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Posts Tagged ‘Mirroring Successful Sales People’

How To Achieve Sales Success in Your Center: Part 4

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Success Factor Number Four: Mirror Successful Agents

This is the fourth post in our series: How to Achieve Sales Success in Your Center

Everyone wants to feel like an individual.  No one wants to copy the behaviors of others.  In the call center world, however, the best path to performance improvement should involve mirroring the skills of another agent who has been successful and may be sitting right next to you.

Quick Road to Success

This idea comes from the saying,  Why reinvent to wheel?  Think about the top people in your center.  Who already has a similar selling style to you?  Perhaps that is the agent to begin with.

Try Doing Some Analysis

Another option for the more ambitious sales person is to analyze the selling style of 4 or 5 of the top agents and build a set of best practices from the group.

Based on my own experiences in centers, I would go with the second option.  Mirror different sales people.  That way you get the best of the entire center.  Some agents are great at building rapport and delivering  a powerful Greeting.  Others will be strong at asking great questions and controlling the Discovery.  One might have an amazing product presentation.

How Do You Get Started?

So here is how to do it.   Begin by identifying all the steps to the sale that you want to improve.  What steps are involved in your Greeting, Discovery, Presentation, Closing and Objections?  Next, observe at least ten calls with each agent.  That way you will have enough data to work with.  You are looking for successful trends.  What has this agent done on most calls that seems to be working for him/her?  Finally, are you capable of mirroring the selected skill?  If this agent just happens to be naturally charismatic, we recommend moving to a different agent.  Capturing someone­s MoJo is much more difficult than using some of the same selling steps they use.

When tomorrow comes and you are ready to use those new skills, we recommend starting slowly.  Begin with a single skill and see whether you can do it well.  Add another one later in the day or the following day, and so on.

Inventing your own set of best practices can take far longer than mirroring what others already do well.  Try this time-tested approach this week.  If it works for you, and it should, thank the agents whom you observed for their contributions to your new, wildly successful sales career.