Having now looked at the the realities of telemarketers: 99% of telemarketers don’t have the ‘Magic Touch’ and the importance of good briefing: The importance of clear definitions and briefing we arrive at the guts of the matter:

What to expect from your Business to Business telemarketing?

As always, there is no simple answer.

Want a quick fix? Jump straight to my tips

The key factors are:

Your Objectives - How much commitment are you looking for from contacts?

At one end of the scale if you are refreshing and qualifying your database, you may simply be looking for confirmation of information you already have. You should expect 70-80% of contacts to give you this. Even here you will find some people who claim to have a company policy wherby they will not even confirm information you already have!

At the other end of the scale, you may be looking to arrange an initial sales meeting, or even sell something over the phone. In these cases, only 1 or 2 ‘successes’ per day might be the norm – but don’t despair, as discussed below, simply resassessing what you are doing might improve things.

Your Propostion – How strong is your offer?

I have mentioned the importance of a strong offer in earlier posts. There is no question that if you can offer clear and unambiguous benefit to contacts it will make things easier and more productive.

It doesn’t matter how good you think your offer is, it is all about what your target contact thinks.

To say you can reduce a company’s monthly phone bills by 25% may sound good but there is no question that phone call costs have all come down in recent years. If you are talking to a small business who only spends £25 per month on phone calls than the £6.25 reduction may not be worth the time and effort for them to switch. It really is about genuine value.

Your Target Market – How well do you know your target contacts?

It may sound obvious but the better you know your target contacts, the more likely it is that your telemarketer(s) will get a good hearing. As most SME telemarketing involves a majority of cold calling, simply getting people to listen can be a big issue – this is where a good telemarketer will definitely show their stuff.

Remember your briefing

Probably the single most common objective in SME Business to Business telemarketing is to generate leads and for most people, this means appointments. As I say above, this normally means that 1 or 2 ‘successes‘ per day at best. If you see more than this then check your briefing! A telemarketer who says

‘We just want to pop in while we are passing and drop off some literature...’

may manage to justify this in their head as a booked appointment but clearly not what you are looking for!

Don’t forget the longer term

This brief case study will hopefully give you some food for thought….

I was talking to a client who had recently set up as a freelance accountant offering services to SME businesses. They engaged a telemarketer to call local businesses to try to set up appointments.

The accountant started to see a slow trickle af appointments. Not as many as they had hoped but a few.

It turns out the feedback they were getting from the telemarketer was simply the appointment details – name, time, date. They knew nothing of the calls where no appointment was forthcoming.

I suggested that they ask the telemarketer to report back on all contacts and to make sure that even where there was no appointment they asked for an e-mail address and checked it wsa OK to ‘keep in touch’ – most people are happy to agree to this.

This added no cost to the telepmarketing work but signifucantly improved the benefits. As well as the appointments, the accountant was now building a qualified target market database of local businesses as a valuable marketing asset that could be used cost effectively on an ongoing basis.

Could you do something similar?

A few other points

How many contacts a day? Normally depends on the target contact level.

Speaking to senior staff in large companies (with many layers of hierarchy!) can be most difficult and 10 contacts a day can be a good result.

As a guide, 20-25 contacts per day can be used as a benchmark.

If you are simply qualifying an existing database (name, address etc) then 70-80 checked records per day should be achievable.

Don’t assume big numbers=good performance! If you are expecting 20-25 decent conversations in a day and your telemarketer claims 6 in the their first hour, check them – and check your brief is being followed.

All telemarketing projects have a learning curve. It can take a couple of hours or so for a telemarketer to get up to speed. I’d suggest giving them at least half a day to start to perform – but if you are not seeing what you expect after a day, it is time to review.

TIP 1: Make sure you get feedback on all contacts from your
telemarketer(s). Just because there is no appointment today doesn't
mean you can't keep in touch and try again in a month or 2. Also
feedback as to why you don't get an appointment can help you
refine your briefing and approach.

TIP 2: Don't fight with secretaries and other 'gate-keepers'. These
people have the ear of your ultimate target contact so keeping on
the right side of them can really pay dividends.

TIP 3: If a particularly important contact is proving difficult to
get hold of, consider trying to arrange a 'Telephone Appointment'

In my post about the realities of telemarketers: 99% of telemarketers don’t have the ‘Magic Touch’ I stressed the importance of having a clear understanding of what you wish to achieve from your telemarketing activity.

You should be able to deliver a clear and actionable brief to your telemarketer or telemarketing team.

Let’s have a look at these:

Your Objectives

In my experience, telemarketing is MUCH more prevalent in Business to Business marketing than telesales (where the goal is to take an order). How many times have your received a cold call where the opening gambit is “Don’t worry, I’m not trying to sell you anything…”!

In essence, you are always looking to secure some sort of commitment from the people being spoken to but where you pitch your expectation for this commitment can make a big difference on the overall value you get out of the campaign. Take 2 different scenarios:

1. You want an appointment to go to discuss your services
2. You are happy where a person simply agrees to you keeping in touch about your services

Both of these are based on looking for people who are interested in you and your services – albeit at different ends of the scale. But think, there is a question that should go ahead of this:

Are you interested in them?

Naturally you want to make sure your target list focuses on companies that represent potential for you but even the best list will have some irrelevant companies. Even if the companies fits your requirements, don’t assume that the person being spoken to can help further your cause!

An important element of any telemarketing call is to check that the person/company being spoken to is relevant and useful. Getting an appointment with someone who is just about to leave or a company that is about to close down is probably a waste of your time.

Right, back to our scenarios.

Once you have a company that is of interest to you, be careful of getting your telemarketer to focus wholly on making an appointment. While this may be what you want, the person on the receiving end of the call may not be ready to make that level of commitment.

In scenario 1, no appointment means no go so move on to the next call. You have already established that you are interested in them so potentially a lost opportunity.

In scenario 2, it is vital that the telemarketer has an ‘eye for the main chance’ If the meeting opportunity is there they should be able to see this and go for it – this is definitely a skill that differentiates the good telemarketer from the not so good. If the target contact is not willing to commit to an appointment, you have a fallback position – keeping in touch. Clearly this doesn’t benefit in the short term but over time you are building a highly qualified database of YOUR target market – an immensely valuable marketing tool.

Realistically, a good telemarketer working under scenario 2 would secure all the appointments that are available under scenario 1. All the additional marketing data you get under scenario 2 – plus the opportunity to build contact and relationships over time using lower cost communication such as mail and e-mail is effectively a free extra benefit!

The Telemarketer Brief

In a telemarketing call, only 1 thing happens – conversation. By definition, conversations are 2-way so, with the possible exception of highly structured Market Research by Telephone, having a rigid script is not terribly helpful. I know there are companies who will sell you a state of the art telemarketing system which can (allegedly) adapt scripts to match the flow of a conversation, for a typical SME telemarketing project there is nothing to beat a clear speaking telemarketer who is comfortable on the phone. To make he most of this ability they need 3 things which you should include in your briefing:

A good understanding of the product/service they are talking about

You can use product literature, your website and/or a personal introduction. All have been designed to explain your products/services so should work here.

A clear statement of the scope the conversation should cover

What questions do you want answered or what information do you want to gather? Don’t expect the telemarketer to remember all of this – particularly at first. Although I do not advocate a script, a ‘cheat sheet’ listing the core details to be covered is invaluable

Your expectation of what they might achieve

Giving an idea of what you expect can be done in (say) an hour is a useful guide – but be realistic. If you are looking for them to speak to senior people and have a decent conversation where possible, then 2-3 conversations in an hour may be a reasonable objective, maybe less for bigger companies.

On the other hand, if you simply want to check and update your database of e-mail addresses ahead of sending an e-mailing out then confirming/adding 12-15 e-mail addresses in an hour shouldn’t be too challenging.

Only with time and experience will you be able to fine tune what is sustainably achievable in your business.

Monitor and Review

Every hour of telemarketer time costs money and once it has gone, you can’t have it back again. During the first few hours of any telemarketing project, keep a close eye on how things are going. You don’t necessarily want to hover around the telemarketer all the time but make sure you don’t leave them working in isolation for too long. Once I have briefed a project and answered any questions,  I normally leave a telemarketer to get on with it asking them to come and talk to me once they have  3 completed  conversations. If they are back to me in 30 minutes I start asking questions. If I haven’t seen them after 3 hours…well, you get the point.

If they tell you they have spoken to X people but no-one was interested then, if they have been well briefed they should be able to tell you why – which should tell you how to tune the project to start to produce more useful results.

It is the job of the telemarketer to do what is asked of them. It is up to you to make sure they are!

TIP 1: Just because they won't make an appointment doesn't mean they aren't
interested. Some people take a bit of time to come around to your way of
thinking - or maybe the time you called just wasn't the right time for them

TIP 2: If a telemarketer can emphasise things differently, they probably
will! Do you really care that they made 50 calls in an hour if no one was in!
It is not about working hard it is about working effective.