We speak with Clare Tweed, Sales Director of More Than Words (Marketing) Limited and a long-standing Marketscan partner. In this blog, Clare shares why telemarketing plays a vital role in winning new clients.
Email marketing is a popular, accessible, and easy way to introduce yourself to new potential clients and it’s cost effective, but it is always good to explore other outbound marketing strategies as well.
One way of improving the overall success of your campaigns is to consider the use of telemarketing. Telemarketing can be used as a standalone tactic to reach people or can be used in conjunction with email marketing.
As an example, using your email click through report, you could follow up this potential lead with a follow up call – providing you check this data against the CTPS register first.
Ultimately the success of any campaign rests on the data you are using to make sure your message gets to the right person and if you’re contacting them at the right time.
As a telemarketing expert, we asked Clare some key questions to help understand the opportunity that telemarketing brings to the B2B marketing mix.
Why do you think people don’t often use telemarketing and rely mainly on email marketing?
I think it is a combination of a lack of time, knowledge, and confidence that stops people from using telemarketing more for their campaigns. Fear of rejection also plays a part. Sending a batch of emails seems easier and feels less anxiety producing, but not using telemarketing is a real missed opportunity.
What are the advantages of Telemarketing?
The biggest advantage of telemarketing is being able to build meaningful relationships with key stakeholders responsible for purchasing decisions. As the classic saying goes, “People buy from people”.
In the B2B world, salespeople are often faced with navigating complex decision-making processes, especially with high value orders, and there is often a procurement process with multiple stages that needs to be gone through.
If you can build a rapport and a relationship with these decision-makers and influencers and get them to know your company and its capabilities, this stands you in good stead to win more business or get your foot in the door to be able to respond to a tender.
What are the benefits of telemarketing?
Making genuine connections makes real, relatable dialogue possible. By ‘humanising’ your business you can create a competitive advantage and get under the skin of your prospects business.
Telemarketing also helps you to more quickly understand if there is a need for your product or service which can save you time. Another sales-ism is, “Get to the no”. By doing this you can focus more time working on leads that may lead to business.
Establishing who the key decision maker is and how they prefer to be contacted is vital in the sales process and telemarketing is a quick way to do this.
Phone conversations generate a stronger lead and a definitive outcome which can be followed up by setting up a further phone call or a meeting.
Telemarketing in combination with email or direct mail marketing helps to boost ROI.
How can you use telemarketing?
When people think of telemarketing, they often just think about using it for lead generation for sales teams to follow up on, but you can use telemarketing as a tool for:
- Face-to-face appointment booking
- Market research
- Event promotion
For Market research telemarketing helps you to establish who the key decision makers and influencers are, what their current procurement process is. Through conversation you can also gauge if your targeting is right and better understand the needs of the types of businesses you are targeting. Collecting this information is invaluable for your future marketing campaigns whether they are based around telemarketing or otherwise.
In a lead generation capacity, telemarketing offers the opportunity for you to position your products and services to decision makers. It’s also a chance to conduct a sales discovery, such as finding out about any existing contract expiry dates or likely budgetary spend in the next 12-24 months.
What tips can you give for running successful telemarketing campaigns?
As with anything in marketing, it’s not just the method you use, but also who you make contact with.
The best telemarketer in the world won’t stand a chance if they are on a call with a person who isn’t the decision maker or has no purchasing power. This is why it is so important to make sure you compile the most accurate and targeted data for your call lists.
As well as getting accurate data it is also important to ensure your data is able to be used legally for a telemarketing campaign. If you are licensing data from a supplier such as Marketscan then you can rest assured that it will have been checked against the TPS and CTPS registers.
Does telemarketing have to be done in-house?
You may not have any telemarketing expertise in-house, so outsourcing is a great option. Outsourcing to a specialist telemarketing team offers:
A flexible service matched to fit around your business requirements and budget
A highly experienced telemarketers with a track record of generating quality leads
The opportunity to gather additional relevant information to keep your database up-to-date and use for future marketing campaigns.
This blog was written in conjunction with Marketscan’s partner More Than Words (Marketing) Limited.
