Call Center Secrets From A Guy Who Does Solar Lead Gen
A great call center is pivotal to your lead gen efforts..
The difference between getting burned and seeing success in a solar lead gen campaign oftentimes comes down to the call center.
Whether you’re a solar consultant, a sales manager, or you own your own dealer, you’ve probably tried a few different lead gen services.
The marketer puts a few grand into Facebook, and you get some leads. You then try to call them and most of them don’t answer.
You get pissed at the marketer and he says you need to call them immediatly. But you can’t because you’re in appointments trying to close.
OR
The marketer has a call center, but they just can’t set appointments or if they do they’re trash.
Here’s how to build a call center in less than a week.
Software
Don’t rely on manually dialing. You won’t get to the leads in time. Instead, find software that automates most of the manual steps so your reps can focus on connecting and qualifying homeowners.
Xencall
At Solarlink we use Xencall. We’ve got around 50 clients so the amount of leads we generate in a day would be too much for a few reps to handle. Xencall loads all new leads into a list, adds them to the dialer, and are then called immediatly. In fact, XC will autodial 5–10 leads at once in order to increase the connection rate.
If your marketing efforts are generating less than 20 leads a day then you’ll only need to hire and train one rep to effectively call and qualify leads!
Go High Level
High level is a CRM and much more. You can zap the leads generated into the crm so that the leads are getting automated texts and emails. You can even use Google’s Tensorflow to connect with high level for AI to have human like converation if you’re into that.
Hiring a call center representative
There’s often a heated debate whether you should outsource your callcenter offshore or hire US based reps.
Here are the pros and cons of both:
Pros of USA based:
- English first language
- Can eventually move into a solar closing role
- At times easier to train
Cons of USA based:
- Expensive
- Will see closer making 10x more than them and want to move into closing role. (High turnover for this role in particular)
- Typically not availaible to call on weekends (American “work life balance”)
Pros of Offshore:
- Very inexpensive
- Willing to work 6–7 days a week
- Often have friends/family who need a job, easy to hire more.
- Much more scalable.
Cons of Offshore:
- English second language
- Faulty internet connection depending on area
- Texting game may not be up to par with American counterpart.
We offshore our call center. If you find reps that have years of english call center experience, are willing to work 6–7 days a week, and are coachable, then this is a the way to go.
Summary
Utilizing proper technology and finding a solid person to call is the reciple for success here. We’re talking 40–50% lead-to-appointment (LTA) ratios. If you can hit those numbers, then more of your marketing campaigns will work more often.
We’ve got summer 2021 right around the corner.
If you want to chat more about call centers or even learn more about our marketing services to help suppliment your growth, then book a call below:
