Telesales

 

Telesales is a way to focus on the leads and try to convert them by persuading them through phone calls and direct calling. Telesales targets the leads which have already shown interest in a provided service or product and can be termed as “Qualified”. Telesales professionals receive sales qualified leads from Telemarketers.

 

Telemarketing

 

Telemarketing is a way to spread the word about the services or products provided by a said company. It is a marketing campaign which is taken forward through telephonic conversations. Telemarketers create brand awareness, marketing research and polling. Telemarketers perform the segmentation of leads and determine their position in the sales funnel. They forward high quality leads to Telesales Professionals.

 

Let’s Understand Math First:

 

 

• Almost 60% of marketing managers in fortune 500 companies believe telemarketing is still “Very Effective” out of which 90% of them believe that telemarketing is “Effective”.
• However, with a survey conducted with customers, around 60% answered that telemarketing is “annoying” and “not effective”.
• Speaking of human touch which, is highly effective, 68% of B2B sales occur when there were some means of human interaction.
• On the other hand, stats depict that it takes at least 80 calls on average to get a convertible lead.
• Also, short marketing campaigns which include telemarketing never bear substantial results. It takes at least 3 months to see some sort of results.
• 80% of the leads require up to 5 follow-ups.
• When on phone, only 14% depends on the words spoken, and 86% depends on the way you say it. Therefore tone matters the most.

 

Telesales and Telemarketing: Breaking the Stereotypes

 

 

With our World speeding towards Personalization every single day, telesales and telemarketing is considered a back-dated technique by many marketers. However, there are theories which prove that human touch is essential to convert leads to revenue. Therefore, telemarketing and telesales are still utilized as a marketing strategy by many B2B marketers.

 

Just like everything has a flip side, Telesales and Telemarketing are both widely criticized as well as widely accepted. In this article, we are trying to break the stereotypes around the much-debated concept of Telesales and marketing. After rigorous research on the subject, we narrowed down 10 most commonly asked questions about Telesales and Telemarketing and take it on our stride to answer them.

 

Question 1:  Is Telemarketing and Telesales Ethical?

 

 

 

There’s a lot of debate whether Telesales and Telemarketing are ethical or not. Most of the people believe that Telemarketing does more harm than good. Nowadays, people are so busy doing their jobs, running various errands that often or not they find telemarketing extremely annoying. Even though a lot of people believe that telemarketing is mostly fraudulent and downright annoying. IT IS NOT UNETHICAL. Genuine telemarketers follow certain ethical guideline while they make calls to the leads.

 

1. There are calling hours restrictions, and ethical telemarketers would never call you in odd hours and weekends.
2. There are also monitoring guidelines; for example, we have all heard the line “This call may be recorded for training and quality purposes.”
3. The calls are only made to people who have shown an interest in some form or the other for the service or product that the telemarketer has to offer.

 

However, what is noteworthy is the establishment of the guidelines doesn’t guarantee that they will be followed. There are people who have been misusing telemarketing for their greed by selling poor quality products and other fraudulent activities. Therefore, we all need to be aware of such frauds and make sure we don’t fall prey to them.

 

Question 2: How can you make Telemarketing and Telesales more Effective?

 

 

 

The trick to an effective telemarketing call lies in how you open it. The opening of the call should sound relevant to the receiver so that you can grab his/her attention.

 

Most of the telemarketers open the call like: “Hi! How are you?”

 

To this, the receiver’s immediate response is, well, why a stranger would want to know how I am and how I am doing.

 

The opening of the call instead should be like:” Hi, I am calling from xyz company and I’d like to offer you so and so service or product.” Now the receiver who is actually interested in the service or product will never hang up, as the call can do well to both the parties involved. Also, the tone of the telemarketer also holds tremendous importance. As a telemarketer, you must speak in a docile manner. Also, the objective behind making the call should be clear and well determined. There are several tricks which you can use for effective Telemarketing and Telesales

 

Question 3: What are the techniques to build the trust of your Caller?

 

 

In B2B marketing, building trust of the client is the most important thing to be accomplished. Building trust can help you retain the clients and establish a long-term engagement. Therefore, here are the techniques which you can use to build the trust of your caller while on a phone call:

 

1. Open with a clear objective and speak confidently.
2. Remain friendly throughout the call but don’t exaggerate unnecessarily.
3. Try to understand, what the customer wants and shape the call accordingly.
4. Bring to their notice the complete knowledge of the product or service that you are offering.
5. Don’t be too pushy, the receiver may get annoyed.

 

Read more about  B2B Customer Retention Strategies – How To Retain Your Best B2B Clients. 

 

Question 4: Is B2B telemarketing also annoying?

 

B2B telemarketing is not considered to be as annoying as B2C. While stats show that 68% of B2C customers find telemarketing as annoying as opposed to just 14% of B2B customers. Out of those, 35% B2B customers claimed the telesales call annoying when the call was made while they were at home and only 4% claimed it annoying while at the office.

 

B2B telesales and marketing is all-in-all a different concept. Unlike B2C telemarketing, where calls are made to masses often blindly, B2B telemarketing is quite a refined approach. B2B telemarketing calls are only made once they have gathered enough information about the lead and are sure that the lead is interested in their offerings. B2B telemarketing calls are made to refined leads that are mostly at the top of the sales funnel.

 

Having said that, you can’t hold responsible for your marketing team if the receiver finds your telemarketing call as annoying. There still is a chance, not as high as B2B telemarketing, that your call might sound objectionable or annoying even to the B2B customers.

 

Question 5: What are the positive effects of B2B Telemarketing and Telesales?

 

 

B2B telemarketing can bear positive effects if exploited mindfully. The trick is the relevance of the call. Relevance can increase the chance of lead conversion up to 800%. Telemarketing helps you establish a human touch. Human touch is said to create the most positive effects of lead conversion. Relevant calls made to relevant leads increases the chance of a conversion. To find relevant leads, data mining can prove to the greatest tool of all time.

 

With the help of the data mining technique, you can find out relevant data from a large pool of unstructured data. Not just that, with some logic you can segment the leads according to their position in the sales funnel. This helps you to devise a marketing strategy based on the lead’s level of engagement. Telemarketing will help you to get in touch with them directly human-to-human. Hence telemarketing in this scenario can be a great tool for converting leads to revenue. The positive effects of Telesales and Telemarketing can be summarized as:

 

1. Telemarketing lets you develop a human-to-human contact that can increase the chances of lead conversion.
2. With the help of telemarketing, you can establish a higher level of engagement with the leads.
3. You can launch an effective re-engagement plan riding on the back of telemarketing.
4. Relevant conversation with the lead can help you develop a relevant trade association.

 

Question 6:  What are the disadvantages of B2B telemarketing?

 

 

It is said that a rotten apple spoils the whole barrel. Telemarketing when utilized ethically can bear higher results than email marketing. However, people exploit the phenomenon by using tricks like cold calling.

 

However, with the help of data mining techniques like Data appending, Web scrapping, skip tracing you can dig out useful data from the raw data. At BizProspex, we provide all of these services readily.

 

Coming back to the disadvantages of telemarketing, which are as follows:

 

1. People believe that Telemarketing is an outdated marketing technique, and is quite annoying.
2. Some people claim that it is a waste of time if the service or product doesn’t hold any value to them.
3. Emails can be marked read, deleted, or spammed, but a telephonic conversation can’t be avoided completely.

 

Thus, telemarketing also has its fair share of disadvantages. However, these disadvantages can be minimized if B2B marketing is used ethically. Also, with the help of relevant data, the disadvantages can be further subdued.

 

Question 7: What is the best time to call the lead and why?

 

 It is hard to determine the best time to call the lead as it differs from person to person. However, it is safe to say that mostly afternoon time and evening time is the appropriate time. However, the calls should not be made during lunch hours or post working hours. Stats show that the likelihood of the caller finding a call as annoying reduces to just 4% when at work.

 

You might also call a prospect in the morning around 9 am as it is usually the time when a person starts his work and might spare a few minutes to talk. Again, there is no best time to reach the lead though afternoon and evening time is preferred as these times are usually known to be less hectic.

 

Question 8: What is cold calling?

 

 

Cold Calling: Cold calling is a technique by which random phone calls are made out of the blue to random people who have no idea about the service or product one has to offer. Cold calling must be avoided because it creates a rather wrong impression of the organization in question rather than a good one. People most often, find cold calling downright annoying. This is because people don’t expect to get called by these companies.

 

Cold calling is based on convincing random people to buy a product or apply for a particular service.  Jeffrey Gitomer wrote in a 2010 article for The Augusta Chronicle that “the return on investment on cold calling is under zero.” Gitomer believes that cold calling will only annoy customers and will not attract business. Gitomer also believes that referral marketing is a better form of selling and marketing.

 

Many countries have certain restrictions regarding cold calling and have strict actions against it.

 

Question 9: How to set up a Successful Telemarketing campaign?

 

 

Data is the backbone of any marketing campaign and Telemarketing is no exception. In order to drive a successful Telemarketing campaign, you must have accurate data about the potential leads. Key points to be remembered are:

 

1. Outsource the data mining task: It’s not a bold but a logical move to outsource data mining tasks to a third-party company. They are the experts and have the right set of tools and technologies needed to mine the relevant data. The marketing and sales team aren’t skilled enough to perform this task alone and end up wasting their valuable time. Thus, outsourcing the data mining task to Third Party companies saves a lot of money in the long run. Also, the right set of data can lead you to generate higher ROI.
2. Call at the appropriate time and mind your tone: Call the prospects at the suitable as discussed above and keep your tone in check.
3. Don’t be pushy: Ensure that you don’t come across as pushy, this is the most common mistake committed by telemarketers and should be avoided at all costs.

 

Question 10: What is deceptive Telemarketing?

 

 

 

Deceptive telemarketing is a way to deceive customers by giving false information about the product or service. It should be avoided and precautions should be taken:

 

1. Beware of the too good to be true offers.
2. Never believe if the prices are too low as compared to market standards.
3. Also, beware if the selling price is way too high as compared to the market.

 

The Bottom Line

 

For a successful telemarketing campaign, you need the right data. At BizProspex, we provide just that. We are industry leaders in manual data mining. We ensure that the data we provide is not just derived with the help of certain algorithms which may fail, but we utilize the power of human logic. We provide several services like Phone appending, Data verification,  CRM cleaning, Email Address search, Data scrubbing, PEP Lists, Aml sanctions lists, global sanctions database etc at a very competitive price. Contact us for any of your data needs. We’ll be happy to help.