subject: Tracking Your Outsourced Campaign With Google Docs [print this page] Tracking Your Outsourced Campaign With Google Docs
As you can probably tell from the title of this article I'm going to recommend using Google Docs to keep track of anything you are outsourcing. I'll lay out a simple diagram of an appointment setting campaign that you can use as a starting point. Feel free to move parts and processes around to suit your needs, but remember to keep things as simple as possible while still getting the job done. Outsourcing works best when things are kept simple, so extra moving parts are generally a bad thing.
Our Appointment Setting Campaign
Your widget company is looking for some new customers and you've decided the best way to get them is to run an appointment setting campaign. You've run this before in house and you have the script and data to call organized already. You found an outsourcing company based in the Philippines through Guru.com and are ready to start a one month trial campaign with an agent calling 40 hours per week. Now what?
Inputs
Inputs are anything you need to provide the agent to get the campaign started and keep it running. Some of the inputs might include the script, rebuttals, calling lists, and anything to keep track of all of the daily progress in the campaign.
For the sake of brevity I'm going to assume you are fairly familiar with Google Docs and most of its basic features. In most cases if you have used MS Office the functionality should make sense to you. If you need to brush up, or want to learn the basics there is plenty of info online. A couple of good resources are:
Now to set up the inputs and make sure that you get everything to your agent I recommend using folders. This make things easy and allows you to compartmentalize other tasks from your outsourced employee. Within the folder you can add documents and they will be shared with the employee automatically.
This campaign might start with four shared documents. A lead list (with agent notes column), a script with rebuttals to common objections, a business/industry FAQ document, and a bullet point process doc walking the agent through what they need to do.
Outputs
These are items you need the agent to deliver to you. In the case of our example these are scheduled appointments with businesses interested in hearing more about your widgets. There are two basic ways that I've seen used to deliver leads to a client with Google Docs. The first involves using the notes column on your leads spread sheet. The agent can simply write the time and date of the appointment, and if you are so inclined, use color coding to make appointments easily visible. This method is good for lower volume campaigns where there is only one person handling the results.
A second method involves creating a GD web form. The form includes all of the information you need for the appointment to be actionable and can be set up to be visible as a GD spreadsheet, a webpage, or even export directly to excel. I recommend this option if you have multiple people receiving appointments as they can sort and color code as needed without confusing the process the agent is using.
Just creating these documents and sharing them with the agent's Gmail account is not the end of what you need to do. Take the time on a call to walk through the process and how you want things done and to answer any questions.
Google Docs is a great tool for outsourcing but its only a tool. You need to put in the time and build the process that leverages the capabilities that shared document provide. The good news is once you have a working process in place you can easily scale up, move it to another provider, or duplicate it for a different task.
