Telemarketing
Despite malpractice by a sub-section of predatory quasi-marketeers pushing PPI, solar panels and insulation, telemarketing is still regarded as one of the most cost-effective means of market creation and pre-sales qualification.
Bollin Green has observed our market and client-base growing significantly. We are riding a wave of outsourced marketing activities, and the reason our services are more cost-effective is because we’re the professionals; this is what we do every day and we have distilled it down into a fine art that is equal parts strategy and creativity – and it can be applied across a broad span of markets.
Some behaviours are (as you’d expect) a given – respect, courtesy, professionalism – but what we as an intelligent telemarketing agency bring to the table is a knowledge-based, conversational approach. We know what a prospect sounds like, how to engage with them and what it takes to turn a suspect into a hot lead: a wealth of understanding and smart questions founded on the base of a strong proposition.
Here are three key Cs to a successful telemarketing campaign:
The salesman is asking closed questions.
“Yes,” you say. “No.”
He thinks he’s closing down a certain deal. You feel the sense of being closed in, and you don’t like it.
We’ve all been there. It’s very easy to push back when you’re feeling put upon – when you don’t feel like you’re making the decision. That’s bad sales.
At Bollin Green we practice intelligent telemarketing with a conversational approach. We’re not force-marketing – you can’t do that in a B2B environment. We want to engage with a business’ key decision makers and talk to them, at all times conveying our clients’ message (not our own). This way, we can establish their needs in full, not just the needs we’re interested in. Why? – because all data is valuable and could be crucial to any prospective sale down the line.
Many a poignant maxim has been uttered by successful people from all walks of life highlighting the importance of confidence. Confidence is key, and we’re lucky; it’s easy to be confident when marketing products that really are business improvement tools – products we whole-heartedly believe in. This is high-end sales; all products come at a significant cost, but they are long-term investments we know will save the right businesses significant amounts over time.
Confidence is transferable, and can often be the clincher in those first few seconds of a call when the Managing Director of ZYX International is deciding whether he has the time for your call when there are emails flying relentlessly into his inbox.
With confidence comes courage, which is what we need when asking the right – but often difficult – questions, bringing us to…
‘Cunning’ has a bad reputation. We immediately see a fox raiding the chicken coop in the dead of night, but cunning in our line of work is an intellect quick enough to handle even the toughest and most surprising objections.
We don’t run through a script. We know the kinds of questions we need to ask to ‘mine’ the right information, but when employing a conversational approach so much of what is said, and when, is dependent on the call journey, which is only ever half in your control. The trick is in optimising your side of the dialogue to guide prospects from Point A to Point B (a practice we’ll take a deeper look into in a few weeks). Suffice it to say that, to accomplish this, you must be able to think on your feet.
Be sure to look out for upcoming blogs on The Most Important Part of a Call and The Gatekeeper, and remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
