Yes I admit it I’m a telemarketer. But I hope I’m one of the good guys, I don’t sell windows, siding, doors and lawn services. My company does not think bothering people at dinner is a good thing. We might bother you at lunch, but then why are you eating lunch at your desk anyway. Get out enjoy the sunshine. Besides for years sales people using the phone to establish connections and make appointments has been a legitimate way to do business.
But there is the dark side so as a “Telemarketer” my industry has to deal with the pros and cons. We have proven quite effective for years, and marketing managers have reported feeling more valued through telemarketing compared to other less personal options of direct mail, mobile marketing and oh yes email marketing. Did you know the Spam museum up in Austin. Minnesota is free of charge, but I regress. Now some say in this wonderful digital era with all this twits, the 3 F’s of Friends Family and Followers and shares and likes and all that stuff it, Telemarketing, seems passé, out of date and all too time intensive.
Yet I have found more often than not from business leaders, that the pros of telemarketing outweigh the cons.
If you’re like most businesses you have a handful of smaller accounts with one large account that is over 33% of your business. Life is good if nothing changes but if you lose your big account you have a major problem on your hands and it is very likely that one key account loss will put you out of business. So you want to grow, but how? Social Media Marketing push, online ads, pay for clicks, email marketing, direct mail all with not so good results. You know exactly what kind of companies would benefit from your service, and he wants to target local business only. For this kind of situation, your best lead generation option is telemarketing. You might want to use an email or direct mail in combination with telemarketing but I’ll save that for another blog post.
It is a fact that telemarketing is the only marketing action that goes out and grabs the prospect. All others you are hoping and praying that they, the prospect, will pick up the phone and call. Ya right in your dreams.
Reality is, and if anyone telling you different they are lying through their teeth, on the average, it will take 75 to 90 calls to get an opportunity of some kind and unless you’re a real mud slinger, a good B2B Telemarketer is only going to be able to give you 10 to 15 calls an hour. You or your trained sales staff have that kind of time?
So you have 2 options.
The first: hire your own dedicated on staff telemarketer.
You can try to train them, get a list, create a script, give them a phone, a desk, (coffee, plenty of coffee) have payroll, and all the taxes that go with that and then hope and pray that once they get trained and working good they don’t up and leave, get burnt out, get hired away or any other number of telemarketer agent problems. Think about what this is going to cost you.
If you are not ready to hear: "What is my script?” “How do I handle the call?” “What data should I use?” “Do I send follow up emails?" “Do we have a PDF ready to roll?” “Do we have a mailer stuffed and ready to just address?” Wow. This is the technical side of running a telemarketing lead generation operation for one agent or a hundred.
Second option: You can hire a telemarketing services company like mine Larson and Associates 847-991-1294 www.larsonassociates.ws .
As a telemarketing service we take care of prospecting potential clients, making cold calls, setting appointments and everything else in between.
If you use Larson & Associates, we do the hiring of a dedicated telemarketer for you. One person who is the ONLY person who will be calling for you (as well as one back up person, just in case. Things do happen) Then we get everything ready from the script, the lists or lists (which you might provide or have us down load one from 1 of the 3 list companies we use) to an email or direct mail program to a email follow-up to pre-set mailers ready to go. What you can’t or don’t want to do and have ready and in place we do so when you go live with your program it is as successful as possible.
Larson Notes & Satire: If you choose to use us all you need to do is make a pre-payment for the first two weeks of your program to reserve your dedicated agent and set up a start date.
The hard work of getting new clients will not stop there. Getting good sales results is a hard, process. But you can now have an experienced agent in place and an experienced company watching out for your best interests and to help you on your way to new client heaven. After all, 75% of B2B sales involve some form of human interaction and intervention, be a phone call or a meeting, telemarketing for lead generation is only the first 30% of that.
Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-1294
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
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P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 10 hours a week. Maybe you should add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.
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1 comment:
Good post.
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