Even wonder why people behave rudely toward telemarketers?
They’d disconnect the call even before listening to your offer!
Before writing for TeleCRM, getting a telemarketer’s call was the worst part of my day.
After I started writing for TeleCRM I figured out what most telemarketers do wrong. This is the script of 99% of telemarketing calls –
Caller: Am I speaking with Rahul
Rahul: Yes, who is this?
C: I am Amit from Anand Realtech Pvt. Ltd. Are you interested in buying real estate in Noida?
R: No!
C: Ok if you are ever looking for real estate, you can call me on this number…
Why would anyone invest crores with a random person calling from a random number?
Most telecallers don’t make an effort to create or deliver value. This is why most prospects feel that the worst part of their day is receiving calls from telemarketers.
What if you can do it differently? What if you can:
- Hold a conversation on every call.
- Generate at least some level of interest with every person you talk to.
- End every call cordially.
- If the prospect is himself not interested at the moment you can ask for referrals.
- Start getting inbound calls from these prospects when they are ready to buy!
All it takes is a minor shift in your approach.
But before talking about that, let us first understand the term ;
What is Telemarketing?
Telemarketing, also known as inside sales, or telesales. It is a kind of direct marketing in which a salesperson (a telemarketer) promotes a product or service through calls.
It is the process of making calls to generate leads, gather marketing information and make sales. Telemarketing is a particularly valuable tool for businesses, as it saves both time and money as compared to personal selling. It offers many of the same benefits in terms of direct selling.
Knowing the importance of telemarketing in business is especially useful for businesses whose products and services are located in hard-to-reach places.
It is like; a company might send information about its products and services first, then follow up with telemarketing calls to assess and finally hit the sales.
Advantages of telemarketing
- Human Interaction: People buy from people. It is the duty of telemarketers to make their prospects feel confident about their decision.
- Small Businesses: Unless you are a big MNC you may not have the resources to send people visiting prospects and closing deals face-to-face. This is where telesales becomes a saviour. Your team can reach out to hundreds of potential prospects each day without leaving the office.
- To Provide Customer Service: Because of Covid customers usually don’t expect you to be physically present at all times, but when they are stuck, they expect a solution for their problems.
Telemarketing can be a great way to provide the support that your customers need. Plus it helps you build a relationship with them and get renewal orders, upsells, and referrals as well.
- Increases Flexibility: Telemarketing is flexible in many ways like; it helps you to know your customer’s needs and requirements. What they want, how to convince them, and to get an order over the phone. Hence it is one of the most flexible forms of direct marketing. It’s also a brilliant way of collecting data and feedback from existing customers, which helps the brands to better understand what’s working and what’s not.
- Reduces Cost: Telemarketing helps reduce 3 major types of costs
- Time cost: If you have a talented sales force then your time is equal to money. Because your team members can take max 2 face-to-face meetings but they can easily take 4-6 zoom meetings/calls.
- Commuting cost: When your valuable assets spend their time in unnecessary commuting, you are leaking money. Thus telemarketing helps you to reduce unnecessary commuting expenses.
- Opportunity cost: Of the lost deals where prospects did not opt because of the hassle involved in face-to-face meetings.
- Measurable: It’s very easy to track, measure, and optimise the effectiveness of your telemarketing operation. You can do this with the help of a Customer Relation management software. Here are 3 ways to set up automatic tracking, measurement, and optimization with a CRM software
- You can use Customer Relation Management Software like TeleCRM and set up accurate call volume and duration tracking.
- You can record all the conversations and download them into an excel sheet for further analysis and review
- You can define organizational hierarchy and delegate the monitoring to your managers.
We’ve covered the ease and benefits of telemarketing, and some of the pitfalls that you must avoid. Now let’s look at the 4 different types of telemarketing, and their use cases so that you can clearly understand which one is best for you…
The 4 types of Telemarketing are:
- Inbound Telemarketing.
- Outbound Telemarketing.
- Business to Business Telemarketing.
- Business-to-Customer Telemarketing.
Let us discuss each type of telemarketing in detail to understand:
1. Inbound Telemarketing
Inbound telemarketing means handling incoming phone calls that are usually generated by broadcast advertising, direct emails, or sending catalogues. It is usually taking orders for a wide range of products.
In inbound strategy the prospect will be initiating the very first conversation with a company. The caller or telemarketer will be providing the right information to the prospects who have already shown interest in your products and services.
Another important thing is to understand and value your customers. This will help them reach their goals when they come to you and ask about your products and services.
Why? Because every time your customer succeeds, you succeed.
There are three methodologies you can apply in inbound:
- Attract: Draw your prospect’s attention to your services with valuable content and conversation that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they can engage.
- Engage: at this step, you need to present insights and solutions that align with their pain points so they are more likely to buy from you.
- Delight: provide them with help and support to empower them to find success with their purchase.
When your flywheel is based on the inbound methodology, your marketing, sales, and services can add force and eliminate friction throughout all the 3 phases: attract, engage, and delight.
Let’s pack some more inbound marketing strategies in detail:
The below-given strategies will help you effectively market to your target audience in an inbound way.
Attracting Strategies
This strategy is tied to content creation and development. To reach your target audience, start by creating content and publishing them such as blog articles, content offers, and social media that provide value.
Examples include guides on how to use your product, how your service can be beneficial, information about how your solutions can solve their problems, testimonials, and details about discounts and promotions.
To attract your audience on a deeper level through inbound marketing, optimise this content with an SEO strategy. This will allow your content to organically appear on your Search Engine Results page (SERP) for the people who are searching for this kind of information.
Engaging Strategies
While using an inbound strategy, try to communicate with your prospect. Listen to them, understand their problem and provide the right solution accordingly.
While doing this, inject them with all the information about how your company will add value to their problems and will provide suitable solutions to them. Keep your focus on how to build a connection and make them convinced to buy while they have shown interest in your product or service. Additionally, you need to make sure that you are selling a solution rather than selling a product. This will end in closing another deal.
Delighting Strategies
This strategy ensures that customers are happy, satisfied, and feel supported after they made a purchase. Sending them regular messages and offers with the help of chatbots will make them feel valued. Moreover, to delight them; have surveys and ask for their feedback as well.
TeleCRM can help you get this done in a few minutes, they have a dedicated team that will handle all the hustle and you can easily handle all of your customers.
Remember: a delighted customer will always become a brand advocate and promoter.
Audience for the inbound telemarketing
In inbound telemarketing, you retain all those incoming prospects and try to propagate your products or services to them. Your target audience already knows about what type of product or service they will be getting from you. Therefore, they are your potential prospects you need to engage with them and delight them individually. You must also partner with your sales team to keep the flywheel spinning effectively and help your business grow.
Most common key challenges an Inbound Telemarketing faces:
- Not building a clear market strategy. One of the most common challenges in inbound marketing is not having a clear strategy. It can be difficult to figure out what your target audience is, and how you will use tactics to solve their problem.
- Inbound marketing is time-consuming. The major problem is that this type of marketing needs time and patience to put into practice.
- Lack of optimization for conversions. A call to Action is super important. If you are dealing with somebody, you need to give a CTA to convert your prospect into a potential client. But during conversations on calls, it lacks sometimes.
- Not good enough user engagement. Prospects get bored for a variety of reasons. For example, poor website design, or mobile optimization. This diverts their mind from purchasing from you and hence you might lose a sale.
- Not having enough resources. Customers want consistent interactions across different channels but due to insufficient resources, it becomes a major issue.
These are some of the major challenges inbound telemarketing faces.
Let’s go to the part, about how you can ace this type of marketing:
- Motivate them in the right way: let the reps engage in a friendly way with the prospects and keep motivating them from time to time to build trust.
- Make sure you are on the same page: nobody should be left behind in the conversation. This will help them to get familiarised with unfamiliar processes.
- Provide sufficient information: it is a good thing to provide information but it should not be over when explained. Only tell the things that are necessary for them.
Key aspects that you can ease with TeleCRM:
- TeleCRM will help you get Whatsapp API, after following certain procedures you can have your very own WhatsApp API and can connect with your customers safely.
2. Outbound telemarketing
Outbound telemarketing involves a proactive sales approach. The telemarketers make calls to target a group of consumers to sell their company’s products and services. It requires you to actively reach out to the targeted audience through unsolicited phone calls.
Outbound Telemarketing involves appointment setting for B2B lead generation, customer follow-ups, or for market data research.
Audience for the outbound telemarketing
All those leads are your target audience who have not shown any prior interest in your products or services. Unlike Inbound telemarketing you need to reach out to them in order to create awareness among them .
Strategies to apply in outbound marketing to put your prospect in the center and become their go-to expert:
- Set realistic KPIs (Key Performance Indicator):
The key performance indicators such as client retention rate, client satisfaction, profit margin, and revenue growth are counted in Key Performance Indicators. Identifying and tracking down the right KPI gives you the ability to measure the success of your outbound telemarketing performance. Therefore, you are able to set realistic and achievable targets. And with the help of TeleCRM, you can do this very effectively.
- Prepare a quality prospect list:
Always remember that everyone is not your customer. In Telemarketing, you have a database. Thus segregating them and qualifying them is very important. With the help of a CRM software like TeleCRM you can easily maintain your database accordingly. You can segregate them on the basis of interested not interested and with many other customizable tags as well.
- Listen to your previous calls:
This will allow you to capture the weak spots of your telecallers. Note down points of successful as well as unsuccessful calls and find out where they are good at, and where they need improvement. This will help you to create new customers. A customer relation management software like TeleCRM provides call monitoring features. With the help of call monitoring, you can easily listen to the calls of your telecallers.
- Ask the right questions:
Asking the right questions at the right time will help you get a step closer to making a sale. It gives you the ability to provide your prospects with valuable solutions to their problems. Questions could be about anything, about their expectations, challenges, preferences, etc.
While they answer, validate their opinion and explain your solutions accordingly.
- Learn to overcome objections:
Objections are inevitable in outbound telemarketing. When a prospect counters your pitch, listen to their objections and try to determine the reason why they are thinking so. After that take your time to explain your points and convince them how your product or service can solve their problems. Don’t force them to buy, listen to them and positively handle the objections.
- Play the numbers game:
Telemarketing is a numbers game, to win it, you should ask your prospect how many calls they want to make? What amount of time do they want to achieve such a target? All these types of questions help you to win them over.
Therefore, the best way is to showcase that the amount of numbers they need to achieve is achievable and you can help them to do so.
- Being robotic:
Some companies use scripts for making outbound calls, which can be a useful strategy when used appropriately. However, as a salesperson, you sometimes try to cram the script and sound robotic. Don’t do that because there is no similar customer every time thus you need to be flexible. follow the script’s pattern and have your own way of presenting it.
- Speaking to the wrong prospect:
Most telemarketers face this issue, spending their time and energy on convincing the wrong prospects. One way to avoid wasting time is by asking them if they are the right person to talk to, they will immediately confirm if they are not. This will help you to sort out only those relevant prospects and avoid those that have no purchasing authority. You can mark these prospects as irrelevant in your customer relationship management software like TeleCRM and do not disturb them again.
- Dealing with difficult prospects:
It often happens that when telemarketers try to make a call to their prospect, they just get rude for no reason. Either they do not want to make a purchase or they put a list of questions in front of your callers before making the purchase. In this scenario, just do one thing! Let them speak first and when they finish. Simply don’t jump to providing a solution. Rather, try to make a bond with the prospect. In this way, they will feel valued and comfortable to talk further.
- High competition in the market:
As there are many options available in the market for just one product or service, it becomes difficult for a telemarketer to compete against them. Therefore, you need to provide your customers something out of the box that can create curiosity in their mind. This can be related to drop in price, some amazing benefits, etc.
These are some of the challenges faced in outbound telemarketing. Let us discuss how to ace in case of outbound marketing:
- Know your competitors: you must know what your competitors are offering and how you can put an effective solution in front of your prospects so they cannot reject you.
- Understand your market: when you put the effort into knowing about your market, it would be one step closer to making sales. With the right understanding, you are able to provide exactly what your prospects want.
3. Business to Business Telemarketing (B2B).
Business to Business telemarketing is a cost-effective method in which one business calls another business. This type of calling can be cold calling or unsolicited calling. The purpose can be anything, from generating leads, qualifying prospects, and direct following up through email.
Telemarketing can be an effective B2B lead generation platform because it builds trust via a personal connection. It helps to enable direct contact with powerful decision-makers for faster lead qualification and conversion.
The target audience for B2B Telemarketing:
Any company that sells to another company can benefit from B2B telemarketing. The target audience would be any influencer, a decision maker from a company, and a buyer who will take economic factors and budgeting into consideration.
In this, one company sells its product and services to another company that may require those products or services.
Strategies to get started with B2B Telemarketing:
Quality B2B telemarketing requires:
- Email marketing campaigns:
Email marketing is one of the biggest trends at the moment, which has generated great leads for b2b businesses. After the email marketing campaigns, the leads will be generated automatically, because your prospects will get aware about your products and services. In order to segregate all these automatically generated leads you need to have a customer relation management software and the TeleCRM is one of the best options you can get to segregate all these leads precisely.
- Give something away for free.
You can lure your prospects by offering them some sort of free services or features related to your business. Of course, these free proposals are a lead generation strategy, which is designed to use and turn the free users into paying customers.
- Turn your blog posts into in-depth guides.
This is another lead generation strategy in which you can put efforts into creating content for your website, blogs, social media channels, and much more. You can also turn your content into a complete guide to business management – which can be meaningful for other business owners and they might get interested in your services.
Key challenges faced by B2B Telemarketing:
- Hard selling:
When you do hard selling most of the time prospects will hang up the call before even listening to you. In order to avoid such things, you need to understand the prospects and business. Hence, try to have a conversation, understand their problems, and help them understand how your software can solve their problems. Never ever try to sell your product at the very beginning.
- Identifying qualified leads:
When you do B2B Telemarketing, you have a huge database. Thus, segregating the database is a very challenging task. It involves identifying qualified leads from the database.
Now maintaining the data of the qualified leads is a very crucial part. Especially if you are a startup or a small business, you’ll have a hard time managing your data across multiple platforms for lead management, report analytics, etc. What you can do is use TeleCRM which acts as a CRM for startups and can help you maintain your database accordingly.
You can segregate them on the basis of interested not interested and with many other customizable tags as well.
- Catching the lead’s attention on calls.
Having the full attention of your prospect is very important and it can not be done if you keep on babbling about your product. Therefore, it requires two-sided communication, and most telecallers fail to do so. Try to make your telecallers be more engaging in having a two-sided conversation. This can be done by asking relevant questions.
Steps to ace in B2B telemarketing:
- Scheduling:
Scheduling your calls will make the most of your time. Researching prospects and calling them at a proper time can make a big difference.
- Effective questioning:
Using your knowledge of the prospect to guide the conversation. Rather than promoting the benefits of your products. Using effective questions to determine how it will help them and whether it will be feasible for them in order to support and cater to their business.
- Know your goal:
Each call you make should have a specific purpose, this will give your pitch clarity and avoid wasting time. Therefore, know your goal and make your targets accordingly.
4. Business to Customer Telemarketing (B2C)
Business-to-customer telemarketing is a broad spectrum of every category that we have discussed up till now. It might include a business profile, an individual, an industry, etc. out of them anyone can be your customer. And they are the people that want your product or service. Thus we can say Business to customer telemarketing means creating awareness about your product to all those prospects that can be your customers, without considering their status quo.
Strategies for B2C to put the prospect in the center and become their go-to expert are:
- Connect with prospects on an emotional level:
If you are focused on building relationships, treat them like emotional beings and not ATMs where they will dispense cash for your products and services.
The idea is to present yourself and your business as a solution to their problems.
- Add a free offer with some purchases:
Adding a free offer might help you in increasing your sales. It helps them know that they are getting something extra, which becomes a win-win situation for you as well as for them.
- Set clear objectives:
Have a clear understanding of your ultimate goal and that is making a sale. Therefore, be clear with your approach while making a call with prospects. You can understand their problem and convince them that your product and services are the only solutions for their problem.
Key challenges faced by B2C Telemarketing:
There are multiple challenges you can face when it comes to making sales and growing the business.
Some of them are:
- Adjusting to customer behaviour:
This is one of the biggest challenges, where a salesperson will face issues because of the prospect’s behaviour when they are communicating on a call. A prospect can be rude to the caller for no reason and he can be polite as well, therefore it creates a challenge to adjust accordingly every time. A caller needs to be versatile in this case to handle all types of customers.
- Staying on top of trends and new market changes:
It becomes difficult for telemarketers to compete against new trends in the market and maintain their spot on top of trends every time. As the competition arises, so does the challenge. Any prospect would get better options while making a purchase.
- Using customer data and dealing with overload
It becomes challenging for telemarketers to handle a large amount of customer data and maintain records for the future. The data is generated at every touch point, from every customer, web visitor, and the prospect you are trying to reach. To maintain such informative data always use CRM software like TeleCRM. It will keep track of each and everything related to the customer.
Ways to ace your B2C telemarketing:
- Customer engagement:
This is one of the easiest solutions to ace your marketing, it requires you to make engagement with your prospects while you are offering them your services and products. It could be achieved by asking the right set of questions, handling objections, and creating interest in your offers.
- Preciseness and clarity:
Know your prospect conditions precisely and remember, you have got a limited time to interact with them. Therefore, you need to be very clear and offer your services accordingly. It will help to save both parties time and also convenient to get results.
- Considerateness and professionalism:
Being polite is the best way to make your prospect stay with you on a call. They can be a bit uncouth at times but the telemarketers need to maintain their composure at all costs. Also, it is equally important to maintain a professional tone, you can be friendly with the prospect but have to maintain a distance that can lead you to get another sale.
- Using CRM software:
Always use CRM software like TeleCRM to maintain the records and the data of your prospects. So when you contact them again you will get the whole idea about them. And they will get amazed by this as they think you remember them. Moreover, you can record calls and monitor them accordingly to analyse what sort of situation you need to put in prior to dealing first. CRM software can help you ace your sales remarkably want to know more about how? You can visit TeleCRM.
Wrapping up:
In this article, we helped you know about the importance and types of telemarketing and how proper telemarketing can lead to proper sales closure. With the right strategies and with the right resources like CRM software you can ace your telemarketing to the very next level. And this will help you in the growth of your business. Consider that all types of Telemarketing are equally important but the main idea is to understand the needs of your prospect and then provide the solution. TeleCRM will help you get your work done easily.
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