New Teleprospector Evaluation Process
A well trained teleprospector is the corner-stone of an efficient sales operation. Though they may not be closing business, they do play an integral role in your forecast and pipeline development. What we recognize at AG is that cold calling is not necessarily for everyone. When a new hire walks in the door with big aspirations to get into sales, what they have to realize, like any other job, is that they need to pay their dues cold calling and teleprospecting before they hop right into closing business. That all being said, we firmly believe that the first 90 days on the job let's us know one way or the other if a candidate is cut out to make teleprospecting calls.
Our corporate culture is very important to us here at AG. It is obvious to us that burn-out can have a big effect on our team's motivation to bang away on the phones each day. As a result, we try to cultivate the kind of setting that echoes the mantra of our co-owners: "play hard, work harder". A problem we occasionally encounter is a teleprospector may have difficulty understanding when to draw that line between work and play, and that is why it is important for us during training (and over the first few weeks on the phone) to set the appropriate tone with our new hires. It is absolutely not our intention to micromanage each person that walks in to our door , but after the first 90 days there are typically some common themes that arise that would indicate to us whether or not someone can handle the grind that can be teleprospecting. It would be easy for us to take the whole "sink or swim" approach, but that has never made any sense to me. You've taken the time to bring a candidate through an extensive interview process, run them through a thorough training...and then what? "Here are the yellow pages. Make it happen!" Guess what? Inevitably they are going to fail. We've found that you need to be there for them over their first 3 months as a continual support system and at the same time you need to pay special attention to potential warning signs.
Here an example of an outline that we've compiled to evaluate a new hire during their first 30 days on the job to help us better identify those signs:
1) Set first check-in meeting one week after going live on the phone.
2) Review daily activity numbers - such as conversation totals, leads passed, and feedback on leads passed
3) Assess new employee's team interactions:
a) Are they actively involved in team trainings?
b) Are they actively seeking help?
c) Are they responsive to constructive criticism?
d) Do they detract from the culture?
4) Reset activity expectations when needed and outline proper consequences . When activity levels are struggling, expectations will be reset
5) Schedule next weekly check- in meeting
This process will repeat itself each week during the employee's first 30 days on the phone. If the performance and effort does not meet our expectations, then we will go through the same process for the following 30 days. Once we hit the 60 day mark and we set some very specific goals around performance, and will again sit with them on a weekly basis. If they cannot hit the goals we've set by the 90 day mark generally we come to a mutual understanding that this job probably not a fit.
Now, we realize that there are other factors that can play a role in a new hire's poor performance, for example they could be calling into a tough vertical, or a bad list with inaccurate contact info. The most important thing we pay attention to in those cases is how they react to those roadblocks. As I mentioned in the outline, if they are proactively seeking out ways to improve output while adding positively to the culture, this will certainly be taken into consideration as we go through this 90 evaluation.
Every organization I've worked for has evaluated their employees differently, and maybe our approach at AG would not necessarily work for you or your organization. The key and is to pay attention to the warning signs that every new hire exhibits and determine your own process to quickly identify it, and then come up with an outline of how best to manage to it. In case you missed it, you can learn more by watching the webcast Perspectives on Teleprospecting: Best Practices for Hiring Teleprospectors.
How do you go about managing your new hire evaluation process?