Telemarketing in the summer and at Christmas…..Is it worth it?

I am often asked about the value of telemarketing during the summer and December. The instinct of many salesmen and managers is that you can’t make the meetings during this time as people are on holiday, so what’s the point. As a result they do not make any effort to create any meeting for effectively 2 months of the year.

Wow…….

That’s 16.5% of the year’s capacity to generate new sales meetings taken out.

Internal v's Outsourced Telemarketing

When considering telemarketing as part of your marketing mix, companies are often faced with a similar dilemma. Why should we outsource our telemarketing rather than do it ourselves? However, it is easy to under estimate the amount of resource and effort that is required to deliver an effective long term telemarketing campaign. Companies face a number of real challenges such as:

• Recruiting reliable and experienced staff
• Training and providing effective product knowledge and skills
• Capturing and communicating the correct message to individual prospects
• Targeting the correct market and effectively reflect this within a marketing dataset
• Holding all the information within a CRM solution that allows the telemarketers to control their calls and report results accurately
• Creating sufficient new sales appointments for your sales teams to meet your strategic business objectives

Often when a company or an individual considers starting a telemarketing campaign, their first thoughts are to look at employing some staff and completing the project themselves internally. On the surface it does not seem too difficult. A good employee calling the data already in the database should be easy to source and manage. The problem is that often it is just not that simple..

6 basic telemarketing rules

By following these 6 basic telemarketing rules you will dramatically improve the number of meetings you create, the quality of the sales meetings you arrange and increase the revenue generated as a result of your work. The job will also become easier and less stressful.

1. Know your market, know who to target.

It is vital to start by clearly identifying those companies who you wish to do business with and have an incumbent need for your service. This can form a blueprint for your target market which includes verticals, size and other more specific criteria.

Once established this specification can be used to purchase or research all the companies that fit your description. As with every form of marketing, each company that is not present within your target market will be a potential opportunity lost. Whilst those companies that do not fit your target prospect profile will detract from the efficiency of the telemarketing campaign.

The difference between a well defined target market and not, can be as much as a 240% increase in telemarketing results..

How to prepare for a telemarketing campaign

Preparing for a telemarketing campaign

The preparation for any marketing campaign is one of the most critical issues that will determine its ultimate success.

Accurate data means you can deliver your message to the right people in the right companies. However, data whether bought from a list broker or in your CRM database is not necessarily “fit for the purpose” of marketing. Our research has shown that marketing databases have a typical error rate of 60%, primarily due to:

• Prospect companies that do not meet your prospect qualification criteria
• Incorrect contact details (Phone number or address)
• Key decision making contacts having left the company
• Key decision making contacts not being present
• Key decision making contact details missing (Email address, job titles)

Here are some of the ways to prepare your data for a telemarketing campaign or any other marketing campaign..