Is telesales a numbers game or a skill?

Volume sets the contacts, skill sets the yes

It is a common question among telesales agents: is selling a numbers game, or is it skill? It helps to split a floor’s sales into two parts. The first is how many people you reach: leads bought, dials made, hours on the phone, the quality of the numbers. The second is how many of the people you reach say yes.

Volume moves the first part. More dials and better lead data mean more conversations. Skill moves the second part. Once someone picks up, what decides the sale is the conversation: the questions asked, whether the buyer feels understood, whether the offer fits what they said they need. A floor that only adds dials gets more conversations at the same conversion. A floor that only coaches gets better conversations, and no more of them. More contacts or better conversion covers how to tell which one is holding you back.

So the honest answer is both. The useful question is which one limits your floor right now.

What the evidence says about the gap between callers

The strongest evidence comes from studies where customers were assigned to callers at random, so the gap cannot be put down to who got the better leads.

• Randomised outbound sales calls. Xueming Luo, Siliang Tong, Zheng Fang and Zhe Qu (Marketing Science, 2019) studied more than 6,200 customers randomly assigned to highly structured outbound sales calls from AI chatbots or human workers. Undisclosed chatbots were as effective as proficient workers and four times as effective as inexperienced workers at getting customers to buy. Both comparisons were on a highly structured call, with customers assigned at random.
• Skill tiers in a telemarketing call centre. A field experiment by Luo and colleagues, published in the Academy of Management Journal and summarised by Temple University, split 40 agents into top and bottom skill tiers. When an AI chatbot screened out casual prospects and passed only the serious ones to the agents, the top-tier agents gained the most. The lower-tier agents found it harder to keep pace, and their gains were limited.
• A worked example, not measured data. Jason Lemkin of SaaStr argues that a great rep can close many times what a poor rep closes from the same number and quality of leads, through bigger deals, less discounting and closing more often. It is a model built in a spreadsheet, and it is useful for its reasoning rather than its numbers.

None of these is your floor. They do show that the gap between people on the same kind of lead can be large.

Skill is not one number

A leaderboard ranks agents on one figure, as if skill were a single quantity. In practice an agent can be the floor’s best on renewals for existing customers and average on cold leads from a comparison site. The second study points the same way: once the screening left agents a denser stream of harder questions, the top-tier agents did better with them and the lower tier did not.

That is why the same agent can look strong in one month and weak in the next when the lead mix changes. Split results by type of lead, compare agents within each type on sales per contact, and the order often changes. Why some agents close more on the same leads.

Our view

In our view, telesales is a numbers game only up to the point where the floor reaches enough people. After that it is a skill game, and the skill is specific to the kind of lead. On floors that close a small share of their contacts, most of the room usually sits in conversion rather than in more dials.

That leads to three practical steps. Track contact rate and conversion separately, so you know which lever you are pulling. Coach each agent on the kinds of leads where their own results trail. And notice that it matters which agent gets which lead, not only how many leads each agent gets. Predictive pairing works on that last point, deciding which agent takes each lead from the floor’s own history. Whatever you change, measure it against a control group run in the same weeks. How to prove a lead routing change worked.

Sources

• Luo, Tong, Fang and Qu, "Machines vs. Humans: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Disclosure on Customer Purchases": a field experiment on outbound sales calls, Marketing Science.
• When and How Artificial Intelligence Augments Employee Creativity (Temple University summary): a one-page summary of a telemarketing field experiment published in the Academy of Management Journal.
• Why a great rep can close many times what a poor rep closes (SaaStr): Jason Lemkin’s illustrative model of rep performance on the same leads.