The Hub Consulting

TELEMARKETING

 

What It Can Offer You

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It's a marketing conundrum that the telephone offers the most direct method of getting through to potential customers, but also has the greatest capacity to irritate them. And with the volume of telemarketing increasing year upon year, it stands to reason that your own telemarketing campaign must be highly targeted and professional to get results. Failure in one or both of these areas can result in wasted resources and damaged business reputations. So where and how can business to business telemarketing actually work for you?

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What is Telemarketing

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While telemarketing tends to be most strongly associated with thick skinned individuals hammering their way through a list in search of sales leads, it is actually a very broad term that applies to a multiplicity of both inbound and outbound telephone marketing. The oft quoted growth in telemarketing is due largely to the huge increase in the number of call centres handling high volume inbound and outbound business/consumer calls. This work includes for example, handling responses to an advertising campaign, or calling existing customers to offer additional services. Generally a differing set of skills are required for inbound and outbound telemarketing, but this article concentrates on the latter, which tends to involve a wider range of selling skills.

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Business To Business Telemarketing

Where Can It Work?

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Telemarketing can form an integral part of a sales and marketing campaign, either as a tool for gathering the data that will be the foundation for your direct marketing approaches, as a follow up to other forms of direct marketing, or as an up-front weapon for identifying your best sales prospects. The most common functions of business to business outbound telemarketing include:

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• Improving marketing data: at a basic level this may include gathering the contact details of decision makers and their usage of products and services relevant to your market, but further probing can deliver more in-depth information - perhaps on distribution channels for example.

• Telecleaning your existing data: it's your data, but is it a valuable asset? Only if it's clean and accurate. A professional team of telemarketers can ensure that your data doesn't embarrass you or let you down.

• Lead generation: using a team of dedicated telemarketers to do this tough, up-front work can make more cost-effective use of your often highly paid field sales or telesales executives by allowing them to focus on closing sales rather than chasing prospects.

• Event planning: if you're investing money in marketing events - perhaps a seminar to introduce your company to likely sales prospects in your target market, or presenting a new product or service to potential customers - telemarketing is an effective way to ensure the right people turn up in the right numbers. This method is often used as a follow up to a targeted mailing.

• Direct mail follow up: telephone follow up to mailings is proven to increase returns, by between three and seven times as much in some cases.

• Point of sale promotion: for those distributing products through multiple channels, regular contact with distributors or resellers has numerous benefits. It can ensure that they are familiar with your products and have the right marketing materials to sell them successfully, but can also achieve the difficult goal of keeping your product/service at the forefront of their minds.

• Company profiling: this offers the opportunity to go beyond the type of superficial prospect data held by most businesses and gain a full understanding of how potential customers operate. Information on aspects such as their decision making processes and who they currently purchase from enables much better tailoring of sales and marketing approaches.

• Customer contact: while all of the above functions are relevant to existing and potential customers, there is scope for more creative uses of telemarketing that have particular relevance to previous/existing customers. For example: you've set up a new website - so call your customers to introduce them to this new way of doing business with them. Or if you change location or company name - as well as writing to your customers, call them - and perhaps take the opportunity to pass on new product information and/or a special offer.

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Successful Telemarketing

What's Required

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Getting a good return from your telemarketing investment will require:

 

• Planning: you need to consider your budget, your objectives for the volume/quality of data you want, and your in-house resources, in terms of manpower, skills and equipment, compared to the cost of using an outside agency. Telemarketing rarely stands on its own; you need to establish how it integrates with your other sales and marketing activities.

• Accurate data: as with all direct marketing methods, accurate data is the essential foundation for success. Naturally, successful targeting rests on speaking to the right decision makers - getting data that includes this information may cost more but the outcomes are consistently more profitable.

• A good script: an effective telemarketing script is actually not a script at all but a guide for the discussion that steers the listener in the direction you want him/her to go. It must be tailored to the target audience, must grab the attention of the listener within a few seconds of the conversation, and must be highly interactive; long presentations of information can be frustrating for the listener who is then less likely to focus on the issue being presented. The guide/script should be refined in the early stages of a campaign according to quality of responses received.

• Skilled telemarketers: no matter how well targeted the call is, nor how well thought out the script, a wooden and inflexible caller will not deliver the goods. To achieve the desired outcomes the telemarketer must have a good knowledge of the company and product/service they represent, be able to talk intelligently around the structure of the script without getting side tracked, absorb all the negative responses, and talk persuasively to people at all levels.