How does cold calling and telemarketing fit in to your sales and marketing process?
First, let me thank you for taking the time to read my first blog at Advance TM Group on why I think cold calling and telemarketing have positive impacts on the marketing and sales process.
As the Business Development Executive of Advance my role is naturally to research and find ways that will generate new business for the company outside of cold calling, such as.
- Social Media
- Mail Shots
- Trade shows
There are many others, with each being wonderful ways for businesses to gain exposure with their own unique way of being utilised.
So, does the telephone still have a role to play when it comes to Business-to-Business marketing and lead generation?
I must point out that my favourite way of generating new business is still the old-fashioned way of picking up the telephone and having a conversation.
To some of the younger generation this may seem odd, in a world where we are born into ever growing technology you now learn how to use a computer before learning to talk. It is no surprise that there are more and more posts declaring Cold Calling as “dead” and that selling through social media is going to be the only future in the sales and marketing process.
I wanted to share my own experiences with you and explain why I think the telephone and more importantly cold calling is still one of the most important and affective tools in Business 2 Business lead generation and sales.
1, Lead Generation
It might sound obvious putting this as number 1, but I feel it should be here to help everyone remember that it is one of the original solution used to help companies grow.
Telemarketing starts with a desire to sell a company’s products or services, if you sell into a defined target market then you are more likely to be successful.
The normal flow after identifying your target audience is to gain a desire from your prospect and when your leads are cold it usually means your prospects will not be expecting your call at all.
This means that your ability to listen and identify key buying signals must be even greater than that of a follow up call.
From there your goal is to build a relationship, identify a sales opportunity and arrange an appointment. This is where the process can ultimately fail. We have a strong ethos at Advance and that is quality over quantity, it sounds so obvious but from that initial cold call you need to establish several things.
- Why are we seeing this prospect?
- What is the need?
- How can we help?
Appointment setting is still one of the most valuable and important exercises for any business.
2, Inbound Lead’s
Managing your inbound enquiries is critical to a company’s success, not following up on these leads in the right way means you could be losing money. I don’t necessarily mean the money that the prospect might be looking spend with you straight away but what about the money you have spent driving that traffic to you?
These marketing activities can come from any number of sources but if you have been waiting for a response of some sort then why delay it any further?
This could be viewed as a warm lead, but we don’t want to get carried away by that. You could in fact be 1 of 3 companies that provide a service your new prospect is looking for. Whenever we receive a warm lead at Advance we approach it with the same attitude,
- Are they relevant
- Why have they contacted us?
- Is there a genuine need?
- How can we help?
The point I’m making is that telemarketing can amplify your return on investment from your other marketing channels, the last thing you want to do is waste your hard work from initial marketing by not picking up the phone and completing the marketing jigsaw.
3, Marketing follow up
One of the most crucial measures in any business is time, we can’t replace it and we can’t afford to waste it. It only makes sense that when a company releases a new product or service they naturally go full throttle with their marketing, usually this is because they want a return on investment from that marketing content sooner rather later.
Companies can spend thousands of pounds on marketing a new product or service, creating fantastic brochures or a new part of the website and naturally so.
It only makes sense to bang the drum about this news and stand out from your competition, take for example Advance TM Group. At the start of 2018 we released our new website and naturally we wanted to drive traffic towards it. We needed to cross sell our services but make sure prospects understood how we worked.
With careful planning we created a successful twitter and LinkedIn campaign, each day we advertised one of our Telemarketing Campaigns through these channels and directed people to visit our new website.
Naturally there was a cost implication when doing this marketing release but with a clear vision of who are target audience was and an agreed content release schedule we were able to drive new leads to our website and receive new enquiries.
This was fantastic for Advance but the quickest and most efficient way to identify whether these prospects would benefit from a construction specific telemarketing campaign was to pick up the phone and introduce ourselves properly.
Suffice to say the campaign was a huge success and yielded fantastic results for us as a business, would it have been so fantastic had we had not of followed up with a call and had conversation?
At Advance we believe in exploring different marketing channels and we are huge advocates of using social media to promote our different services. Though we back up each of these with targeted call campaigns, this has provided measurable success and helped increase the ROI from all our marketing projects.
Telemarketing can receive an unfair reputation and can be negatively perceived, however at Advance we are working to break the mould and build long lasting relationships with our team and clients. Our aim is to be the best quality driven construction specific lead generation and telemarketing partner available.
If you would like to know more or have any questions on the services we provide, please get in touch today.
Thank you for reading.
Mike Dunn
Business Development Executive