How telemarketing can boost your sales or screw your brand
Telemarketing sucks. And not only to those of you who've been on the receiving end of a 6.15pm telemarketing call. Many of you will be able to recall a telemarketing campaign that failed miserably, at great expense.
So, should we give up on telemarketing as a way to reach new prospects?
No. Because we'd be blaming the wrong bit. Just like the old gun lobby argument, telemarketing in itself isn't bad - it's the people who make telemarketing do bad stuff.
There's no magic to this. Get a 17 year old school leaver to parrot a script about timeshares to a stranger at dinner time and you're bound to get some negative reaction. (Now, clearly, the people who run these things get enough positive response to give them reason to keep doing telemarketing, but I can't help wondering what it does to their brand ‑ as if they care.)
But if you've a business related product or service that isn't out there with ex-planet Pluto, you'll actually be able to use telemarketing to find people who want to know more about what you have to sell.
But how do you go about increasing your chances of success with telemarketing? Try getting these things right:
The list
Direct marketers will tell you that about 60% of the success of a campaign depends on the quality of the database. In other words, if you've a crap list it doesn't matter how cute the material or how relevant the product, you'll still get a crap result. Makes sense, huh? Same with telemarketing. If you call a priest to sell condoms [bank to sell dynamite?], don't expect a good response.
There are good databases to be had. For example - and here's a message from our sponsor - a new "superbase" has recently been created as a result of the merger of IDG's Contacts database with Fairfax's Marketbase database. The new database has up to 3000 contacts in it and sports a great depth of information about each company's IT infrastructure and assets. End of ad.
You can also create your own database, if you're willing to invest the time and money not only in building it from scratch, but also maintaining it
The Guide
Once you've got the list sorted, what do you do? Write a script, you say? Nope. A script is fine if it's to be delivered by parrots in a call-farm. But, really, do you want a parrot talking to the guy who's got his finger on half a million dollars of infrastructure spending that could come your way if you say the right thing?
Rather than getting a bunch of callers to deliver a braindead script, what you really want is to get a conversation going with your target prospect - and, really, a start of a conversation is all you can realistically expect to get from a cold call (even if it's following up on a mailer; more on mailers some other time.) Remember, all we're looking for is for the prospect to share a need or a goal or a problem or express some interest. At that point the best thing the caller can do is politely close and hand off to you. (There's such a thing as un-selling a prospect: having a semi-informed telemarketer get into a long debate on a technology issue is one way to achieve an un-sale.)
True, having a good opening is important, but people will give a caller enough time to explain themselves if they sound even a little intelligent. (And, often, the only reason for a brusque response is bad timing: suggest a later time and they may well be more willing to talk.)
To get a conversation going the caller needs to know something about what they're talking about. They also need to have an idea of the sort of things keeping the prospect awake at night.
What I'm talking about is providing callers with a "guide" - a collection of information about the product or service that you're selling, and in indication of the direction we would like to see the discussion take. The guide will include such things as objectives and desired outcomes, a indication or outline of the path of the discussion, background material, case studies and such things as recent local (if possible) sales. If you don't have local sales, at least try to provide case studies of sales to firms overseas in the same sector as your prospect.
The idea is that you provide the callers with enough material for them to develop the confidence to have a short but reasonably informed, but directed, conversation with the prospect. And the caller should feel interest and pride in the product - if they're disinterested it'll show through, for sure.
Stalking your prospect
So much for the list and the guide. Now, there's one aspect about telemarketing that can easily be overlooked even in the best planned campaign.
However it's fair to say that this aspect in fact has nothing to do with the telemarketing itself. It's about follow-up. Follow-up is B to B stalking. Remember with telemarketing all we're trying to do is start a conversation - like, in a bar. But now we've got them talking, we don't just drop 'em. Sure, they're not in buying mode today, but who is?
However, they've bothered to share a need or a pain, or express a goal, so the least you can do is commit to calling them back every couple months to mark their progress. Eventually, even if it's eighteen months down the track, they will begin an investigation process as a prelude to buying, and who's been diligently keeping in touch all through the last year: you, or your competition?
Not every contact has to be by phone. If you're close enough to his or her business to know what they'll be interested in, you can forward related information to them by email, just as it comes to hand.
We've gone way beyond that first telemarketing call now, of course. But doing your follow up well - and that means assiduously over a long period - months, if not years - could make the difference between the original campaign being judged a success or a failure.
I mentioned earlier about making up your own list. Well, it'll be tougher than you imagined, and it'll cost way more than you expected to maintain it (and most people don't, so their database gets progressively more out of date.)
However you get your database started, do yourself a favour and keep it well fed and watered.
Now, as an add-on to BAU it's an expensive and laborious task. In other words, a pain.
But if you're doing the prospect stalking thing, keeping your database updated becomes a part of BAU (well, it should be, if you've got a good CRM system going and you've well-behaved sales people - and doesn't everybody?)
And, finally, a short word about the callers themselves. I've earlier dissed the 19 year-old braindead parrots in call-farms. Sorry fellas. It's not your fault. I, too, have been a parrot.
Now, it's ok if you've a list of 15,000 households and what the hell if you burn 95% - who cares? Because that last 5% are the ones who'll come along to your timeshare presentation. But if there are only 750 prospects in the whole country for your $200,000 infrastructure appliance you can't afford to burn-off even one name. In the words of an old Monty Python classic, "every sperm is sacred", so, please, be prepared to spend a bit more than the minimum wage on your telemarketers. Remember: every sperm is great, and if a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.
