Every savvy sales expert knows that lead generation is one of the most important tasks for the growth and future prospects of a business. To stand still in business is to be beaten by the competition. To be successful, you always need to be sourcing new opportunities and turning interest in your products and services into qualified leads.
Telemarketing remains one of the best ways of generating high value leads for your business. Telemarketing leads are a cost-effective and efficient way to ensure that the leads you generate are of the highest quality and offer the greatest opportunities to develop into paying customers. The process of B2B lead generation is something of an art, however, and takes some talent and experience.
To give you some insight into how best to using telemarketing as a high-value lead generating tool, let’s look at some specific tips in more detail.
Do Your Research
Taking the time to research potential leads more effectively at the outset will increase the likelihood of your telemarketing calls to meet their mark. Make sure that your call list is filled with businesses that would actually be interested in using the products or services that your business provides. Narrowing down your call list to include people from your social media platforms can help in this regard.
It can also be immensely helpful to know the basics of the businesses that you are planning to contact. This includes their ability to purchase your products and services and the job description of the lead that you are actually going to speak with. Ideally, this will be someone with decision-making authority.
The more time you spend making sure that the people you are calling represent solid opportunities, the less time you will waste taking chances on random cold calls.
Avoid Sticking Too Strongly To A Script
Being too rigid with a script in telemarketing is a sure way to annoy potential leads. Even if a business would be interested in your products and services, they are more likely to be turned off by a robotic and unfeeling interaction with a marketer. While using a script is an effective way to ensure that everything gets said during an initial conversation, it can be your own undoing if you choose to adhere to it too strongly.
Instead, if you choose to your telemarketing to generate high-value leads, try adding a little more flexibility to your interactions. Have a conversation with the person on the other end of the line and make sure that your passion for your business shines through. Even in business, people remember how you made them feel and not necessarily the precise words you used. This is especially important during an initial interaction where the best outcome is to perk their interest.
Play The Numbers Game
While it is still important to try to maximise the number of high-quality prospects you solicit, and avoiding the use of a script, when using telemarketing, the technique is still a numbers game in many ways. Forbes refers to this concept as operating at the right frequency. Assuming that your sales pitch is on point, the more people that your sales team interacts with each day, the more potential your business has for attracting new leads.
To truly maximise the effectiveness of your telemarking lead generation, you can even ask the person you are speaking with if they know of any leads themselves that would be interested in your business. As long as you are polite and respectful, this is a high-powered technique.
Collect And Use Data To Make Better Decisions
Making sure to keep track of how successful your past and current telemarketing campaigns are going will allow you to optimise your strategies looking towards the future. One important metric to keep track of is a generalised lead rating system. Categorising the leads that you generate through telemarketing into a few different categories will allow you to prioritise the efforts of your sales team towards closing deals while gauging the overall effectiveness of your telemarketing strategy.
Data can also be collected and put towards the use of identifying a better target market. Using data insights to see what segment of a market has been more responsive to your messaging will allow you to maximise the use of your resources for future campaigns.
Use An Outsourced Telemarketing Service
Using a professional team of outsourced telemarketing agents will allow you to reap all the benefits outlined above and save your own team from the effort of having to make the calls! Professionals who “do telemarketing” on a regular basis know the ins-and-outs of making an effective pitch and prospecting for the best leads. These teams are trained in the most effective methods of persuading and generating interest. Best of all, your team will be able to spend their time and energy on actually converting leads into sales rather than going through the tedium and uncertainty of cold calling.