When I use the word ‘telemarketing,' I really mean any type of formal communication between you and an existing or prospective customer over the phone. Each time you or your staff have a customer on the line, it is an opportunity to market your business and provide exceptional customer service.
A salesperson making a cold call is an obvious example, but the people who answer the phone at the customer service desk, your receptionist and every other member of your team, including you, participates in your telemarketing strategy.
In this context, telemarketing is a powerful lead generator and conversion booster. It makes sense to me - it's a really cheap, and with some thought and planning it can be super effective.
To learn more about How to Make Telemarketing Work for you - sign up for our online Marketing School at: http://sweetspotmarketingacademy.ca/
In the Telemarketing E-Class we cover:
- What is telemarketing?
- How your business uses telemarketing on daily basis
- How to use the telemarketing process for incoming and outgoing calls
- How to write an effective telemarketing script
- Strategies for effective telemarketing
Meanwhile, here is an article authored by Andy Dickens of Virtual Sales Limited titled "Top 10 Ways to Use Telemarketing" http://www.virtual-sales.com
Most people mistakenly believe that using telemarketers is limited in use to cold calling sales activities. But telemarketing can turn be used to turn many opportunities into business, there a literally hundreds of ways to do this but these are our Top 10 ways to use telemarketing.
ONE: Appointment Setting
Appointment setting is, always has, and always will be, a primary way that companies generate new business. Organisations usually place a great deal of emphasis on appointment setting, and also a significant proportion of their budget. Why do they do this? Because there’s no more effective way to close a sale than a chance to sit down with a prospective client in a face-to-face meeting. Appointment setting is a cost effective and intelligent use of telemarketers to generate new business for your organisation.
TWO: Seminar Booking
In recent years, telemarketing has proven itself to bring exceptional results for those individuals and organisations that deliver seminars. It doesn’t matter how good your seminar is; if delegates aren’t booking you’re losing out. Using a telemarketing team to book your seminars means getting the good news out to people that could greatly benefit from attending your seminars.
Working from existing mailing lists or cold calling people with industry links to the seminar subject or topic is a great way to put a telemarketing team to work for your seminars.
THREE: The Follow Up
Using follow up calls is a powerful and effective way to make the most of your direct mail or email marketing. The recipient has already had the opportunity to consider your offer by mail and now telemarketing offers a renewed chance to capitalise on that offer for both parties.
Follow Up calls can also be made after literature or sales enquiries, chasing up interested parties and converting prospects that may have otherwise dithered undecidedly about purchasing your goods or services from a brochure. Follow up interest by using a dedicated telemarketing team to convert interest into action.
FOUR: Market Research
One of the truly time-tested uses of telemarketing is market research, often used for product review and customer feedback. However, these days it can be used to cover a full range of quantitative and qualitative data collection.
Using the latest integrated technology, telemarketing interviewers can handle everything from small executive level surveying to mass nationwide customer feedback questioning. Doing Market Research via the telephone is a highly cost effective method of conducting large-scale market research and can cover vast geographical locations from a single base. Of course, given the right permissions, data gleaned from your market research telemarketing can be used to target the prospects for your next telemarketing campaign.
FIVE: Customer Reactivation
Your organisation should keep a record of all current customers and all those people that were customers but are not actively buying from you. Telemarketing is an effective way to reconnect with and reactivate your dormant customer database and using data that you already have in your systems. By using telemarketing, your company can win you up to 50% of your past customers back!
SIX: Collections
Outstanding invoices and missed payments can really cripple a business and hinder a company’s progress and development. If you’re struggling to recoup outstanding sums, then telemarketing can be an effective method of collecting what’s owed to your company. Working from a list of your debtors, a tele-collections team can identify individuals or companies that owe your organisation money and ensure that you have the correct contact details for them. If you then wish to take a payment, these can be handled through an automated system or passed through to your own payment teams.
SEVEN: Selling Advertising Space
When you’ve got space to sell, you can’t rely on people just coming to you. You need a team of dedicated telemarketers that can directly sell your space to the people that need to advertise. This isn’t simply cold calling; it’s designing a campaign to target those businesses and individuals that might benefit most from the opportunity to use your advertising space. A team of experienced telemarketers can target likely clients and more effectively approach hundreds of potential clients, rapidly improving your chances of new business generation.
EIGHT: Database Cleansing
The information in your database is quickly out of date. By using telemarketers to work through your data, you can correct, delete or amend the details of your existing customers, leads or prospects. By making sure that your data is up to date and accurate, you can increase the rate at which your sales staff can make sales. Data cleansing may also be a legal requirement in various industry sectors, so it also keeps your nose clean with industry’s regulators. Make your existing data work for you by purging useless existing data.
NINE: Lead Generation
Using telemarketers to generate leads means increased sales revenue and greatly reduces the amount it costs to make a sale. When you use telemarketers to generate your leads, you free up your sales teams to do what their good at – which is making sales!
Last, but certainly not least, telemarketing provides a successful route to improving sales by selling directly to those that are already using your products or services. Existing customers are much more easily converted because you don’t need to convince them of your expertise, reputation or benefits.
With an existing customer, you can use telemarketing to offer extended service, upgrades and further features on something they’ve already bought, or offer them a completely new product or service. If the existing customer is happy with what they bought from you in the past, the worst that can happen is that they will simply reject your new offer. But since they were willing to listen in the first place, it wasn’t a hardship and you can still call them again in the future with new offers.
Telemarketing offers organisations of all sizes the opportunity to expand and develop their customer base with reduce costs and impressive results.
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Author: Nancy Beth Guptill
Founder of Sweet Spot Marketing Canada
http://www.SweetSpotMarketing.ca
http://www.SweetSpotInternetAcademy.ca
http://www.SweetSpotMarketingAcademy.ca
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About Sweet Spot Marketing: Sweet Spot Marketing is a new media marketing training and education company that lives by the motto "It is better to know than to think you know, there is power in knowledge". We have a host of education programs in the areas of digital technology, new and social media, marketing automation, creativity, commercial innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. To learn how we work with government, business organizations and corporate clients, please book a complimentary assessment appointment: http://sweet-spot-marketing-canada.genbook.com
