I’ve been inspired to put pen to paper by the number of clients I’ve been speaking to recently who have asked me to help with their approach to telemarketing.

 

Now first things first – what do I mean by telemarketing?  Well to be honest it can mean many different things.  I mean using the telephone as an effective business tool to contact business customers and prospects, with an offer you believe they may be interested in.  So, no I am not talking about the worst forms of cold calling or hard-sell double glazing stuff – I am talking about a carefully planned activity which, as well as increasing sales directly, can also achieve other objectives too – like raising the profile of your business with your target audience, giving you a better understanding of what the concerns or issues of your target market are, as well as developing a future sales prospect list.

 

Telemarketing can be undertaken on a grand scale, using bureau services to make the calls on your behalf, or can be something you do within your business, or by yourself  to achieve your business goals.

 

And whether you are using the ‘professionals’ to help you out – or taking a DIY approach,  following this step by step approach below will improve your chances of success.

 

 

What is the reason for the call?  What offer are you making and what do you want the call recipient to do?

 

Being clear about your offer is absolutely critical before you even think about using the telephone.  Firstly, can your offer be described without the need for images or diagrams?  Some products will be almost impossible to sell directly by telephone – but the telephone may be used to secure an appointment to demonstrate the products, or as a follow up to an offer made in writing or a brochure mailed to the prospect.

 

When I talk about a clear offer – and this is very important for service companies – can you describe what you offer in a sentence or two, without using jargon, with references that the call recipient will understand and with lots of benefits?

 

If for example you are web developers and you are offering a fixed fee website audit, describe or list briefly the kind of things the audit might expose and how a company could use this intelligence to get more business from their site.  Test out the words you will use.  I tend to advise all clients to avoid scripts, at all costs, but it is useful to have a call guide, so that you know what questions you want to ask and the points you want to get across.

 

 

If you have a good offer which you know people will respond to the next step is to decide who you want to approach and to obtain their details.

 

Your best prospects for any offer would normally be your existing customers, and one assumes you have their details already.  Your next best prospects will be those you have already made contact with – either personally, at trade shows and exhibitions or through networking or other sales approaches.  Make sure you have all the relevant details to hand before making any calls – things like when you met them and in what context, anything that they said to you at the time which might lead in to an introduction to your offer now, information you have about what business they are in. who their customers are, the number of employees they have, anything that might be a trigger when you are talking to them.

 

Of course if yours is a larger scale calling programme that you are asking a telemarketing agency or another team within your business to undertake on your behalf, you may not be able to take quite such a personal approach but it’s still important to use as much of this information as you can.

 

It may be that you are planning to approach a whole new market with your offer and need to obtain company names and addresses before you can even start calling.  If this is the case there are some simple rules to follow.  Always use data that is up to date, accurate and contains relevant details.  I’ve recently come across examples of companies using the Yellow Pages as their main source of prospect data.  Although this may appear like a cheap option do be careful.  You can waste an awful lot of time using this kind of resource and of course the data won’t have been checked against the telephone preference service register.

 

My advice to clients is always to define as carefully as possible the type of companies who will respond to their offer.  Think about whom within the organisation would be responsible for buying or specifying the product or service.  For example if you are a company with a new time management course on offer you will want to speak to the person responsible for training and development in larger companies, but in smaller companies you may need to obtain a list of all of the Directors or Managers and try a few of them.  In fact this may determine the first question you ask when you make your call.

 

The number of employees within the company will help you to understand or anticipate the structure and therefore the decision making process.  A software development company approaching a company with 2,500 employees may need to speak to the IT director or procurement manager before perhaps approaching the functional managers who might use the software, but in a smaller, owner managed business, the decision will more than likely be made by the MD or Chairman.

 

Having this clear picture will help you to make effective calls, or brief those who will make the calls for you.

 

There are plenty of list brokers who will sell you lists of prospects.  If you decide to go down this route make sure you carefully specify the type of business, size of business (by for example turnover and number of employees), status of the business (if relevant to you) and geographical parameters.  Dun and Bradstreet (www.dnb.com and go to the English site) are probably one of the most reputable list sources, because their data is cleaned regularly and you can specify by a number of different fields the precise information that you want to buy.  Always ask for counts before committing to buying data and make sure you buy things like the contact name of the person responsible for what ever it is you are dealing in.  And one final legal note – to avoid fines make sure any list you use has been TPS checked (ie that the companies you are going to call are not registered with the telephone preference service)

 

 

Why have you chosen to use the telephone as a tool to reach prospects – and what are you hoping to achieve?  Are these goals realistic and have you agreed proper methods of measuring whether they’ve been achieved?

 

As always there are no hard and fast rules on these things.  For example – if your business has built up a loyal customer base over a number of years and you decide to approach them by telephone to introduce a new product or tell them about a special offer, they may be more receptive than a list of companies you’ve never had contact with before. 

 

Although your loyal customers may be receptive to the call – they won’t necessarily respond to the offer – maybe because they prefer to buy from you in the traditional way (through your salesman or by coming to your shop) or maybe the offer you are making is just not relevant to them. 

 

So set realistic objectives based on who you will be approaching and what the offer is.

 

If you are using outside help or undertaking any kind of large scale calling exercise you need to make sure you are monitoring call outcomes.  The standard measures tend to be things like:

If you monitor the measures above you can calculate your success rates of things like decision maker contact to sale.  Mapping this information against things like the size or type of business you can also start to build up a picture of the type of organisation you have more success with and who to target in the future.

 

 

…and as always, test and refine.  If the people you call don’t seem to respond well to your offer ask yourself whether you could be clearer in your description, or maybe whether your offer isn’t as strong as you thought it was.  If you seem to be getting success with a particular type of company – maybe focus your attention on other businesses in that sector. Bear in mind it’s a bit of a numbers game – don’t give up if the first few calls are all knock-backs.

 

The usual tips for effective telephone calls also apply of course.  Speak clearly, and don’t be too rushed.  Stand, rather than sit if you are making a really important call and want to focus your attention and sound more impressive.  Listen – which probably means making sure you ask some questions too for those important buying signals.  And to give a professional image, even to those calls which don’t result in a sale, have a standard opener and close which promotes your business. 

 

The telephone can be a very effective tool in the right hands – don’t be put off using telemarketing but the unprofessional approach taken by some companies.

 

Second Opinion Marketing advise clients on the effective use of the telephone in sales and marketing campaigns and can outsource complete telemarketing solutions on your behalf.  Contact us now to discuss your requirements.