house analyst or external consultant to look over your data and draw conclusions. This process costs both time and money.

With a WMS, you can get highly accurate reports with just a few clicks. This gives you valuable insights into customer buying trends, product performance, sales opportunities and fulfilment.

With this information to hand, your telesales team is in a much better position to prioritise call lists and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Cross-sell and upsell

Is your telesales team struggling to cross-sell and up-sell? A cloud-based WMS can make all the difference by furnishing them with accurate inventory data and order histories.

With this data on the caller's screen – or just a click or two away – the caller can recommend complementary products and promote overstocked items.

This information can also be used to plan campaigns. Customers can be targeted for cross-selling and up-selling more effectively based on their purchasing history and behaviour.

Make your telesales work for you with Minster WMS

At Minster WMS, we develop cloud-based WMS software with built-in telesales integration.

Using our solutions, you can:

Schedule calls at convenient times
Personalise the tone of the conversation to each customer
Get instant access to purchase histories on a per-customer basis
Access information about special offers, substitutions, supersessions and phase-outs

Want to make your telesales strategy work harder? Learn more about our telesales integration or see our solutions in action by booking a demo with our experts.