The Death Of Telemarketing – Or So They Say
We have all heard the pundits. Telemarketing is dead, social media is the real deal, deeper relationship with B2B leads prospects is the key to success. That phone call means nothing anymore in today’s modern marketing environment.
Really, as if social media is the new money-maker for companies.
To tell you the truth, pundits come and go, but marketing and lead generation mediums will never die. Rather, they evolve. It is the same thing with telemarketers. If you believe that social media marketing is the solution to all our problems, be ready to be disappointed. Just what happened to Pepsi’s Refresh project, social media will never bring home the bacon, the way a marketing phone call can. The best it can do is to simply begin a conversation, engaging people to open up or become more active in the community. But when it comes to selling, you need a more aggressive tool: telemarketing.
Telemarketing is not dead. It merely evolved.
Cold calling can be a pain, especially for a new company that has not yet established a firm foothold. If you want your fledgling business to prosper, employ telemarketers in the selling, and let social media do the talking. In this way, you can gain the networking power of social media, while you get the aggressive selling strength of telemarketing. It is like the best of both worlds.
Use that, and you really have nothing to lose. It could be just the thing you need to help your business prosper.
Why Multi-tasking Will Never Help Lead Generation
We all want to do more in one day. That is in our nature. It is the same way with our lead generation efforts. If you want to get more sales leads, you want to work on more prospects, way more than you can. And you probably handle each account at the same time. While this might sound good in theory, we all have heard about the risks of such multi-tasking activities. You think you were able to do more, but you, in fact, are doing far less than optimum. A myriad of phone calls, a dozen emails waiting for your reply, all coming from different people. These can play a huge role in distracting you. And that is bad news for your appointment setting efforts.
It all falls back to being unable to concentrate in your work. This is something you cannot afford to fail in. For example, when conducting telemarketing campaigns, you need to concentrate on your current prospects. Suddenly getting a business call from another prospect, or an email request to do an entirely different task, it sure becomes easy to lose your trail of thought on your current task. Usually, it will take you a couple of minutes before you get your original bearings back on what you were initially doing. By then, a lot of opportunities for B2B leads would have been lost.
Best you take things one step at a time during lead generation. Not only will you be able to concentrate better, you can even work faster in this way.
Generate B2B Leads, Just Like The Rolling Stones
Thinking about one of the most iconic rock bands during the 1960′s that still function today, you have to admit that the Rolling Stones tops the list. Just imagine, they have been around for more than five decades, yet they still command a sizable following even now. For businesses or brands that have existed as long as their band, how can they still maintain their edge? How will they still be able to generate good sales leads? What secret does Mick Jagger and his pals have that can be used by a company’s lead generation campaign?
It all has to do with nostalgia.
Really, nostalgia works with appointment setting campaigns. Think of all the positive things that you have done for your customers in the past, or the familial or personal bonds that your company idealizes. All these play a key role in turning prospects into actual B2B leads. No matter what medium you use, be it social media, telemarketing, or even a rock concert your company sponsors, that can mean a big deal. Emotions and feelings can be a great motivator for a business prospects to sign up or buy from you. It is the exact same thing that made the Rolling Stones a success even until today.
Work with the nostalgia. Appeal to your prospect’s senses. You might discover a few things along the way, maybe a few ups and downs. What matters is that your identity, your ideology, the image, the market, and the people under you all form a clear picture of who you are, and what message you want to convey. And that can make you succeed in lead generation – just the way the Rolling Stones do it.
3 Ways That Telemarketing Helps You Get More B2B Leads
Telemarketing is a great way to get more qualified business leads. Although it is often considered as a nuisance, for business to business companies, it provides significant benefits that help improve a company’s lead generation process thereby improving that company’s closing ratio as well. Here are the ways the telemarketing helps improve b2b lead generation and appointment setting.
- Lead qualification is best done through the phone.When qualifying b2b leads, specific questions are asked and must be answered immediately. Information from the sales leads can be clarified immediately and leave no room for doubts or conjectures. If this was done through email or by simply filling up a form, miscommunication can occur and the result would be falsely qualified leads.
- Appointment setting is best done through the phone. When setting business to business appointments, the faster you set a schedule with your b2b sales lead, the better chance you have of closing a sale. Doing appointment setting through emails or chat simply take too long, and the time spent waiting could have been used for better purposes.
- Telemarketing helps broaden business networks. Through professional telemarketers, your company’s services or products can become known throughout your chosen industry. You will no longer have to rely so much on word of mouth from your existing clients because the professional telemarketers you’ve hired do it for you.
Before hiring a telemarketer, make sure that it is from a reliable call center. Research the BPO company beforehand so that whatever telemarketing is done in your name would not be associated with a bad reputation.
Read This if You Want to Get More Business Appointments
Business appointments are equally important as making deals and sales. On the other hand, there’s much more greater benefits in being able to meet with clients instead of merely presenting goods or services on the telephone. Meeting with the clientele enables you to be able to explain yourself well and your business—something no professional telemarketer could do better than yourself. This is due to the fact that as an entrepreneur, your gift of gab and comprehensive product knowledge would definitely go far than just a telephone call.
In a world filled with new and fresh business opportunities, investors and entrepreneurs should exert extra major effort which would likely to guarantee the success of their marketing campaigns. By way of using telemarketing services, you could improve more chances of your company’s growth and success.
So just how exactly does effective telemarketing campaign suit into the entire scenario of obtaining your desired business appointments? Well, the answer is appointment setting. By generating business to business calls for your potential prospects, then they carry out your pitch and then attempt to find and serve you appointments. If prospects approve, then it is your task to handle them and nurture the business connection, wishing that sooner or later, it could turn out to be a long-standing business deal.
That is just one of the several rewards of performing appointment setting services via telemarketing. It is an effective and reliable way on how to boost sales and then aid you in getting those desired business deals.
How To Cultivate Loyalty In B2B Leads
Brand loyalty is an important part of your marketing and lead generation campaign. After all, this is what keeps your prospects (not to mention current customers) from doing business with your competition. As an entrepreneur, it is your job not just to generate B2B leads, but to also nurture loyalty in your business. How will you do that?
- Provide a holistic experience – you should consider this whenever you are conducting an appointment setting campaign. These days, you are not just selling the product. You are also selling the experience, the service, as well as the presentation. You have to do it all.
- Know the need before it comes out – anticipation is a rather tricky task, since you might offer something no one wants or needs at that time. You might need to invest in data gathering tools, like telemarketing, to learn something. Phone surveys can be a very useful aid here.
- Focus on quality – you know, one way to generate qualified sales leads is by showing prospects that you offer quality products or services. If they see what you have is good, they will stay.
- Always deliver what you promise – there is no sense in thinking that ‘promises are made to be broken’. In today’s business world, if you do that, then prospects will leave you in a hurry.
These are some simple ways to establish, nurture, and maintain brand loyalty in business prospects and current clients. This makes your lead generation campaign in the future much easier to perform.
Need B2B Leads? Get Better Ones In Three Steps
When conducting a B2B lead generation campaign for your business, you need to remember that there are various factors in play during the campaign. One or any of these can affect the quality of the B2B leads you generate. Unknown variables can mess up what should be a simple sales operation. As a business owner or manager, you must be aware of the many strategies that can be employed to ensure a smoother campaign, especially in appointment setting ones. How you do it will define whether your business will be profitable or not. Of course, you just need to remember a few pointers.
For one, remember that a good sales process, like those in telemarketing, can help a great deal in your lead generation. And in case you are not receiving the desired results at the start, just be patient. It takes time before you can be successful in generating sales leads.
Second, work with your current customers. It is hard to get new B2B leads, so you might as well keep the ones you already have. You can never really tell; your current customers might be the ones that you are looking for.
Lastly, coach your people well. Let them know that you are there to help them succeed, that they can approach you. Be prompt in your feedback. If the situation merits it, be free to praise their performance, too.
These are just some of the tips you should keep in mind to help in your lead generation process.
What To Do To Maximize Your Telemarketing
Telemarketing is a very important business investment to support your firm. After all, you will need additional clients and customers to sustain your operations profitably. You can do that by generating sales leads by the aid of lead generation and setting qualified business appointments. Professional telemarketing services is one of the best mediums that you can employ to help reach out to your prospects. Of course, investing is not enough. You also have to maximize your ability to get the needed B2B leads for your business. How will you do that?
- Listen to your telemarketing team – your front line team is certainly the most knowledgeable about how things are doing. Asking them about the current lead generation situation can help you gauge your business better.
- Review performance consistently – you need to be consistent when it comes to measuring the performance of your team. Timely analysis and intervention is crucial to keep things going, as well as make the necessary corrections when the situation demands it.
- Reward good work quickly – waiting until the end of the shift to reward good work is way too late. If you want to maintain consistent positive performance from your team, you ought to recognize their achievements right after their successful lead generation call.
You can add more to this brief list of what to do. But what matters here is that you know where to start. Remember, the success of your lead generation and appointment setting campaign will depend on just how good your telemarketing team is. Make sure you make the right choice.
Three Sales Person Blunders To Avoid In Lead Generation
Your business may be small, but it could be successful already. It may be possible that you need to hire a real sales person to handle your orders and prospects in lead generation, since you now need to focus more on your business. Yes, while it may sound nice to hand over all your business territories for your sales person to cultivate, you need to hold yourself back. You might fall into blunders that will strain your relationship with your telemarketing rep, not to mention wrecking your ability to find and cultivate B2B leads. You have to avoid these common pitfalls:
- Giving too much sales territories – you need to be strategic in giving out sales territories for your sales person. It may be easy to give them out, but it will be difficult to take them back (without antagonizing your sales person).
- Skimming off the top – all companies enjoy a level of inbound sales leads (due to word of mouth or advertising). If there are too many coming in, your sales rep might just take them for himself.
- The single sales rep – if you have only one sales rep, you might find it difficult to measure their performance. But if you hire another one, you can use the competition to measure their capacity to produce results.
This is, of course, assuming that you have a team of your own already. If not, then you might want to outsource your work to a competent lead generation company.
Buying A Calling List: Is This Good for You?
For a lot of companies in search of better clients, they will need to conduct a lead generation and appointment setting campaign. The only problem here is that there are too factors involved in its success. One of these is the contact or calling list of prospects that your firm can reach. Can you compile this on your own or will buying one be better? You have to think carefully about this, since it can affect your telemarketing operations and in getting more B2B leads. There are risks involved in buying one. You need to understand what might happen to you if you make the wrong buying decision.
The most damaging of all: if you buy your list from a cheap, yet questionable source, you might get a list that contain honey traps or numbers listed already in the Do Not Call list. Your company could get seriously penalized for this. Legitimate firms routinely perform, or have others perform, a database cleanup. Disreputable list providers will just provide something that they got from a phone book. Making this mistake can damage your reputation with the authorities and prospects.
To avoid that, you need to regularly update you database. And in case you do not have the means to verify your own list, it might make sense to outsource the work to a telemarketing firm that specializes in data cleaning. This will save you the effort of checking each contact if they are still updated. This will make your job of finding new sales leads much easier.