Tele-Services

What would you do if your company leadership landed you with a big hairy audacious goal of increasing leads by 2000%? Run for cover? Start putting out feelers in the job market? You’d probably think they were completely out of touch with reality. How could you possible achieve such an absurd goal? The truth is the data shows this is one goal you can achieve with well-orchestrated business-to-business telemarketing.

It just takes a step-by-step process to pre-qualify leads on the Internet, and respond to the crème de la crème quickly. How quickly? Within 5 minutes. 

Because communication is the lifeblood of any sales process, management is always seeking more efficient ways to communicate with prospects and clients. With all the possibilities for quick and easy communication methods brought forth by the digital age—social media, search engine optimization, email marketing, and more—the telephone has been sidelined by many sales and marketing departments.

And that simple fact could give you a competitive edge, but only if you decide to stand out from the crowd and add telemarketing services to your sales and marketing tactics. That’s because for all the strengths of digital marketing, it cannot replace a two-way phone conversation where people get to the root of complex business problems and find solutions together.

So where should you be using the phone to increase revenues?

Implementing a win/loss analysis program, which dissects the sales efforts your company has won or lost, requires thoughtful planning. To be successful and boost your new business win-rate, you need to get all members of your team on the same page.

Here’s a checklist of steps to launch a win/loss program:

If your telemarketing efforts are achieving sub-par results, it’s only natural to wonder whether your internal telemarketing agents, or those from your B2B teleservices company, are doing a good job.

It’s a good question.

After all, the inside sales people are on the front lines. They are the voice of your company. If they make a good first impression, your company can crack open the door, and start a relationship. If on the other hand they are unprepared for a call, and unable to hold a beneficial one-to-one conversation with your prospect or client, your company will suffer a black mark, making your job that much harder.

Relationships Not Robots

The primary aim of business-to-business lead generation is to form relationships with prospects and nurture them until they turn into business. But even the best script in the world cannot help telesales agents forge relationships.

Have you ever picked up the phone during election season and heard a robotic voice reading a recorded message in support of a particular candidate? If you’re like most people, as soon as you realize that you’re not speaking with a person, you hang up the phone.

But sometimes live human beings can have the same impersonal affect as a prerecorded message. That’s because they’re reading from a script, and, well, it sounds like they’re reading from a script. In business-to-business telemarketing, scripts have the devastating effect of turning off potential clients because your goal is to have a true peer-to-peer discussion.

The challenge of business-to-business lead generation and nurturing is often made worse by self-inflicted handicaps. One such handicap is a marketing database jam packed with incorrect, redundant, or outdated contact and company information. It wreaks havoc on sales and marketing campaigns anddooms sales representatives to poor results.

The Aging Data Challenge

Customer contact information tends to age quickly. And in the last few years, the data-aging process has accelerated. Causes for inaccurate data include:

Your sales people ask you for well-qualified leads to help in customer acquisition. They want buyers with bucks, who’re authorized to buy, need what you offer, have a sense of urgency, and can benefit from one of your solutions or products.

It sounds simple. So why does your sales funnel fail in producing qualified leads? There are several common reasons.

• Your Website Is a Lone Warrior

Your website can’t do the job alone. It’s just a cog in the sales and marketing machine. Your website may be optimized and starring on Google’s rankings. Your blog posts could be being shared frequently on LinkedIn, Twitter and across the Web.

As the New Year dawns, many are resolving to shed a few pounds, become more familiar with the local gym, quit smoking, or climb out of debt. But those of us who strive for business growth need to find more effective ways to put our sales people in front of buyers. And that means developing some New Year's resolutions that will make us more successful at setting B2B appointments with prospects.
Use these New Year's resolutions to boost your success with B2B appointment setting or to lead your telemarketing team.

Dear Marketing:

Because the holiday season is all about giving, the sales team thought you’d like to know what we want this year. We all agreed that we don’t want fruitcake, chocolates, bottles of booze, ties, or scarves, or even Starbucks gift cards. We want gifts that keep on giving—the kind that can make us money year round. What we really want is business-to-business telemarketing.

And we know that it’s better to give than receive. So we’re planning something special for you, too. We’re so excited about it that we’re breaking the news now. If you give us all the tools on our Holiday list, we’re going to work with you to achieve revenues beyond your wildest dreams.

Interested? Good, because here are the details on what we want.

In my last blog post, I discussed how to get past the gatekeeper. Let’s assume that you’ve broken through the gate and now you’re faced with new challenges in your quest for business-to-business lead generation. You either reach voicemail, or are put through to the decision maker and need to engage them in conversation.

Cracking the Voicemail Conundrum

More often than not, you end up battling with voicemail. What does it take to break through?