The Hindu Business Line : The tele-salesperson has arrived

There is the very first one all of us are so familiar with. The salesperson in the field. The guy who chats you up in the ration shop queue and wants to sell you an Amway product. The guy who will bring you your weekly stock of a Rin or a Tide. The guy who will visit your retail outlet every week for the next 20 years and build a relationship with you, at times one even stronger than the one you enjoy with your wife!

And then there is the girl you find behind the counter in a Calida outlet. She will want to first show you every bit of the wares stocked in the outlet and then lead you on to the buy-kill!

And then there is the salesperson at large! The peripatetic guy who will even do elevator pitches with you to get in a word edgeways in your busy life!

The focus of this piece, however, is a different kind of salesperson altogether. A salesperson who has carved out a rather large chunk of pie in the market for salespersons. The tele-salesperson!

Over the last several years, the tele-salesperson has assumed a definite part of significance in our selling and sold-to lives. Slowly but surely, tele-selling has today become an integral part of the commercial community we live in. And the tele-salesperson has emerged a salesperson in her own right.

The tele-salesperson has been in our lives for decades together. In many ways, she happened right away with the invention of the telephone itself. The moment you said the first hello, the tele-salesperson happened.

The first of these were really service-centric folk. The telephone company wanted to popularise its range of services. What better a way to do it than to dial the number of a captive consumer and spend those precious five minutes chatting away one-on-one with your customer! The customer found it absolutely comfortable, sitting in the comfort of his own home, getting information about the range of service on offer.

Tele-selling of information was, therefore, the precursor to it all. This went on for a while, and the savvy marketer of the day spotted an opportunity that was not to be missed. He got in touch with the telephone service provider, logged on to his database of numbers through the common telephone directory for a start, and put together a team of guys and girls to call every home on the list there was to call. You the consumer enjoyed this as well, sitting at home and receiving information on this brand of toilet cleaner and that brand of toothpick alike.

Till it got a bit too much. There came a time when literally every other call on your line was someone selling something to somebody! Tele-selling became an irritation for a start and an obnoxious intrusion at the end! The tele-sales person of the intrusive kind died a small death of sorts! The tele-selling movement took a wee bit of a backseat. Not for long, though!

In came the era of permission marketing. The tele-seller would call you based on permission sought earlier to have you on a database of those who enjoy being called by the salesperson on the phone. May their small tribe thrive! Tele-selling continued and the small brand of salespersons survived.

The tele-salesperson has come full circle. From the peddling of information to the selling of products and service to the peddling of information all over again! The tele-salesperson in many ways found himself a kind of an evangelist who would seed the idea of a product. He would do no selling at all in the physical sense of the term. Instead, he would be the first one to disseminate information one-on-one through the phone.

Viagra did this well on entry and what a way to do it! Pick up the target segment of adult men you want to address. Call them on the phone and talk to them about this product that has just hit the shelves. For a product like Viagra, high-priced, it makes sense. For a product like Viagra, addictive, it makes sense. For a product like Viagra, personal and confidential, it makes sense. Guess what? The tele-caller is completely a voice on the line. The man at the other end of the line could go as berserk as he wanted to with his questions to the voice on the line. There was no face involved here. No embarrassment. Just the plain old privacy of the telephone line and you!

The tele-salesperson thrives today in literally every segment of the product and service range that is touted on sale. In many ways, every customer service centre is in the selling process continuum. Selling is indeed about creating that awareness of the product, stoking interest, creating that desire to buy, facilitating the action of purchase, and most importantly, ensuring the satisfaction process. Every service outfit ensures satisfaction through the post-sale process. If your experience with the Sony service centre voice online has been good, it only enhances your brand choice the next time you are in the market to buy an audio system. The tele-salesperson is, therefore, an important constituent of the selling hierarchy we have built over the years. This silent, faceless army is one to reckon with in the future. You don't see them. You only hear them. You don't know their names! But they matter!

Peek into every BPO/ITES enterprise on the horizon. Every person with those headphones and flat-screen LCD on her desk is a salesperson. Whether inbound on service or sales or outbound on service or sales, every employee in a BPO outfit who services a want, need, demand and complaint is a salesperson. A tele-salesperson!

Dear tele-salesperson, you have arrived!

(The author is business strategy consultant and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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