Telemarketing. Love it or loathe it, but my experience has generally been a positive one when using telemarketers to make appointments.
That said, you can have campaigns where you don’t get any response whatsoever. This may not be the fault of the in-house telemarketing person or outsourced. A poor response rate can be due to one or more factors:
- the quality of the data you’re using;
- your message or the offer you’re making;
- timing, i.e. calling during key holiday periods; or
- the ability of the telemarketer to develop a rapport with any gate keepers (receptionists, PAs etc.) and ultimately the key decision makers.
To try and make your calls as successful as possible I would advocate the following approach:
- Identify your prospects – think of businesses who would be your ‘perfect client’, so businesses in a key sector; of a particular size (turnover, no. employees, no. offices etc.); in a specific location; similar to existing clients and so on.
- Create your list of target perfect clients – will this be a bought-in list using the chosen criteria outlined above, will it be a list of current contacts you have, or will you do your own web-based research to create the list?
- Clean the list – i.e. get someone (could be the telemarketing person/agency) to call the people on the list to confirm contact details of the key people you want to talk to, check addresses, phone numbers etc. In my experience, if you buy in data only 30-40% of it will be accurate.
- Send a mailing (could be an email) to your list. The mailing should give a brief overview as to who you are, but more importantly how you could help their business. There should also be an ‘offer’, i.e. you will come and do them a free review of their business/accounts/marketing. The aim of this offer is to arrange an appointment to go and see them – it doesn’t matter what you offer, as long as it gets you in front of a prospective client.
- Brief the telemarketing person/agency on what you are trying to achieve. Give them copies of the information which has been sent out in advance so they can familiarise themselves with the content, but can also send out copies if the recipient hasn’t seen it.
- Get the telemarketing person/agency to make the follow-up calls to this mailing/email to try and arrange appointments for you. However, do bear in mind it can take several attempts to get through to the right person and to start to develop that rapport.
- It is important you choose people who have the requisite skills and experience to make telemarketing calls. It is not something that anyone can do. Your telemarketer should be articulate and sound professional without being pushy, but also able to strike up a conversation with people they don’t know and to get to know them better. The main skills required are having the determination and coping with rejection! On average a telemarketer will make 60-70 calls per day, most of which result in no-calls (they can’t speak to the correct person, the call goes to voice mail or is not answered). Another large proportion will say ‘not interested’ and only a small amount will be interested and agree to an appointment or whatever offer is being made. You’ve got to be pretty thick-skinned to be a telemarketer!
Some people just do telemarketing campaigns, without sending a mailing or email beforehand. This is a typical ‘cold calling’ approach. In my experience, your conversion rates for getting appointments is enhanced by sending the mailing beforehand, to ‘warm them up’, so they have some name/brand recognition when the follow-up call is made.
A direct marketing approach of a mailing followed up by a telephone call is a very effective way of targeting prospective clients. In a world which is full of white noise from social media and emails, try talking to people – you’ll be amazed at how effective it can be!
