How I built my first outbound call center from scratch

A question came in about creating an outbound call center. How do you develop something like that from nothing? Great question. The best way to answer it is the story of how I built mine.

When I got into the energy business, I knew about deregulation, because I had already been through the deregulation of the telecommunications industry. I will be honest with you: I did not know the first thing about how energy actually worked. I knew that if you flipped the light switch, the lights came on. That was the extent of my knowledge.

But I knew something else. Out there was a guy running a small business, and a person with a house, your normal mass market. And I knew that with the right script I could get the majority of them to move from brand A over to brand B on who they buy their power from. I did not know how yet. I just knew I could.

Five booths and forty scripts

So I got myself a call center. A friend of mine owned a big one, and I went in and borrowed five booths from him. I hired five telemarketers, guys used to being on the phone and dialing hundreds of times a day. And we started making calls.

I am in the background with my computer, writing scripts and handing them to the guys on the phones. This is live fire. They are dialing, I am listening to what they say and what comes back, and I am constantly adjusting. Try this. Now try this.

All day Monday, five guys on the phones, nothing. All day Tuesday, nothing. Wednesday, Thursday, I am losing my mind, thinking, what did I get myself into? By the end of that week I must have gone through somewhere in the neighborhood of forty variations of that script.

Give me the phone

Friday morning, after four days of that, I did the next logical step. I said, give me the headsets. Give me the phone. Let me call.

I sat down and started dialing at about nine in the morning. An hour and a half in, working my way toward a decision maker, I got a man on the phone at a little bakery up in New Jersey. I told him about the program, and I am in there working with him, talking with him, handling him, adjusting everything in live communication. And I closed him. The first one ever closed.

I will tell you something: that call was the birth of an industry. Since the day I personally closed that bakery, millions more customers have been enrolled by my company, and hundreds of other companies came along behind us into the same mass market, all from one phone call. So if you are asking how to reach the people in your industry, here is my answer: pick up the phone and start making calls, because the responsibility is on you.

The Texas fix

I will give you another example. About eight years into the energy business, Texas opened up. Come on, man, Texas is a huge marketplace, like a whole new New York, millions of people we could add into our lead base. We went out there to launch, and we fell flat on our face. Could not give the product away.

I gave the team three or four days, because sometimes you have to give people a chance to get the marbles out of their mouths and figure it out. Still nothing, and this was a professional call center by then, not five borrowed booths. So I went down to the floor, got a bar stool and a headset, and I just listened, and listened, and listened. And then I went, aha.

Texas had changed the rules a little differently than the northeast, and our script did not match what the customer was living. So I changed some of the words, literally swapping nouns for pronouns: instead of saying this company does this, we said they, the guys you are used to seeing. I adjusted the way we explained the situation so the person on the other end could actually take it in. Within about an hour, we went from goose eggs to forty and fifty deals an hour. It was that simple, and nobody would have found it from an office upstairs.

The three things you control

Now I am doing it again. I am a business partner at Attention Grabbing Media with Manuel Suarez, and we are building a call center there too. Marketing can bring a tsunami of clicks and leads. That part is never the issue. But somewhere in all of it there has to be human interaction: a person who finds out what is unique about the prospect. What are they trying to handle? What are they trying to solve? What made them click in the first place?

Here is a fact about everyone on the face of this earth: we buy on emotion and rationalize it on logic afterward. You knew you were going to look good in that new shirt, and that is why you bought it. The finest fabric, the national brand, the sale price, that is the story you told yourself later. Your job on the phone is to find that little spark, the thing that made the person go ooh, and talk with them about it, not at them.

It comes down to the three things you as a business owner or an executive can actually control. What do you say? How do you say it? And how often do you say it, meaning the dials, the presentations, the sheer quantity of it?

If you own the company or run the sales department, you have to take ownership of this. It is an art form, just like the marketing that comes before it, and nobody is going to master it for you. I have seen it work multiple times in my life, and I am in the booth with a headset doing it yet again. You can do the same in yours.