How The Quality Conversation helps keep cable customers from cutting the cord

By Bob Davis

Cable companies are faced with competition today like never before. Not only do they have to deal with traditional competitors, they also have competition from content owners, game consoles and cloud-based competitors. All of this has led to the practice called cord cutting.

Whether or not you believe cord cutting is just beginning and will gain momentum, it is impossible to argue with the numbers. The cable industry has lost more subscribers in the last quarter than any other quarter in history.

The number-one driver of this loss is that customers are pursuing lower-priced alternatives. The second most common reason is that cable customers are leaving for bundled products and services elsewhere.

Requests for help versus true cancellation intent

So how do you save a customer who calls in to quit? Well, 50 percent of these calls begin with requests for help related to affordability. Customers start off by saying something like, “I have to do something about my bill! It is just too high and we need to cut back everywhere.” In these cases it is very easy for the agent to jump on the fix and eliminate the premium channels. In fact, this is the number-one solution presented. But is it always the best solution?

And what is the best way to handle calls from customers who have a clear cancellation intent?

My company, Robert C. Davis and Associates (RCDA), works extensively with customer contact centers for cable providers and many other types of companies, and we have found that the best approach for saving canceling customers is to enter into what we call The Quality Conversation with them. To do so requires certain attitudes on the part of the cable CSR.

The importance of showing genuine interest

The most important attitude CSRs need to engage in The Quality Conversation is one of genuine interest in customers and their wants, interests and needs. Much like you can hear a smile over the telephone, genuine interest comes right through to customers and sets the stage for the save. Unfortunately, not having an attitude of genuine interest comes across the phone line, too.

Discovering the true cancellation reason

Perhaps not surprisingly to anyone who has worked in a customer contact center, most callers don’t at first volunteer the real reason they are canceling. Our studies show that on 53 percent of all cancellation calls, the first reason a customer gives the CSR for cancellation is not the real one. Beyond showing genuine interest, The Quality Conversation is centered on a process that includes using discovery questions to find the true cancellation reason. This is extremely important. After all, if CSRs don’t know the true cancellation reason, they’ll focus on fixing problems that don’t resolve the real issues.

The real magic bullet is to use a complete process—full discovery—to help customers realize the value that they see in the service. For most customers, watching TV drives many positive emotions. The Quality Conversation and the full discovery that is part of the process get customers talking about these emotions and their underlying value.

Here’s an example of how it all works. Imagine that a customer is calling in to cancel HBO because he needs to save money. Through initial discovery, you determine that this is the true cancellation reason. Moving through full discovery, the next question you might ask is, “What show are you going to miss the most once you cancel?” More often than not, the customer will answer by saying something like, “Well, I was looking forward to the new season of “Boardwalk” (or whatever program is the customer’s favorite). Once customers start talking about what they’ll miss, it is very likely that they will reconsider their cancellation request. “You know what? I am going to find another way to save money,” the customer will say. “Let’s keep my HBO.”

Helping customers find the value they see in the service is so important, yet CSRs cannot lead them to it without engaging in The Quality Conversation.

Learn more about The Quality Conversation online at http://robertcdavis.net/process/ or call 678-548-1775.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

The Quality Conversation is the key to turning service into sales

By Bob Davis

We were three weeks into a service-to-sales project in a large customer contact center when I overheard the following comment from an agent passing the training room on her way to the break room.

“I wasn’t hire to sell. I don’t care what they say,” the agent said. “I am not going to do it!”

This is not an uncommon reaction to change. My company, Robert C. Davis and Associates (RCDA), has been helping organizations turn service into sales for many years. We have found that this is a journey to win the hearts and minds of the agents—a journey that is well worth taking.

For example, we helped the billing department of one company move from zero sales to 90,000 sales in just six months. We helped the tech support organization of another company move from .02 sales per 100 calls to 1.8 sales per 100 calls—a 900-percent improvement!

How exactly do you obtain gains like these?

The main way to get there is to engage in what we call The Quality Conversation. If you don’t build a strong emotional connection with customers while solving their technical problem or billing issue quickly and efficiently, your chances of turning the service call into a sale are very small. On the other hand, if you use the following elements of The Quality Conversation on the call, your chances of converting the call to a sale increase greatly:

• Show genuine interest in the customer.
• Handle the call with sincere enthusiasm.
• Engage in full discovery of not only the issue at hand but also the customer’s wants, interests and needs.

The Quality Conversation seems quite simple. The big question is, what prevents agents from carrying it out?

First, you have to address the natural reaction to change. Any time you ask people to change how they do something, they react in stages:

1. Denial (“I can’t believe they’re making us do this.”)
2. Anger (“This really makes me mad. I’m not doing it.”)
3. Bargaining (“Can’t we just keep doing things the way we’ve always done for while?”)
4. Depression (“Why even try? I’ll never be able to do this.”)
5. Acceptance (“Well, it’s mandatory. I might as well learn how to do it.”)

If you understand and expect these stages of reaction to change, you’re better able to help team members move quickly to acceptance of a Quality Conversation initiative.

The other key to changing a team from a service orientation to a sales orientation is to understand comfort zones. People tend to keep doing what they are comfortable doing, regardless of whether or not it produces results. The role of the supervisor or coach is critical. The job is to help agents stay outside their comfort zone using The Quality Conversation approach until they are comfortable with it.

Here are some effective techniques for moving from service to sales:

1. Make a strong transition statement. Once agents have taken care of the issue at hand, they need to make a smooth transition statement. This means saying something like, “Now that we have fixed your billing issue, let me ask you a couple of questions to determine if we can add even more value on this call.” If agents make this statement confidently, the customer will usually react positively. This will help agents move to acceptance of the change, because they’ll see that it works.
2. Move to full discovery. Instead of just making a product pitch, agents must ask questions that will allow them to truly understand how they can add value for the customer. RCDA has been working on service-to-sales transitions with cable providers using this approach. Agents become amazed when they see how full discovery focuses on customer wants, interests and needs and consequently creates a positive experience for the customer. The agents see for themselves how willing customers are to answer discovery questions from the agent who drives that positive experience. The customers talk about their wants, interests and needs as related to their phone and Internet service—and how additional products and services can add value. In the end, the process helps customers sell themselves.
3. Coach for sustainability. Coaching from supervisors is critical during the roll-out of a Quality Conversation service-to-sales transition. They need to reinforce all of the new behaviors on a daily basis or the agents will revert back to their comfort zone—doing their job the old, familiar (albeit less effective) way. Side-by-side coaching, skill transfer, small group practice sessions, commitment sessions, and following up on those commitments are all key to succeeding with a service-to-sales transition and sustaining it.

More information on The Quality Conversation and how to make your service-to-sales transition work, visit RCDA’s website at www.robertcdavis.net.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

Driving newspaper revenues higher: How to sell more multimedia advertising over the phone

By Bob Davis

Over the last few years, my company—Robert C. Davis and Associates (RCDA)—has been working with newspaper organizations to help them sell multimedia advertising. In some cases we have helped our clients build multimedia sales centers from the ground up. In others, the task has been to train and coach existing inbound classified reps to make outbound multimedia sales calls. Our experience in these efforts has taught us a great deal about what drives desired results.

Hire the right people. This may seem obvious, but it is clear that not everyone is cut out for outbound multimedia advertising sales. We have learned this the hard way when trying to convert inbound reps into outbound sales stars. Many simply do not have the personality for it. We believe in training and coaching people to do the job, but some individuals just do not have the right traits. When building an outbound sales team, it is critical to test reps for several key traits:

• Empathy

• Resilience

• Energy

• Persistence

• Social boldness

Use good lists. Studies show that as much as 40 percent of success in an outbound campaign is tied to good lists, and our experience supports these findings. Not all prospects are created equal. The multimedia sales rep’s job is to call prospects who are not advertising and are too small to be called on by an outside sales rep. But this does not mean to call on just anybody. Most markets have tens of thousands of prospects, and management must target the prospects and manage the lists.

It is unfortunate indeed to go into a multimedia sales center and see reps spending time on the Internet or looking through the yellow pages for the next prospects to call. They should be on the phones. Almost as bad is to see reps wasting hour after hour calling prospects who are unlikely to buy. You may have 397 nail salons in your market, but is this a list your people should spend a full day calling? Without a doubt, building good lists is hard work that requires exceptional management skills, but it’s much more profitable than using bad lists. Here are a few tips:

• Find businesses in town that do not advertise with you, but that look like your current advertisers.

• Determine the characteristics of businesses that advertise on radio and TV.

• Build a target profile and create a list of businesses that fit it. If you don’t have sufficient resources to generate the list in-house, work with a good list broker.

Create and manage a campaign calendar. Even with the very best lists, the right timing is essential. Calling the snow removal people in the fall and the lawn maintenance people in the spring seems like a no-brainer. But without a campaign calendar to coordinate what lists to call and when, many great dates and opportunities to sell will just slip by.

Insist on 200 dials daily. Keeping the right pace is another key to successful outbound multimedia sales efforts. We believe in the effectiveness of 200 dials daily per rep, and we insist on it. To reach their sales goals, reps must keep dialing and not spend time looking up or Googling the company they are going to call next. When management provides excellent lists and firm campaign objectives, reps hit this number of dials consistently, and it shows in higher sales.

Measure ROI daily. Like prospects, not all campaigns are created equal. To keep reps focused on the campaigns that can make the most profit for the organization, measure your return on investment for each campaign daily.

Have a Quality Conversation. This is the most important and interesting part of the process. As we have talked with thousands of prospective advertisers, it continues to impress and amaze us how many people—after just a minute or two—will open up to a stranger who has called them and asked with a caring demeanor about their wants, interests and needs. The most important thing that we strive to understand is the advertising motive. As we ask prospective advertisers the right questions with genuine interest, they open up and provide the road map to the sale. It’s all part of a proven process in five basic steps:

• An enthusiastic Greeting

• Discovery questions to determine the prospect’s wants, interests and needs

• A Solution conveyed by centering on features and benefits

• An Offer that shows how the features and benefits fulfill the prospect’s wants, interests and needs

• An assumptive Close

Manage the pipeline. It would be nice to think that every sale could be closed on the first call. However, the truth of the matter is that most of the biggest and best sales take several calls. With a level of activity at 200 dials or more per day, a pipeline of interest will grow very quickly.
This pipeline must be managed, and this is the job of the sales coach, who should ask:

• How many leads are being generated by each sales person?

• What is the value of each lead?

• What is the next step to take with each lead?

Then, the sales coach must manage each next step to help the reps close the sales.

Considering the number of advertisers a newspaper has versus the number of businesses in the market, the potential for driving multimedia sales is tremendous. But simply increasing outbound efforts is not enough. It must be done using a proven, targeted and well-managed process.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

How one sales team stands out: One group of 12 leaves low morale behind

By Bob Davis

Imagine being, as I was recently, in a 400-seat customer contact center for a major telecommunications company. The vast majority of the representatives do their work in a mediocre, robotic way. Their job is to handle customer service calls and transition them into sales opportunities, but they are demoralized because the last couple of years have been hard on them. They are required to do more with less. They have seen layoffs and wage freezes. Most remember better times and miss the good old days. Yet right in the middle of this sea of bad attitudes and below-par performance is a team of 12 people who shine bright. They exceed all of their goals, have fun at work, and have great attitudes about their jobs and about themselves.

How does this small group maintain positive attitudes and attain high performance despite the dismal atmosphere created by the other representatives? The answer to this question has powerful implications for any organization.

Let’s begin by noting that these top-performers work together as a true team. They are pleasant and upbeat with customers and each other. When one gets a sale, the others join in celebrating it. If one struggles to close a sale, the others do all they can to help. The team leader is very supportive and seems omnipresent. Recently, he worked side-by-side with a new team member for an hour until she won a sale.

The customer contact center in this case rotates representatives between teams every six months. The high-performance group has members coming and going but continues to do exceedingly well. When I was observing them, they had just welcomed three new members.

Here are seven practices that make this team stand out, even in an environment where other teams are achieving lackluster results.

1. Driving a sense of belonging
Maslow had it right when he said most people are motivated by a sense of belonging. Again, during the week I spent observing this high-performance team, three of its members had just joined from another group within the customer contact center. It was clear to the new members from day one that this team was different than their previous ones, and their biggest concern was how to fit in. They recognized right away that a competency model was at play within the team, and that they did not measure up. The team leader had created an environment that encouraged excellent behaviors. To have a sense of belonging, the new members knew they had to reach for excellence. They understood they did not have the sales skills to make it on their own, so they asked for coaching.

2. Setting crystal-clear, compelling performance expectations
The team leader was remarkable in this area. He checked in with everyone daily to see what their goals were for the day. He let his representatives set their own goals, but if the goals were not high enough, he told them his expectations. He has monthly one-on-one meetings with each representative to help them set monthly goals and break them down into weekly goals. It was clear to me during my time with them that all the team members knew their goals and where they stood toward meeting them at all times.

3. Providing timely and meaningful performance feedback
The team leader always worked closely with his people. He knew when they were following the call flow and when they were starting to drift. He was able to coach them on the spot because he was always there. “When do you do your email,” I asked. He answered, “Does a basketball or football coach do email while his team is on the field?” No, and neither does he.

4. Transferring essential skills
All team members have individual strengths. The thing that was remarkable about this group was that they helped one another and shared their strengths. They had brief daily meetings that included a skill-transfer process: One member who has mastered a skill teaches the others to do it just as well.

5. Inspiring high performance with urgency and motivation—from the top down
I found it interesting that the team leader drove success from the top down. He began each day working with his top-performers until each won a sale. This started the day off right with a sense of urgency and motivation for the entire team. He then coached everyone else throughout the day.

6. Leveraging the physical environment
The team leader had a huge scoreboard in the center of the work area, where everyone could see it at all times. It had all key metrics for every member of the team along with their achievement to goal updated daily. The entire team celebrated and recognized successes. And the workspace had balloons, streamers and other festive decorations—it looked like party central.

7. Demanding excellence
On this team, everyone knows what it takes to fit in. When the team leader finds someone not motivated on their own, he demands excellence, holds then accountable for their goals and eventually writes non-performers up if they don’t attain excellence.

In a separate case recently, I saw another good example of demanding excellence. I was working with one of our clients, a large newspaper that is building an outbound online advertising team. The company is committed to high performance and the steps outlined to make it happen. One goal set from the very beginning is that each team member is to make 200 dials per day. One new representative would not do it. Day after day, the team leader communicated expectations, but to no avail with this individual. After two weeks, the company let the representative go. This was unfortunate, but you are either serious about having a high-performance team or you’re not.

Back to our team of 12: These people are happy and positive, while most of the other employees in the customer contact center are not. Our organization will now work with these other teams to apply the seven practices to change the environment, boost morale, and take the entire customer contact center to a dramatically higher level of performance.

So belonging to a successful team is wonderful for morale—and creates another positive result. Faced with today’s business challenges, many companies today find morale at an all-time low. Building high-performance teams within these organizations using the principles demonstrated by our one small team is the answer to turning around not only morale but also profitability.

My consulting practice specializes in building high-performance teams from scratch or by transforming existing teams. Do you have a success story, idea or comment about this topic? Please share it by posting it below, and let’s keep in touch.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

A virtual Ellis Island: Selling online services to digital immigrants—and to new arrivals on the docks

By Bob Davis

Recently, the publisher and vice-president of advertising of a major newspaper sat down with me to listen to the recorded sales presentation by a 20-something online telephone sales rep in the newspaper’s multimedia sales center. It was an eye-opening experience. The prospect, a tire store owner, replied, “Can you send me something that spells all that out? I am having trouble following what you are saying.” In this case and countless others like it, the rep was a digital native speaking in a new lexicon—and the prospect was a digital immigrant yet to learn and understand the language. How can the prospect make a purchase decision when he can’t decipher the pitch?

My consulting organization has been helping clients deal with this challenging issue. The question is, how do you communicate your online value proposition to someone who did not grow up digital—an immigrant to the new world of online advertising—or to a business owner still on the docks of this virtual Ellis Island?

It is so easy for digital natives to fall into their own language when talking to a prospective advertisers. They use terms such as organic search results, pixels, RON, CPM, SEO and skyscrapers. These terms mean little or nothing to digital immigrants, and a prospect who is confused does not buy. If online advertising sales people are going to be effective, they need to communicate in a way that makes sense to their prospects.

So, what is the best way to communicate with digital immigrants? It is critical to remember that they tend to be smart business people who know how to make a profit and will be interested in the value proposition of online advertising—if we can just explain it in the language they understand.

Here are some tips:

Tell success stories. Nothing sells like success stories. Ask your online advertising sales people to share them. If they don’t have many on hand, insist that they go out and collect more. If your online offerings are helping other businesses, and you share the specifics with prospects, they’ll see how online advertising will drive desired results for them, too.

Talk in terms of the prospect’s interests. The discovery step of the sales process is critically important. It is the key to what I call the Quality Conversation. And, if handled correctly, discovery gives sales reps all the information they need to talk in terms of the prospect’s interests. Reps should ask discovery questions such as:

• Do you have a website?

• What did you hope your website would do for you when you set it up?

• How has your website lived up to your expectations?

• When the last time that you polled your new customers to find out how they came to do business with you?

When reps know what their prospects have tried, what works, and what hasn’t worked, they’ll be in a better position to relate online advertising offerings in terms of each prospect’s interests.

Make your sales presentation easy to understand. There are many market realities associated with online advertising that will resonate with advertising prospects and drive the sale. For example:

• Eighty-seven percent of all consumers research online before they buy, making a strong online presence essential to businesses. If businesses are not where their potential customers can find them, they will be out of the game.

• Online advertising prices are at low introductory rates. Their return on investment will be better now than at any other time.

• Online offerings are limited, so now is the time to get the best placement.

Prospects understand these kinds of value propositions for online advertising very quickly, and they respond positively.

We work in an industry that continues to adapt to the evolving world of online advertising, and innovative thinking reaps high rewards. So let’s keep the conversation going. I encourage you to share your experiences and ideas by leaving your comment below or sending me an email at bob@robertcdavis.net.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

Customer contact center performance: Better attitudes, better bottom-line results come in three steps

By Bob Davis

How many people who work with you really love their work, or for that matter, love life? Many of us work with people every day who hate their jobs. So the question is, what can be done to help them feel better about themselves, what they do for a living, and life itself?

Harvard professor William James once said, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.” Now, I realize that believing that this statement is true and being able to change one’s own attitude are two different things. It is even harder to change the attitudes of one’s employees.

I have given this subject a great deal of thought, because my consulting organization has a couple of high-profile culture change projects going on right now. How does one go about changing the attitudes of an individual, or the attitudes of many individuals, within an organization?

Maybe your company has gone through challenges such as layoffs and furloughs. These trying times can really drain morale from a company. Or maybe you are trying to transform the culture of your organization to drive higher sales or more proactivity in customer service and retention. In any case, I’ll bet the ideas discussed below will be of significant interest to you.

Hugh Downs once said, “A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.” Yet sometimes we think that to help our people love their jobs, we need to change the circumstances. Maybe if we just provided free snacks or other perks, or gave them all a raise, our people would be happier. This might help in the short term, but not for more than a few weeks.

So how do you move team members from “I hate my job” to “I love my job, and I love life?” One thing I have learned, having accomplished this in many organizations over the years, is that you can’t do it in one big jump. People need to move through steps to get to the point where they can say, “I love my job.”

Step one: Know you can control your attitude
The first step toward being able to control one’s attitude is to know you can do it. In my experience, many people have never thought about the fact that we are as happy as we make up our minds to be, and that it takes just as much effort to be miserable as it does to be happy. Once accepting this truth, a person has taken the first step toward loving his or her job.

Step two: Feel good about yourself
The second step is improving self-confidence. We could all use a little more self-confidence at times, but most people who hate their jobs could use a lot more. It is very hard to feel good about your job when you don’t feel good about yourself.

Step three: Have a positive group of peers
The third step to improving attitude is to have a positive group of peers. This is why changing a culture within an organization is so hard. We rely on our peers to support our beliefs, and if our peers hate their jobs, too, it is a vicious cycle.

My consulting practice addresses these three steps in head-on. We run workshops on attitude control and let people know that they are in the driver’s seat when it comes to controlling attitude. Many times this is truly eye-opening for the individuals in class.

Next we work on self-confidence. Our confidence comes from our successes and our successes come from our skills. For example, I am working with a call center now that specializes in handling customer service calls for several newspapers. As you might expect, they receive calls frequently from customers wishing to cancel their subscriptions, and these calls are hard to handle. One customer service rep was not very good at keeping these customers from quitting (winning saves), and this was just one more reason why she hated her job.

As we worked on her skills at winning saves, she had more successes. She started feeling better about herself. In fact, on my last visit, she bragged to me, “I am one of the top savers now!” She said this with a big grin on her face.

A powerful number for teams
I have seen the power of teams of three. Whenever possible I put three people together to work on a challenging problem. This process leads to everyone in the group feeling better about themselves. However, you have to be careful not to put more than one person with a bad attitude about his or her job in the group. For example, I was working with a division of a large national company helping them rebuild morale after rounds of layoffs and cutbacks. In one of my groups of three people, one person was feeling bad about herself and her life, while the other two were ego-driven individuals who had the attitude that they are great at what they do. The project at hand was to win an account that had eluded them for years. The results? The person who had the bad attitude blossomed around the two with the positive attitudes, and the team won the account.

I am sure that as a leader, you are always looking for ways to grow and develop your people. The techniques discussed in this article will make a huge difference. If you would like to discuss them in more detail, I will be happy to help. I can be reached at bob@robertcavis.net or 678-548-1775.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

Building a long-term customer relationship—and better bottom lines—starts with a Quality Conversation

By Bob Davis

I had a positive customer service experience on the telephone this afternoon that I want to share because I believe it is an ideal example of how a call center representative can make not only a short-term gain for the company, but begin a long-term relationship that kicks off with a great impression.

I wanted to buy a thoughtful gift for someone who is an avid sportsman, and I went to the L.L. Bean website to see what I might find, but I was overwhelmed by the number of choices. So I decided to call the toll-free number to see if someone could give me some guidance.

Within two rings, a man with a pleasant voice greeted me enthusiastically, thanked me for calling, introduced himself by name, and asked me how he could help. I found it so refreshing that my initial greeting was not in the form of a recorded message telling me what button to press to place an order. In fact, I felt like I was talking to a merchant behind a retail counter, not a call center representative.

“I’m hoping you can help me,” I said. “Thinking ahead to the holidays, I am looking for gift ideas for someone who is very involved in hunting and fishing, and I was hoping that you could give me some guidance on finding a small but thoughtful gift for him. I was on your website but was overwhelmed by the choices and don’t know where to start looking.”

“Sure, I understand completely. I can certainly help,” he said. Immediately he began asking me questions, such as, “First, were you able to find our special section on hunting and fishing on our website?” He continued to ask me great questions to better understand how he might be of service to me.

Instead of pushing me toward a certain group of products to try for an immediate sale, he said, “Soon, we will have a special holiday section on the site with holiday gift ideas, but since that’s not up yet, and you’re not sure what you’d like, it sounds like we should send you our special hunting and fishing catalog that will give you plenty of ideas.”

Then he gave me a great solution. “Since I’m sending you the catalog, what you might want to do is order a gift card and then send him the gift card along with the catalog, so he could look through the catalog at his leisure, choose what he’d like, and then use the card,” he said.

“Sure, I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “That’s a great idea.”

“I’ll also send you our general catalog, which may contain other holiday gift ideas for you,” he said, and then he proceeded to get my mailing address.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” he asked.

“No, this is a big help. Thanks,” I replied.

“You’re welcome. And thank you for calling L.L. Bean,” he concluded.

He didn’t get an immediate sale, but he started a relationship with a pleasant exchange and a solution to my problem that I will remember when I receive the catalog. In all likelihood, I’ll be doing business with L.L. Bean in the near future and beyond. He has my mailing information so his company can stay in touch with me. And like many satisfied customers, I’m telling others about this positive experience.

I call this kind of interaction the Quality Conversation (a central concept for me, given the name of this blog), which has several key elements:

• Enthusiastic Greeting: It starts with a welcoming and appreciative greeting that makes the customer feel as though he found someone who is glad to help with a high level of personal service.

• Competence: The Quality Conversation continues with a representative who is competent—who knows how to do the job in a professional, quick and efficient way using all available tools and resources.

• Knowledge: Armed with thorough knowledge about what the company offers, the representative gives sound advice without hesitation or wasted time.

• Genuine Interest: The representative takes a keen interest in the customer and the problem to be solved. In my case, it made sense to help me even though it didn’t mean an immediate sale, but one down the road.

• Personal Recommendation: By listening and asking questions, the representative learns enough about the customer’s wants, interests and needs to make a personal recommendation that resonates with the customer and solves the problem in a meaningful way.

• Attitude Toward Objections: The representative views objections as concerns to work through in partnership with the customer. In my example, my objection was that the website overwhelmed me with options. The representative addressed my objection as a legitimate concern that he understood. Then, he came up with a solution that solved my problem and provided a positive experience that makes me want to watch for the catalogs and return to L.L. Bean time and again.

The thing is, the Quality Conversation doesn’t happen by itself. It requires the right training and coaching up front with supervisors and representatives, and complete buy-in by company leadership. Is it worth the effort? Well, I’ve seen the Quality Conversation approach add millions of dollars to the bottom-line results of client companies including USA TODAY, Cox Cable, America Online and yes, L.L. Bean. And much like what happened on my call to L.L. Bean, this approach yeilds long-term customer relationships that pay dividends for years to come.

What could a focus on the Quality Conversation do for your organization’s results?

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

Non-traditional revenue sources could work wonders for newspapers

By Bob Davis

There I was, sitting in a customer retention call center for a major phone company listening to a top-performing customer retention rep talking to customers who wanted to cancel their service. The phone company was interested in my observations because of all the customer retention work I have done in the newspaper industry, but I was learning more from them on this day then they were learning from me.

Call after call would come in with the customer saying, “I want to cancel my phone line. I just have too many bills, I don’t use my land line that much, and I will just make my calls using my cell phone.”

This particular phone company is losing two million phone lines per quarter!

The top-performing rep I was observing was a joy to watch. He would take a call from a subscriber wanting to cancel land line service, and he would start asking questions.

“What cell phone provider do you use?”

“How do you access the internet?”

“How about TV service—who provides that for your household?”

Finally, he would say, “You know, if you let us provide all those services, you could save a lot more than the price of dropping your land line.”

Caller after caller would come in wanting to cancel their land line and they would leave with a bundle of services they’d had with competitors before the call. In fact, this 200-seat call center sells $28 million worth of extra services to canceling customers each year.

Now how does this apply to the newspaper industry? Right now, your average customer calls you three times a year. For a major metro, that adds up to a million calls per year or more. Right now, newspapers look at these calls as an expense and they try to get these calls done as cheaply as possible.

What if we changed our mind set? What if we took notice that we are getting a million opportunities to sell more services every year? Certainly if a phone company can sell a new TV service to customers who intend to cancel, we should be able to sell something to someone calling in with a vacation hold!

What if we formed a partnership with an insurance agency who is an advertising customer? What if we made a deal with that insurance agency that they would pay us $5 for every customer we transferred to them when they call in with a vacation hold? We could say something like, “Mr. Subscriber, we have a partnership with the Wonderful Insurance Agency. They are giving all of our traveling customers 50 percent off on their travel insurance. If you will just hold the line one moment, I will transfer your call so they can tell you all about it!”

Now a call that used to cost you $1 to take just made you $5 in revenue. Multiply that by your 100,000 vacation stops in a year and it starts to add up.

The opportunities for these partnerships are only limited by your imagination. For example, we could sell subscriptions for our delivery partners. Who better to buy another paper than current newspaper customers? We could do seasonal promotions with our advertisers, offering special prices for our subscribers for each gift-giving holiday. If we have an advertiser who sells snow tires, we could offer our subscribers seasonal discounts. Given recent weather patterns, my friends at the Washington Post might want to jump on this right away!

So the goal for 2010 is to find some non-traditional sources of revenue. Here they are. What are you waiting for?

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net). He specializes in creating custom programs that deliver measurable results for the newspaper industry. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), an outsource call center serving the needs of newspapers across the country.

Newspapers Doing More With Less: Boost Retention at a Lower Cost by Outsourcing

By Bob Davis

Now more than ever, circulation managers are being asked to do more with less. I’m sure that as you have done and redone your budgets for next year, you have looked for every possible nickel to save yet even more savings are required. So let me suggest a great place to look to cut costs while actually increasing your output. Outsource your retention calls.

Now I know that when ask retention managers how things are going, they’re likely to tell you that the reps are doing a great job, but beware. I’ve found several common problems exist even when reports are positive.

Bad timing, wrong strategy
Most in-house retention teams spend way too many hours calling during daytime hours, not a very productive time to try reaching your customers.

Chances are that your retention team is calling way too early in grace. More than 50 percent of your early-grace subscribers will pay on their own. Calling too early gets sales that the newspaper would have received anyway by just waiting a week or two for the check to come in the mail.

And in-house retention teams try to save subscribers with a discount strategy instead of using a quality conversation approach to sell value over price.

The best way to boost your subscriber retention is to call deep in grace, or more than two-thirds of the way into the grace period, and to have quality conversations centered on value, not price, with every subscriber you contact.

The robust call flow
Having a quality conversation requires a robust call flow. This begins with a world-class greeting. The first 15 seconds of a call determine how the rest of the call goes, so the greeting must convey enthusiasm, assurance of help from the very start, plus clarity of purpose.

Next is discovery. We need to understand the subscriber’s wants, interests and needs as well as the true reason he or she has fallen into grace. We discover these variables by listening, restating and assuring help, drawing out hidden concerns, isolating primary concerns, finding areas to add value, and bridging to a solution.

We have to present a solution that strikes a chord with the subscriber. If we’ve done a good job at discovery, the solution will present itself. This is the essence of consultative selling.

Next, if we have provided a solution that adds value and addresses the subscriber’s wants, interests and needs, the subscriber is ready to respond positively to the offer—but it, too, must be presented correctly.

Then comes the assumptive close. If the call flow is handled correctly, closing the sale with an assumptive approach will, time after time, win the save.

The quality conversation:
A robust call flow provides five actionable steps to improve your in-grace calling


The problem is that many newspapers don’t have the resources, especially these days, to provide the training and coaching needed for their teams to master the quality conversation.

Comparing performance
Now that you are looking for every possible way to cut costs and boost revenue, conduct a test. Find a quality retention outsourcer and split your records for two or three weeks between the outsourcer and your in-house team.

I predict that the outsourcer will do the calls cheaper and better. And with today’s budgetary demands, it’s worth finding out whether or not I’m right.

###

Call center expert Bob Davis is president of Robert C. Davis and Associates, a training, coaching and consulting company specializing in the newspaper industry. He is also co-founder and managing partner of Surpass, an outsource call center handling customer service, retention, telemarketing and advertising sales calls for newspapers and other companies. Both companies are based in Bedford, New Hampshire. More information is available at www.robertcdavis.net and www.surpasscalls.com or by calling 603.472.9705.

Outbound classified sales: How to trade fear and avoidance for self-confidence and top performance

By Bob Davis

Lately I have been teaching a group of long-term inbound classified reps I consider to be among my favorites. The other day while I was teaching, a woman in the class who had been with the newspaper for more than 30 years told the group a story about computers being introduced to the department in the 1980s. Back then she and the other reps were afraid they would get cancer working so close to the computer screen for extended periods.

One of her co-workers was so concerned that she made a cone-shaped hat and a nose protector out of aluminum foil to shield herself from the presumed radiation coming from the monitor. She was so convincing in her fear that she got others in the department to wear this silly outfit. Looking back now it’s laughable. It also brings to mind an important question. Do we fear making outbound calls today the way reps in the 1980s feared computer monitors?

Indeed, I believe the number-one factor holding reps back from making outbound calls is fear driven by lack of self-confidence. This leads to avoidance behavior. In my experience in newspaper call centers, most classified reps will do just about anything to avoid making an outbound call.

The good news is that we’ve been very successful in helping reps overcome fear and avoidance by showing them how to make better outbound calls, and more of them. Here’s how:

• Be enthusiastic. If you look like you’re having fun while you are making the calls, reps will be more willing to give it a try. I like to teach a two-hour class first thing in the morning on a slow day. Then I follow the class back to the floor and work with each rep as they make outbound calls. Sometimes I make three calls, and then they make three calls, laughing and having a good time along the way. Other reps tune in to what is happening to the point that they become eager to work with me. Enthusiasm really is the key to the success.

• See the good. When we first begin working on outbound calls, reps stumble. After every call I could tell them everything they’ve done wrong, but I don’t. This would deflate them! Instead, I focus on the good things they’ve done on the calls. This builds them up and they become more open to coaching.

• Expect the best. In the beginning most reps have only been making about six dials per hour, so they look at me in shock when I tell them I expect 30 dials per hour. Yet once the expectation is out there, they do it. Even if the rep’s skills don’t improve (they always do), results improve dramatically because the reps are talking to so many more people.

• Celebrate success. At the end of each day, we have a celebration. Everyone gets to tell about their successes that day—how many outbound calls they made, how much money they generated. This really gets everyone excited about what they can do.

Based on my experience, implementing these ideas—being enthusiastic, seeing the good, expecting the best, and celebrating success—will help your reps improve dramatically. It’s the kind of leadership and confidence-building that newspaper classified departments need badly today.

My recommendation is to get started right away. You’ll love the results.

Need to know: Call monitoring and mystery calls prove vital to classified departments

By Bob Davis

Over the past year or so, based on the needs of some of our newspaper clients, we have begun to provide quality monitoring and mystery caller services for classified advertising sales departments—with very positive results.

We have learned a great deal from the experience. In fact, I am thinking about writing a book entitled I Heard What Your Potential Advertisers Had To Say Yesterday. In the meantime, however, I’ll share some of what we have learned right here and now.

Present feedback positively.
At first we were resistant to start monitoring because feedback can feel like “Gotcha!” to the sales reps. Studies have found that stress among reps goes up during monitoring. They tend to shut down if the feedback is not delivered correctly, negating the potential benefits. Ultimately, however, we decided that as long as we present feedback in a positive way we will achieve desired results. Our solution has been to make sure 80 percent of the feedback is positive so that the reps are receptive to the 20 percent that specifies areas where they can improve performance.

Provide actionable feedback.
When reps hear about what they did well on the calls, they are more likely to repeat those behaviors. Where they need improvement, it is critical to give them specific actions to take. For example, make suggestions such as, “Decrease the number of set-aside ads by asking customers how important it is for them to sell the item or fill the position—this helps them see value in the ad.”

Deliver feedback in real time.
It just isn’t very effective to say, “Last month we listened to some of your calls, and this is what we think.” Giving feedback daily is much more meaningful because the reps remember the calls being discussed.

Score the calls objectively.
Before we monitor calls, we work with the client to develop questions that will allow objective scoring. We recommend questions like, “Did the sales rep assume the online buy and include it when quoting the price?” instead of more subjective ones like, “Was the sales rep polite?”

Boost sales revenue.
We have been able to benchmark key metrics with newspapers that want to participate and share their data to see where they stand compared with other newspapers. What’s more, our clients have benefited significantly from our approach to quality monitoring and mystery caller services because we have harvested highly valuable information. For every customer who calls in and doesn’t buy, we record the reason. We also document issues such as how often money comes up as an objection. The whole process gives newspapers the information needed to reinforce best practices, solve problems effectively and boost sales revenue dramatically.

Yet classified departments don’t always have needed resources in-house to do the job. Besides their own reps, many classified departments rely on outsource call centers to handle overflow calls, making monitoring and mystery callers even more important.

Now more than ever it is critical for newspapers to generate maximum revenue in ad sales. They need to know what’s happening on their classified sales calls. Outsourcing your call monitoring and mystery calls is an excellent way to verify whether or not your classified department is achieving all it can. And in our experience, what newspapers learn in the process provides a significant return on investment.

Transforming the customer service center

Don’t settle for expense when you can have profit

By Bob Davis

Your customer service department does not have to be an expense. It can indeed be a profit center. Yes, you read that right -- a profit center! I will explain how in a minute, but first let me tell you a story.

I got a call last Monday from my father. He and my mother spend their winters in Florida and they were packing to make their migration north when he gave me a call.

“Bob, you have got to come down here to Florida and help this [expletive deleted] paper.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I had to call them seven times to get my paper put on a temporary stop.”

“What happened on the first six calls?” I queried.

“Well, you know I don’t hear well,” he said. “The first six times I called, I could not understand a word they said.”

“So what happened on the seventh call?” I asked.

“My neighbor had the number for the office downtown, a number that doesn’t go overseas, and I called them,” he said. “The lady who answered was very nice. She says she gets a lot of calls like this. I’m keeping her number!”

When we do the math on why a customer care department here in the United States can be a profit center, we won’t count the cost of multiple calls to your overseas outsourcer. We won’t count the costs of the hundreds of calls a day that now come to the few people still answering the phone stateside. We will, however, count the value of doing an excellent job.

Consider these facts about cancellation calls:

• One of the performance differentiators between an average customer service operation and an excellent one is the saves rate on cancellation calls. With good effort, an average operation can get a 20-percent saves rate. An excellent operation can get a saves rate of more than 40 percent.

• Ten percent of all calls coming into the typical customer service operation at a newspaper are cancellation requests. In a paper with circulation of 200,000 customers and 600,000 calls a year, that’s 60,000 cancellation requests. An extra 20 percent on the saves rate means an extra 12,000 saves per year. That's 12,000 fewer paid in advance orders you will need to write. At $40 per order, that adds up to $480,000 per year.

Now let’s look at EZ Pay conversions:

• Industry statistics say that a subscriber on EZ Pay will keep the subscription going twice as long as someone who is not on EZ Pay. So every EZ Pay sale is worth $40 to the paper (one less order to write).

• The average customer service operation converts less than one percent of call volume to EZ Pay. An excellent one gets more than six percent. An extra five percent in EZ Pay conversion on call volume of 600,000 calls per year means an extra 30,000 EZ Pays per year. At $40 each, that’s $1.2 million dollars to the enterprise.

Assuming it costs you $1.50 per call to take calls with excellence, your cost of operation is $900,000 per year for 600,000 calls. Your income from just the cancellation saves and EZ Pay conversions is almost $1.7 million—more than $780,000 in profit!

Is it easy to get these kind of results? No, but I have seen it done in top-performing newspapers around the country.

The question I put forth is this: At a time when the economics of the newspaper industry are so challenging, why settle for your customer service department being an expense when it could be a profit center?

Take Theodore Roosevelt’s advice: Dare greatly

By Bob Davis

Picture a scene in the boardroom of a large newspaper chain. I have just presented a proposal that will require a considerable investment but will deliver a fantastic return. It’s decision time, yet many of the leaders in the room seem only to be looking at their shoes. At last a mid-level manager speaks up. “This is a great idea,” he says. “I think we should do it.” What a hero!

Now is prime time for newspaper managers who can take charge, influence others and exert authority. The young man in the scene above owns the project. If it works, it will make his career.

In my ongoing work with newspapers over the years, I have seen what makes leaders highly effective—and what makes them less effective or even paralyzed—during trying times.

Being decisive, taking action

The young mid-level manager who speaks up for action while others contemplate their shoe shines is an example of what it takes to be highly effective—quick decisions. True, the industry is in uncharted waters right now, and nobody will make the right move every time. But it is better to make mistakes once in a while than to do nothing for fear of making the wrong decision. Such paralysis will doom the newspaper to continued decline in circulation and advertising revenue.

Consider this quotation from Theodore Roosevelt. “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Supporting top performance

Besides decisiveness and taking action, it is critical in these times for executives and managers to ask their people to function at their very best. This does not mean pushing them beyond reason or burning them out. Instead, leaders must set goals that are worthy of the highest aspirations of the group and communicate those goals over and over again until they are accomplished.

Do you expect a great deal from your people? If asked, would they say you are always testing their limits? Would they say you have high aspirations for them? Would they know their top priority?

What’s more, have you made sure they have the skills and training to achieve their goals? Screams from the stands don’t get baseball players their hits. Batting practice does. Your people can excel only if you make sure they have the skills, training and tools to excel.

Having a sense of urgency

Thriving despite today’s challenges in our industry requires a sense of urgency. One successful executive I know is an excellent example. As publisher for one newspaper and regional vice-president of a group of newspapers, he:

• Returns all calls within 24 hours.
• Returns all email with 24 hours.
• Makes decisions quickly. (On one Monday I sent him four large proposals requiring big-dollar decisions. By the end of the week he had rejected three and accepted one.)
• Does what he says he will do, when he says he will do it.

The fire of enthusiasm

Finally, a leader’s ability to help people feel good about themselves and their work is the very essence of leadership. Toward that end, leaders capture followers emotionally with enthusiasm. So, do you light your fire of enthusiasm every day before you arrive at work? Doing so brings positive energy into the organization—not only among subordinates but also among colleagues and superiors.

Impressed by Tribune’s ‘new sheriff‘

A great future for newspapers rests on an effectiveness-versus-efficiency mindset

By Bob Davis

I was very impressed last month when I read about how real estate mogul Sam Zell (photo - Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University) rode in like the new sheriff in town as the new Chairman and CEO—and new majority shareholder—of Tribune Company in Chicago.

One of his statements in particular got my attention. “I’m sick and tired of listening to everyone talk about and commiserate over the end of newspapers,” he was quoted as saying in a recent story from the Associated Press. “They ain't ended and they're not going to end. I think they have a great future," he said.

His confident statement is backed up by a philosophy I agree with wholeheartedly. Unlike in some recent media buyouts, the conversation wasn’t about exerting wide editorial control, slashing costs or pushing major asset sell-offs. It was about rebuilding the media conglomerate from the bottom up to facilitate faster decisions and innovative, pragmatic thinking about how to increase revenue and reverse the effects of industry-wide decline.

The AP story continued in its coverage of a news conference at Tribune Tower, quoting Zell as saying, “I believe this company has spent a significant amount of time in the last five years cutting costs, and maybe not enough time on increasing revenue," he said. "Our focus, and our bet, is that we can significantly increase the revenue of this company and dramatically increase its profitability going forward.”

In August 2007 I wrote an article that made the same point applied to the entire industry. I think it bears repeating here.

By putting effectiveness before efficiency, I wrote, newspapers grow top-line revenue. Let me give you a few examples.

Call abandon rates versus top-line revenue
For newspaper classified call centers everywhere, the call abandon rate is a key measure. However, managing the call abandon rate with head count alone is too efficiency-minded.

A better approach is to examine call center effectiveness by asking what the call center can do to grow top-line revenue. Find out how many outbound calls your people are making in their extra time. In my experience working with classified departments across the country, the problem is that reps often cherry-pick instead of calling all current prospects and advertisers. Nationwide, I see tremendous room for improvement in this regard.

Cost of winning new customers
At most newspapers, the number of subscribers who call in to quit each year represents at least 20 percent of circulation. That number climbs to 30 percent or more at some newspapers. At the same time, the industry saves only 17 percent of these subscribers from canceling. When it was cheaper to win a new customer than to keep an existing one, maybe these numbers were OK. Today we can and must do a better job retaining subscribers.

Significant improvement is well within reach for virtually any newspaper. After all, other subscription-based industries achieve 50-percent and even 60-percent saves rates regularly. And by focusing on effectiveness instead of efficiency, top-performing newspapers are earning 40-percent saves rates.

Say you have a circulation of 300,000 and receive 100,000 cancellation calls in your call center each year, and that you save the industry average of 17 percent of these calls. The efficiency-based measure would be talk time, and our work has shown that it takes an extra 30 seconds on the phone have a quality saves attempt.

Yes, spending 30 seconds more costs the paper around 50 cents. However, the extra effort will drive your saves rate up by 23 points. This means 23,000 fewer subscribers you will need to replace at $40 or more apiece, adding up to almost a million dollars per year. It’s a great example of how effectiveness beats efficiency hands down.

Online advertising expertise
Here is another example. Most newspapers have only a handful of online advertising experts. The sales force relies heavily on these experts to help them sell online ads. This is an efficient way to handle it, but is it the most effective? To answer that question, look at the amount of online revenue you receive today from existing advertisers. If it is not as much as it should be, maybe the efficiency model is not working well for you. To boost effectiveness, train all your sales reps to sell online ads effectively so you can maximize this revenue source.

When market conditions present challenges such as circulation decline and technological changes, the natural result is pressure to be more efficient. But in my experience in the newspaper industry, organizations that resist the pressure and focus instead on effectiveness see dramatic improvement in customer service, customer retention and sales. The return far exceeds the investment.

The key place to add top-line revenue
Lastly, many advertising sales people spend so much of their time servicing their accounts that they do not have enough time for prospecting new accounts. The solution we have found in consulting with our clients is to drive top-line revenue by building sales teams with two types of players. First, have top-notch production and service personnel who will serve advertisers in a world-class way. Second, have high-performance prospectors who can win new business from non-advertisers and additional business from existing customers.

In the current environment, business is not coming to the newspapers as strongly as in years past, but it is still there for those who go out and get it!

Bob Davis is President of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, that specializes in improving sales, customer service and retention results in media customer contact centers. He is also Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com) in Bedford, New Hampshire, RCDA's specialized outsource call center serving newspapers and other media organizations. He can be reached at 678-455-6812 or bob@robertcdavis.net.

The Power of Prospecting

Reps who shift their focus find no shortage in ad business

Imagine the scene: a newspaper advertising team is gathered for an end-of-day celebration. They form a semi-circle around a large whiteboard. There are cheers and jeers as each rep reports prospecting success and sales results for the day. Kathy, a long-time real estate rep writes $15,000 on the board as her results for the day. She turns to the group and says, “There’s a lot of business out there from people who are not going to call us.”

For years I have worked with advertising reps to help them improve their sales effectiveness, and recently we’ve all seen how the marketplace has changed. Today newspaper leaders are recognizing that reps are spending too much time servicing existing accounts and not enough time prospecting for new business.

The competition—alternatives to newspaper advertising—have focused on prospecting for a long time now. Perhaps it’s because their product did not give advertisers the ROI that newspapers provided. Maybe advertisers weren’t calling and the reps had to prospect just to stay in business.

I have known radio sales managers who didn’t allow their reps to be in the office between mid-morning and late afternoon. That was prospecting time. I’ve seen others require their reps talk to at least 10 potential advertisers daily. These might have been tough policies, but perhaps they were necessary to survive!

My experience in working with newspaper clients has shown me that today’s market holds a tremendous number of sales opportunities for newspaper reps who go out and get them. What’s more, the competitive landscape has changed, making it essential for newspaper reps to spend more time prospecting, and consequently win more business.

So here are some tips for newspapers that want to capture more advertising dollars:

1. Communicate compelling expectations to reps. Most reps tell me they are too busy servicing existing accounts to do much prospecting. Tell them that the competitive landscape has changed, and that spending more time prospecting is not optional.

2. Communicate specific, measurable, actionable prospecting goals.

3. Inspect what you expect. If the goal is to call 30 non-advertisers a day, inspect the call sheets regularly.

4. Celebrate successes. In 1955 no one believed a human could run a four-minute mile because no one had ever done it before. But when Roger Banister reached this goal, 16 other runners achieved it within weeks. Celebrating advertising sales successes will have the Roger Banister effect on your team.

5. Don’t blink. Your people are not going to like prospecting. They will come up with every excuse imaginable to avoid it. If you accept a rep’s excuse for not reaching prospecting goals, you’ve not only blinked—you’ve also lost business!

Newspapers whose reps are prospecting have discovered that, despite changes in the competitive landscape, the advertising dollars are out there to win. So the message for reps is, don’t wait for the calls—go out and get your share!

High return on investment

Newspaper with growing circulation points to the value of follow-up on service errors

Recently I’ve been working in the customer service department of a large newspaper that holds the distinction of growing circulation. Sure, it has the benefits of a growing market and a good product, but the same is true for many newspapers with declining circulation. So what makes the difference? This newspaper might be considered downright fanatical about following up on all service errors, except that the results make their emphasis on follow-up quite rational.

Missed paper? A replacement arrives within 30 minutes. Same time the next day, a rep calls the subscriber to make sure that day’s paper arrived.

If a subscriber cancels for poor service, the district manager follows up to solve the problem and win back the business.

The newspaper empowers its customer service reps to make sure every problem gets fixed. They can call carriers themselves. They follow up personally on each service error call to make sure the issue is resolved.

Every district manager rides with new carriers for the first full week of delivery and for the first two Sundays.

I run a call center that makes outbound retention calls on behalf of newspaper clients to subscribers who are late in grace. By the time we get the records and make the calls, theses subscribers have made up their minds that they are going to quit the paper. It is our job to win them back. I listen to several hundred of these calls each week. Here’s what I hear regularly:

• “I got a new subscription and it was delivered OK for two weeks and then it stopped. When I called to complain, nothing was done. If you can’t deliver the paper, just never mind.”

• “I got a bill that was wrong, I asked for a corrected one, it never came. I refuse to pay this incorrect bill.”

• “I paid for a year in advance, and you have not given me credit for the payment. Now you have stopped my paper. If you can’t keep things straight, I don’t want to deal with you.”

• “We moved, but we never got the paper at the new address. You seem to be able to mail a bill to my new address, but not my newspaper! I have called three times, and still no delivery.”

Every one of these problems and hundreds like them would be solved—relatively easily and inexpensively—with a service error follow-up call. Yet newspaper executives tell me daily that their team members just do not have time or resources to follow up with subscribers to make sure their problems were fixed.

In response, I point to the newspaper I have cited here that requires its staff to make the time and invest the resources. Without a doubt the apparent returns to their bottom line and circulation figures have far exceed their investment of time and resources.

With the right approach, outsourcing customer contact works

The key is to partner with vendors in focusing on the behaviors that drive desired results

Demand for outsourced call center services is rising fast in the newspaper industry. The Newspaper Association of America reports that 60 percent of all newspapers outsource at least some of their sales efforts. While outsourcing has been common in sales for some time, the industry is turning increasingly to outsourcing for customer service. Most recently, newspapers who have outsourced to McClatchy Company’s soon-to-close C3 call center are seeking new customer contact partners. But can newspapers manage outsourcing effectively enough to get the top performance needed in today’s competitive media marketplace?

Newspapers that have formed true partnerships with the right outsource vendor answer that question with a definitive yes. But before they form such partnerships, the newspapers that are the most successful with outsourcing are doing their homework.

Key indicators and behavior management
Newspapers most successful at outsourcing customer contact determine key performance indicators in advance of the outsource partnership by benchmarking based on their in-house operations and industry research. Then they figure out how to manage the behavior that will drive those results.

The best way to explain this is to use an analogy. Imagine a baseball player in a tight game. The team manager could focus on the desired result by yelling, “We need a hit! Drive in that runner!” But it is far more effective to manage the behavior by saying, “OK, now stand a little farther back in the box and choke up on the bat!”

By the same token, if the newspaper wants to save 40 percent of its subscribers who call in to cancel, the rep needs to hear more than, “We need a 40-percent saves rate.” The effective call center supervisor will say, “OK, on the next call you need to ask more discovery questions to get the subscriber’s true reason for cancellation. Then you’ll know how to present a solution that addresses the subscriber’s wants, interests and needs. You’ll be able to win the save based on the newspaper’s value to the subscriber.”

But by and large, vendors need help implementing this behavior-based approach.

So the best outsource partnerships begin with clear agreement between the newspaper and the vendor on the behaviors that will drive the key performance indicators and desired results. Then, the newspaper takes a hands-on approach to helping the outsource partner practice those behaviors consistently.

Owning the numbers, calibrating the calls
What strikes me most about newspapers who do well with their outsource partnerships is that not only establish a system for managing the behavior of their outsource vendors, but they also own the numbers. They set aside time in advance to get the current numbers, study them and prepare to discuss them thoroughly with the outsource partner. The comes the behavior management—the weekly call calibration.

Call calibration means that the newspaper and the outsource partner—independently of one another—monitor the reps and score them on the agreed-upon behaviors including a consistently applied, robust call flow. Each week, they meet and compare the scores to make sure that the outsource partner is evaluating the reps’ behaviors properly and consistently. They not only communicate but over-communicate to ensure that the outsource vendor continues to buy into the key performance indicators and behavior that drives them.

Remote monitoring and coaching
I have found that it is critical for the newspaper to dial in and listen to reps without the outsource partner being able to select reps for evaluation, and to make site visits regularly. These steps increase the likelihood that the newspaper will hear lower performers on the phones and then take steps with the vendor to correct problems.

Recently I saw that monitoring alone by one newspaper increased its outsource vendor’s performance by 40 percent!

The most effective outsource vendors have their supervisors doing side-by-side coaching. This involves much more than wandering around and observing. The supervisors are experts at the call flow and desired behaviors. They model these processes and behaviors for reps and do one-on-one coaching between and during calls. They listen to calls on the spot and guide their reps to mastery. By all accounts, outsourcing works best when the newspaper has chosen a partner who has the resources to provide this type of coaching—and a proven track record for doing so effectively.

Indeed, outsourcing customer contact can have a dramatically positive impact on the newspaper’s bottom line. It works for all types of calls—from inbound to outbound, from customer service and retention to new subscriber sales. But like everything else in the realm of communicating with customers, it boils down to having a quality conversation, building rapport, and offering solutions. It means setting goals and delivering value. It’s about behaviors!

Based on what I have observed in the field, outsourcing is producing stellar results given the right approach—managing behaviors, owning the numbers, and working in real partnership with the outsource vendor.