Lost Opportunity
Businesses lose thousands every day through ineffective telemarketing.
No matter how well trained or dedicated, telemarketing professionals without proper support and pre-planning will lose opportunities and marketing investment will be wasted. The damage will be significant: poor telemarketing execution damages reputations. There are brands and companies synonymous with ‘hard sell’: you do not want to be counted amongst them.
Where did those leads go?
Most companies have thought leadership campaigns and generate significant interest on their blogs and websites. Direct mail pieces are well thought through and targeted. Email campaigns are effective; white papers are downloaded and visitor numbers increase. But despite doing ‘everything right’ companies still fail to develop a reasonable number of opportunities for the investment made.
The problem is that poor co-ordination and a lack of timely information means that most leads generated by marketing are wasted.
Often, getting a complete record of an individual’s interactions with an organisation is difficult if not impossible. Leads get passed to telemarketing because they ‘downloaded a White Paper’ but the neither telemarketer nor the company know that the prospect accessed the company’s website on several separate occasions, read case studies and product information.
Put simply data collection is not sophisticated enough to spot opportunities. Jonathan Calver discusses how to address this issue in ‘Lead Profiling to Accelerate Sales’.
For a copy: Click here
The second problem is that telemarketing agencies (and even internal sales resources) respond too late.
There is only one thing that cools faster than a ‘warm lead’ and that is a ‘hot lead’.
When someone is pre-disposed to purchase; customer service rules. Take your time over recognising their interest and they are likely to find another vendor. The fact is your prospects are bombarded with information on a daily basis. Getting a spreadsheet with 200 ‘warm leads’ to your telemarketing agency within 48 hours is no longer good enough. You are effectively giving the agency a list to cold call. And the results will be poor.
Telemarketing can only be effective if leads are processed immediately.
Getting it right
With multiple agencies, different departments, products, divisions and campaigns, getting everyone onto the same page may appear to be an impossible task. But it is not. Infrastructure and systems exist that link each element of your campaigns, your team and your marketplace. And they do it securely: you do not have to let third parties into your databases.
The Paper: Marketing Operations, shows how companies can co-ordinate multiple campaigns with feeds from Web Analytics through to eMail and deliver a 360 degree picture of a prospect directly to a telemarketer who can act on it.
If you would like it: Click Here
Telemarketing can be effective when supported by good planning and co-ordinated execution. That way your agents will be calling the right person, at the right time and have the right conversation.
Posted: April 29th, 2010 / No Comments /
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