TelstraClear: proving the phone could beat the doorstep.
I arrived from Hotel Dynamics Group with a telephone-sales system I knew worked. TelstraClear had the product. What it did not have was an outbound telephone-sales operation. I rebuilt the HDG model for telecommunications, wrote the scripts, developed the objection handling on live calls and trained the team around what converted.
HDG gave me the architecture. TelstraClear gave me the test.
Hotel Dynamics Group had taught me disciplined high-conversion telephone sales: scripting, qualification, objection handling, closing and repeatable process. I took that framework to TelstraClear and reworked it for telecommunications.
There was no outbound telephone-sales team when I arrived. The existing assumption was that these consumer products had to be sold face to face, and a large door-to-door campaign had been built around that belief.
The product was not the problem.
I thought the TelstraClear offer was excellent against Telecom. The real job was finding the language that made people trust the change.
The weapon arrived before my first call.
I came back from designing the scripts ready to start calling. National Sales Manager Shane Constable told me Australian head office had authorised me to offer the broadband installation with no fixed-term contract because they did not expect the telephone model to work.
First in New Zealand
Shane also told me I was the first person in New Zealand authorised to offer broadband sign-ups with no fixed-term contract.
I knew immediately what that meant. My only real hesitation about launching the telephone campaign had been asking people to accept a 12- or 24-month commitment over the phone. Head office had just removed the objection I was most concerned about.
They thought telephone selling was the weak point. I saw the no-contract offer and knew I had been handed an enormous advantage.
The phone model worked.
The assumption that the product required an expensive face-to-face sales model did not survive contact with a properly designed telephone process.
I developed the scripts, worked out objections in real time, refined the hard-hitting statements that gained trust and built the training around what actually converted. The model generated substantial business without the cost structure of the door-to-door approach.
“The Government wanted you to be able to have a choice.”
Older Telecom customers were the group reps least wanted to call. They could talk for a long time, were deeply familiar with Telecom and often had no appetite for change.
During one call I improvised a line:
Her reaction was instant: “Oh... oh, the government?”
The sale went through.
That was the insight. The objection was not really the product. It was trust. The line reframed switching from an unfamiliar sales pitch into exercising a choice that had deliberately been opened to the customer. It became part of our sales language, and I later heard variations of it across the wider telecommunications sales industry.
Outbound sales capability
Telephone scripts, qualification, objection handling, closing structure, process refinement and outbound-team training.
Language changes systems.
The right sentence can remove the real objection faster than ten more minutes of product selling. That lesson carried directly into the sales organisations and businesses I built later.