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:
- You want an appointment to go to discuss your services
- 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.
Following right on from our Marketing Planning Introduction the first step in the PIMMS process (and in any marketing initiative) is to set objectives.What, exactly, are you trying to achieve? If you don’t know this, how can you know whether you are gettiung anywhere!?
As it’s the week before Christmas we thought we would put the marketing ideas on hold & offer a little light distraction with a new game we’ve found.
Networking is a real growth area in business development. If you want to get to know more people relevant to your business (whether as customers or suppliers, or both), networking, where you meet people regularly, can be very effective – and the key to networking is not just the people you meet but the people they may be able to link to you to as well.