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As corporate decision-makers seek refuge behind gatekeepers from relentless telemarketers, it has become more challenging for well-intentioned business people to reach these people. Gatekeepers ask you to send an email instead of calling; they question your motives; tell you they don’t take sales calls; and present many more obstacles. So how can you reach more decision-makers efficiently? Here are some tips from our telemarketing services team.

1.       Get the Gatekeeper on Your Side

The gatekeeper is important to you because they can open the door to the person you want to reach. They can put your call through or, if the decision-maker isn’t available, perhaps look at their calendar and tell you the best time to call. 

So make them feel important. Don’t regard them as simply a barrier to be pushed aside. Treat them as a human being. For example, use their name, and ask how their day is going.  

Sales lead qualification in the B2B world is like dating—you learn more about each other over time, deepening your relationship and, when all goes well, you progress seamlessly from introduction to marriage or first-time lead to closed sale.

To be successful, you need to know when to commit more resources to the relationship and when to pull back and provide more space.

The Introduction

If Sally is introduced to Mark at a party, she might be happy to engage in a little small talk, but a marriage proposal would send her running.  Or vice versa.  Too much too soon can kill a relationship….in both business and love.

If you work for a company that sells in the business to business market, outsourcing your appointment setting to professionals may be a smart move, but you should ask some critical questions first. Here’s a list of questions to make selecting the right business to business appointment setting company easy for you.  

Why did you lose…or win…that sale?

What if you could peak under the covers of a lost sale and discover exactly what went wrong? Or perhaps you’d like to know exactly what gave your company the competitive edge in the sales you won. That information would be powerful in developing a strategy to ramp up remarkable sales results.

That’s why I believe in conducting win/loss sales analysis--analyzing why one sales effort won the client over and another did not. You compile data about your buyers’ perceptions of each step in the sales cycle—the marketing messaging, your product or service offering versus the competition, the proposal, the pricing, and more. Then you dissect the data to gain deep insights to what’s working and what’s not and develop a formula for success.

Does Your Trade-Show Follow-Up Suffer These Symptoms?

B2B sales and marketing managers spend plenty of time preparing for tradeshows – developing new products, the booth design and construction, and creating and printing up literature. But often they fail to do the one thing that could more than double or triple their return on investment:

In the run up to a trade show or event, managers typically focus on creating an attractive booth, glossy literature, and the presentation and catering. After all, that's where the big money goes. But to increase your return on investment substantially and maximize B2B lead generation, you need an integrated marketing approach that includes a dose of pre-planning.

Every day, marketing people across the globe are working industriously to acquire leads. Perhaps they offer a white paper on their website which generates sales leads. The leads flow into your marketing pipeline, your marketing department scores them, and then directs those with the highest scores to your sales people, expecting them to transform into revenue.

Can't figure out why your investment in lead generation isn't paying off? You might want to look at your sales department and how they may be dropping the ball when it comes to business-to-business telemarketing.

While some salespeople are doing things right, and by the book, some are not. Instead of engaging prospects in tele-nuturing, the building of long-term, future-oriented relationships over the phone, many teams let sales slip away when they skip critical steps in the sales process.

Here are three things that unwittingly get in the way of making new sales.

70% of Leads Generated are Never Acted on by Sales

Marketing departments put a tremendous amount of energy, time and money into lead generation. Yet, according to the American Marketing Association, approximately 70% of leads generated are treated by the sales force like confetti. They don't think it's worth the time to pick them up, check them out and follow up on them.

Business-to-business lead generation is like growing crops. You can't expect a plentiful harvest if you plant seeds and then neglect them. On the contrary, newly planted seeds need nurturing—water, nutrients, and weeding—to provide fruit.

Today's companies are adept planters. Many focus on lead generation, but most are not doing enough when it comes to nurturing planted seeds (a.k.a. leads) so they grow into abundant resources. Too often, warm leads fizzle away, resulting in lost sales opportunities.