I know it can be hard to run successful telemarketing campaigns. I also know it makes it even harder to listen to all the people who say telemarketing’s dead. Just for the record, they’re wrong. For example, 69% of buyers have said that they bought from a telesales operative in the last year alone. It gets even more encouraging when you see that 82% of buyers will accept a meeting if a salesperson reaches out to them. Of course, with COVID-19, it’s impossible to meet people, but before then, setting appointments with cold prospects was reasonably straightforward. Nowadays, it can be a bit more complicated.
There are a lot of reasons why your telemarketing campaigns can fail. It might be that you didn’t hire the right people or get the right resources. Alternatively, you might have found that you were pitching to the wrong audience. Whatever the troubles you may have had with telemarketing in the past, there are steps that you can take to boost your chances of success significantly. These are the steps that I’ll be walking you through, and hopefully, by the end, you’ll be able to run a successful telemarketing campaign.
Hire The Right People
I think this one goes without saying. Telemarketing campaigns are like anything else in life. You get what you put in. If you’re hiring people that don’t necessarily have the skills or the experience to work with your products and services, you’re not going to do well. This is why a company’s recruitment process is much more important than people believe. I’ve seen some shocking recruitment efforts in the past and some spirited ones. The companies that succeed are ones with a clear outline for what they were looking for in their candidate.
This doesn’t mean they have to have a Bachelor’s Degree or anything like that. I think that’s a pretty mental hiring pre-requisite for a telemarketing role. It means that the person has to fit your business’s culture and have the appropriate transferable skills to learn about your business and how to market that to your prospects. Sometimes, you will require your candidate to have a certain number of years of experience, and that’s fine. I don’t think you should need more than ten years of experience for most of the roles that you’d want to fill, though.
Get High-Quality Telemarketing Campaigns Data
To run a successful telemarketing campaign, you’re going to need to call people. I hated having to trawl through Google to find new businesses to contact. It made things slow, awkward, and just miserable when it came to generating new leads. This is why you need to get a high-quality telemarketing campaign dataset to drive your calls. There are many reasons why telemarketing data can be used to help your campaign.
Firstly, you will have a list of business telephone numbers ready and waiting for you, with the business name. This dramatically cuts down lead generation times by giving you the business on a plate. You have to close it. Additionally, you can filter this data down based on your own needs. So, for example, if you needed to target customers within a specific region, you would be able to do that. If you required the businesses to be within particular industries, you would also be able to do this. Using this data cuts down on the more time-consuming lead generation elements.
That said, you need to make sure that the data that you’re buying is accurate. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a frustrating experience.
Perform Quality Checks on Call Recordings
Your team is excellent at what they do, and they’ve been killing it on the phone lately. That’s great, nothing to worry about. Right? Wrong. You should still be performing quality checks on your agent’s calls. They might not necessarily be doing anything wrong, but there is always room for improvement. You can still tweak the little things which can make the difference between closing a deal. This is why keeping your call recordings is incredibly important. You’ll be able to get everyone to their best level.
Call recordings can be educational in other ways. You had an excellent last call, and the sale went off without a hitch. So why wouldn’t you want to share your method with the team so that everyone can learn and improve? That way, your colleagues will improve even quicker, and you will all be able to learn from each other.
You should be aware that you need to follow GDPR or DPA 2018 regulations. This means you have to get consent from customers and prospects to record calls. It would help if you always researched your call recording process’s legality before you do so.
Choose Whether You’ll Use a Script For Your Telemarketing Campaigns
This topic is often a two-sided debate, and you’re likely to be on one side of the fence. This is choosing whether or not to use a script. Some people say that using a script is outdated and robotic, which hurts the sales process, and these people have a point. I always know when someone’s reading off a script to me, and I tend to switch off slightly. That’s not to say that I don’t see situations where scripts are useful, like when reading off terms and conditions to a customer before signing them up.
Other people have had great success using a script and swear by it, although I think that’s just a mix of the script being right and the salespeople being exceptional. If I was to give my advice on what I’ve seen work. Prompts. That’s a clear list of key bullet points for various aspects of the sales process. This allows the salesperson to put their own spin on the pitch whilst still using all of the key points from the prompt to optimise the calls. A healthy medium is usually the way to go for everything, wouldn’t you agree?
Ensure You Have Good Network Infrastructure
This may seem like a self-explanatory point, but I cannot overstate the importance of having a good network infrastructure. You don’t want to be on an important call with a client, just for the line to go dead on you. It’s not only the phones you have to worry about either. You want to make sure that you have a good internet connection in your workplace and your agents’ homes. This is particularly important if you’re using internet-based calling systems like 8 x 8 or RingCentral. So, when you’re starting your campaign, think about your current supplier.
If you’re finding that you’re having severe issues, you should consider switching to a different option. I understand that this can be quite disruptive and even costly in some cases. Still, the benefits gained from increased productivity and work-based satisfaction are worthwhile. You should evaluate your options at the very least and see if it is something that could be improved on. If you don’t have the time to do it, there are endless companies dedicated to switching your provider. Just make sure you go with a reputable one.
Identify The Best Audience For Your Telemarketing Campaigns
Trying to run a telemarketing campaign without knowing your audience can be compared to many things. My pick would be trying to shoot an ant from 100 Meters, in the dark, blindfolded. If you do this, you’re just going to end up making too many calls to businesses that wouldn’t need what you’re selling. This is time wasted that will ultimately end up costing you money. Instead, you need to make a plan for the ideal target audience for your campaign. Who would care for your message and benefit from what you have to offer?
Once you’ve identified your audience, you can tailor your sales process to these people. That way, you’re going to know what to say on most, if not every call. Not to mention that you’re going to avoid the likelihood of making hundreds of dud calls that waste your time.
Integrate Your Campaign With Your CRM
This process can save you a lot of time through its diversity. As a B2B business, you should already have a CRM for at least one element of your sales process. This will help you track the stages of multiple deals and help you begin tailoring your marketing communications to your audience. You can even integrate the telemarketing data as mentioned above into your CRM. This means that agents would better manage their pipelines by not having to input each prospect that they call manually- the data will already be in the CRM. This cuts out a considerable time-cost. I hate having to update my CRM manually. It just feels like stolen time.
In terms of what CRM to use? I’d say it depends on your business’s size and needs. If you’re a small company, you may want to use the free version of HubSpot CRM, which is intuitive and easy to use. Despite this, it’s still surprisingly powerful because it’s free. You’ll be able to create new contacts and companies, as well as assign them to the agent responsible for them. Also, you’ll be able to track the progress of any deals in the pipeline, along with their notes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it can be seen that despite telemarketing campaigns being difficult sometimes, they’re not hard. Not if you do the right things from the start anyway. You need to hire the right people first so that the customers will want to speak to your company. Don’t hire people who can’t get someone interested or don’t have the necessary experience to drive the campaign forward.
You should also try and get some high-quality data to streamline the calling in the campaign. You should be working on-call recordings so that people can learn about how they can improve. They’re also crucial so people can see good examples of the calls they should be making. Then, you need to decide whether or not to use a script.
Ensuring that you have a good network infrastructure is a great way to ensure that you’re using your time well. You’re still not going to get anywhere if you don’t identify the right audience to convey your message to. Finally, you should be using a CRM system to streamline your sales process and integrate it with your data if you have any.