The amazing thing about business-to-business (B2B) telemarketing is that it pretty much opens up a world of opportunities for professional telemarketers to explore different types of people and conversations that lead to the discovery of one’s self. What better way to get a head start on this than being inspired by some of the memorable songs of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, who, in his own right, lived and passed on leaving behind a message of internal peace and external harmony.
These mantras live forever, and it can serve as a guide for those who are up to the challenge of telemarketing and the dynamics that come along with it:
“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” – Preparedness always gives an advantage, as luck favors those who are prepared. But you wouldn’t want to leave the fate of your efforts to chance; a professional telemarketer puts considerable efforts into making sure everything’s ready and will start on a good note.
“Remember the Time” – Every campaign has an element of time. Though some projects give you more than ample time to produce numbers, there’s no reason for procrastination or delaying tactics. Time is money, and the more you maximize your time, the more productive you will be.
“Human Nature” – Now, effectively talking to prospects may be a natural talent for some people, but for those who were not endowed with such a gift, it should be taken as an art that needs to be perfected. The key is to never forget that whatever their roles in company may be, they’re still humans deep down, and you can only bring that nature out if you treat them like one.
“Black Or White” – The world isn’t divided into black or white, as is the vocation of telemarketing. When prospects say yes or no, it doesn’t necessarily equate to the truth. It’s a telemarketer’s job to probe on the undisclosed needs and desires of the prospect and of the business, and to get a clear understanding of whether or not they know what they are saying.
“You Are Not Alone”– In outsourced lead generation firms, teams are specially assembled to tackle a particular project. This includes team leaders, coaches, researchers and quality assurance specialists. The amount of support that goes into developing telemarketers has seen its growth especially since businesses are looking more into “personalizing” the call experience for prospects.
“Man in the Mirror” – despite the available support, the best resource is yourself. The will to improve or reinvent one’s self is something that cannot be taught. External motivation can only do so much as adding more fuel to the fire, the flame itself must come from within.
“Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough” – The strength of a warrior is not measured by his victories but by his failures. Getting a lot of rejections from prospects may sometimes be demoralizing, but each person has his own mechanism of resiliency and perseverance; you just need to find out what is yours.
The secret to a successful lead generation campaign, as well as retention of customers, can be as simple as providing customer service. Believe it or not, an excellent customer service system can help your company establish a firmer hold in a rather volatile market, as well as identify potential sales leads that would otherwise not appear if the way you treat customers is generally sloppy. If you want to take to take your marketing campaign to the next level, make sure that your appointment setting team knows how to provide an excellent customer service. In case you are in the dark as to what it covers, here are the main points below:
Of course, this is assumed that your people are skilled at these matters. In case you are not, then comes the time for you to look for outside help. There are a lot of B2B lead generation agencies that can assist you for this type of work. There is no loss for you if you can get in touch with a professional one. This is an excellent investment to your business, and further improves the effectiveness of your customer service.
First-call resolution (FCR) is the immortal mantra of inbound marketing campaigns. If you cannot satisfy a customer’s questions on the first call, then your marketing campaign is not doing enough. While this is clearly applicable in the inbound marketing business, will it also apply to outbound lead generation processes? The answer is actually a ‘yes’. You can employ FCR strategies when looking for qualified sales leads.
The premise is actually simple: we want to resolve everything in just one call. This will save everyone the time, money, and effort involved in entertaining each call. The less repeat calls you make on a single person, the more people that can be contacted in a single day. In terms of marketing and appointment setting, qualifying leads with a single call can mean a big thing. But for this set-up to work in a lead generation campaign, you need to have initiative.
It is not bad to follow your sales script, especially if it comes from your client. In fact, you should follow it to the letter. But if you want to do better, then you have to take some initiatives and decide on your own if you should add more qualifying questions during the call. This will require some experience for you to do it right (not to mention a few experimentation), but in the end, this might be just what you need to generate more B2B leads. Such a judgment call may not be that bad to make, you just have to try
Selling can be a pain, especially for people not used to this kind of work. Well, even veterans still find this profession a challenge. With the way markets move and trends change, adapting constantly can be a daunting chore. Even so, there are plenty of strategies that you can use to consistently stay at the top of the lead generation business. Generating sufficient sales leads is not that hard at all, as long as you keep in mind the following three tips:
Another thing you should remember would probably be the content. Regardless of whatever marketing tool you use, be it social media or telemarketing, you need to stay consistent in your message. This would be the first thing your prospects would be looking for. As for the other three, well, now you know them, it would be easier to do it.
Generating qualified sales leads is hard work – there is no doubt about it. So it is only natural that you would want to find ways to keep the ones you have. And how will you do that? It all lies with your customer service. Yes, a successful lead generation campaign also depends on the quality of customer service you have provided to your current and past clients. If you want to get your B2B leads back, or find new ones through referrals, then you need to take a good look at the way you treat your customers and clients.
Providing an excellent customer service is crucial in keeping sales leads that you worked so hard to gain.
It can be pretty hard to do business, especially with business prospects that doubt your offer. But all that is just a normal day in the office. The way you deal with them is what makes all the difference. To be successful in generating sales leads out of these types of prospects, you need to understand why they doubt you in the first place. Only then will you be able to come up with a winning lead generation strategy. To start with, B2B leads prospects do not trust you because:
Correct these bad habits and your sales lead generation campaign will be more credible.
It can be a real pain to be a victim of cyberspace hacking, but it is a reality you need to face in today’s modern business environment. All those years of hard work in lead generation, all those gigabytes of customer and market data, and the lists of sales leads you have collected, all these can disappear at just a click of a mouse button, and you cannot do anything at all once that happens. That is why you need to prevent hacking in the first place. You need to improve your security. Only then can you fairly say that you have taken steps to deal to protect your B2B leads.
There are other things that you need to do to protect your lead generation campaign, but these three will top that list. Follow them well.
The Internet has totally changed the way we do business nowadays. Now, we can reach out the most number of business prospects, increasing our chances of generating B2B lead, in a manner that is not available to us from five or ten years ago. This is a great opportunity for your B2B lead generation campaigns, helping us convey more information to those interested. Of course, along with the ready availability details, there is the risk of what we call the ‘tyranny of choice’. What is that and how will you deal with it?
The tyranny of choice, as psychologists call it, is a condition where customers have so many alternatives to choose from that they practically cannot make a choice any more. Give the numerous products and services offered by a lot of marketers during their appointment setting campaigns, it is only natural that business prospects will have a hard time choosing which to buy or sign up for. This impairment can have a serious impact on your generation of sales leads. Of course, this can also have a positive outcome for your campaign as well.
It all depends on your ability to best represent your brand. People, especially the busy ones, tend to have too little time to analyze the products or services that their business will need. For them, it would be more cost effective if a seller can more as an information source, and help them make the right decision. At this point, it is also important to remember that sales leads are not everything. You need to establish a relationship with them.
Solving problems is only natural when we are conducting lead generation campaigns. After all, if we do not solve problems, how can we turn prospects into qualified B2B leads? That is why we need to offer the right business solutions to your prospects. There are a lot of things you would want to say to your prospects, offer answer to their problems. But have you ever thought of those rare moment where you do not need to solve problems? Sometimes, not solving a business issue can get you the sales leads you wanted. The idea behind it is actually sound.
To begin with, you must first understand that some of your prospects may be aware of their problems already. They might just want to have a sounding board, or probably a second opinion on whether this is their real concern. Also, it is possible that they know the solution already. Your telemarketing team may not need to talk much. Your team will just have to listen, and the answer will present itself on its own. And would it not be a much better appointment setting tactic. At least you will get the full cooperation of your business leads. All you need to do is to be sharp at the details.
While it is possible that you have a lead generation team ready for the task, it may not be economically feasible to have a large one for a seasonal campaign. Perhaps outsourcing the work will do you good. There are a lot of telemarketing, advertising, and other agencies that can do the job for you.
This week, we’re going to tackle the basics of how to set up your own blog for your business. A good blog will attract quality sales leads using your content and can eventually become the main lead generation channel of your business.
Every day, there are about 2 blogs created every second around the world, and a significant percentage of these blogs are by beginners. Due to the popularity of online entrepreneurship, most of these blogs are probably connected to a company website from a fledgeling business, much like yours. If you really want to make a significant dent in your target niche, then you have to make sure that your company blog will be able to attract your sales leads. To help your businesses get better returns for your efforts on blogging, we have provided here the essential tips on how to start a company blog from scratch.
The best way to start a blog is by using available free platforms for blogging, the most popular of which are WordPress and Blogger. Both platforms have their own strengths; Blogger, being affiliated with Google, allows for faster integration with Google-owned business tools while WordPress, being a bit more for professionals, offers more customizability for your blog. Using free hosting sites such as these will save you from the expense of purchasing the services of a hosting company. If you have funds set aside for you blog however, you can make use of a self-hosted WordPress blog for a few dollars, the cheapest web hosting service being about $3-$4 a month.
After you’ve selected a good blogging platform, it’s now time to create the design of your blog. A free hosted blog provides free templates from which you can choose and easily apply to your site. A self-hosted blog will let you create a more customized blog or, if you want, you can hire a web designer to design your blogsite for you from scratch. This is the best choice if you want to integrate your blog design to that of your website.
The important things to consider about design are:
Do not forget to include a call to action on your blog. A splash page which instructs your viewers to sign up for newsletters will allow you to easily add them to your business list in case you have to email them or need your telemarketer to call them about product updates.
The next post will be all about what to write on your blog, what your posts are about, and how to make these easily searchable through search engines.
The amazing thing about business-to-business (B2B) telemarketing is that it pretty much opens up a world of opportunities for professional telemarketers to explore different types of people and conversations that lead to the discovery of one’s self. What better way to get a head start on this than being inspired by some of the memorable songs of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, who, in his own right, lived and passed on leaving behind a message of internal peace and external harmony.
These mantras live forever, and it can serve as a guide for those who are up to the challenge of telemarketing and the dynamics that come along with it:
“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” – Preparedness always gives an advantage, as luck favors those who are prepared. But you wouldn’t want to leave the fate of your efforts to chance; a professional telemarketer puts considerable efforts into making sure everything’s ready and will start on a good note.
“Remember the Time” – Every campaign has an element of time. Though some projects give you more than ample time to produce numbers, there’s no reason for procrastination or delaying tactics. Time is money, and the more you maximize your time, the more productive you will be.
“Human Nature” – Now, effectively talking to prospects may be a natural talent for some people, but for those who were not endowed with such a gift, it should be taken as an art that needs to be perfected. The key is to never forget that whatever their roles in company may be, they’re still humans deep down, and you can only bring that nature out if you treat them like one.
“Black Or White” – The world isn’t divided into black or white, as is the vocation of telemarketing. When prospects say yes or no, it doesn’t necessarily equate to the truth. It’s a telemarketer’s job to probe on the undisclosed needs and desires of the prospect and of the business, and to get a clear understanding of whether or not they know what they are saying.
“You Are Not Alone”– In outsourced lead generation firms, teams are specially assembled to tackle a particular project. This includes team leaders, coaches, researchers and quality assurance specialists. The amount of support that goes into developing telemarketers has seen its growth especially since businesses are looking more into “personalizing” the call experience for prospects.
“Man in the Mirror” – despite the available support, the best resource is yourself. The will to improve or reinvent one’s self is something that cannot be taught. External motivation can only do so much as adding more fuel to the fire, the flame itself must come from within.
“Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough” – The strength of a warrior is not measured by his victories but by his failures. Getting a lot of rejections from prospects may sometimes be demoralizing, but each person has his own mechanism of resiliency and perseverance; you just need to find out what is yours.
The secret to a successful lead generation campaign, as well as retention of customers, can be as simple as providing customer service. Believe it or not, an excellent customer service system can help your company establish a firmer hold in a rather volatile market, as well as identify potential sales leads that would otherwise not appear if the way you treat customers is generally sloppy. If you want to take to take your marketing campaign to the next level, make sure that your appointment setting team knows how to provide an excellent customer service. In case you are in the dark as to what it covers, here are the main points below:
Of course, this is assumed that your people are skilled at these matters. In case you are not, then comes the time for you to look for outside help. There are a lot of B2B lead generation agencies that can assist you for this type of work. There is no loss for you if you can get in touch with a professional one. This is an excellent investment to your business, and further improves the effectiveness of your customer service.
First-call resolution (FCR) is the immortal mantra of inbound marketing campaigns. If you cannot satisfy a customer’s questions on the first call, then your marketing campaign is not doing enough. While this is clearly applicable in the inbound marketing business, will it also apply to outbound lead generation processes? The answer is actually a ‘yes’. You can employ FCR strategies when looking for qualified sales leads.
The premise is actually simple: we want to resolve everything in just one call. This will save everyone the time, money, and effort involved in entertaining each call. The less repeat calls you make on a single person, the more people that can be contacted in a single day. In terms of marketing and appointment setting, qualifying leads with a single call can mean a big thing. But for this set-up to work in a lead generation campaign, you need to have initiative.
It is not bad to follow your sales script, especially if it comes from your client. In fact, you should follow it to the letter. But if you want to do better, then you have to take some initiatives and decide on your own if you should add more qualifying questions during the call. This will require some experience for you to do it right (not to mention a few experimentation), but in the end, this might be just what you need to generate more B2B leads. Such a judgment call may not be that bad to make, you just have to try
Selling can be a pain, especially for people not used to this kind of work. Well, even veterans still find this profession a challenge. With the way markets move and trends change, adapting constantly can be a daunting chore. Even so, there are plenty of strategies that you can use to consistently stay at the top of the lead generation business. Generating sufficient sales leads is not that hard at all, as long as you keep in mind the following three tips:
Another thing you should remember would probably be the content. Regardless of whatever marketing tool you use, be it social media or telemarketing, you need to stay consistent in your message. This would be the first thing your prospects would be looking for. As for the other three, well, now you know them, it would be easier to do it.
Generating qualified sales leads is hard work – there is no doubt about it. So it is only natural that you would want to find ways to keep the ones you have. And how will you do that? It all lies with your customer service. Yes, a successful lead generation campaign also depends on the quality of customer service you have provided to your current and past clients. If you want to get your B2B leads back, or find new ones through referrals, then you need to take a good look at the way you treat your customers and clients.
Providing an excellent customer service is crucial in keeping sales leads that you worked so hard to gain.
It can be pretty hard to do business, especially with business prospects that doubt your offer. But all that is just a normal day in the office. The way you deal with them is what makes all the difference. To be successful in generating sales leads out of these types of prospects, you need to understand why they doubt you in the first place. Only then will you be able to come up with a winning lead generation strategy. To start with, B2B leads prospects do not trust you because:
Correct these bad habits and your sales lead generation campaign will be more credible.
It can be a real pain to be a victim of cyberspace hacking, but it is a reality you need to face in today’s modern business environment. All those years of hard work in lead generation, all those gigabytes of customer and market data, and the lists of sales leads you have collected, all these can disappear at just a click of a mouse button, and you cannot do anything at all once that happens. That is why you need to prevent hacking in the first place. You need to improve your security. Only then can you fairly say that you have taken steps to deal to protect your B2B leads.
There are other things that you need to do to protect your lead generation campaign, but these three will top that list. Follow them well.
The Internet has totally changed the way we do business nowadays. Now, we can reach out the most number of business prospects, increasing our chances of generating B2B lead, in a manner that is not available to us from five or ten years ago. This is a great opportunity for your B2B lead generation campaigns, helping us convey more information to those interested. Of course, along with the ready availability details, there is the risk of what we call the ‘tyranny of choice’. What is that and how will you deal with it?
The tyranny of choice, as psychologists call it, is a condition where customers have so many alternatives to choose from that they practically cannot make a choice any more. Give the numerous products and services offered by a lot of marketers during their appointment setting campaigns, it is only natural that business prospects will have a hard time choosing which to buy or sign up for. This impairment can have a serious impact on your generation of sales leads. Of course, this can also have a positive outcome for your campaign as well.
It all depends on your ability to best represent your brand. People, especially the busy ones, tend to have too little time to analyze the products or services that their business will need. For them, it would be more cost effective if a seller can more as an information source, and help them make the right decision. At this point, it is also important to remember that sales leads are not everything. You need to establish a relationship with them.
Solving problems is only natural when we are conducting lead generation campaigns. After all, if we do not solve problems, how can we turn prospects into qualified B2B leads? That is why we need to offer the right business solutions to your prospects. There are a lot of things you would want to say to your prospects, offer answer to their problems. But have you ever thought of those rare moment where you do not need to solve problems? Sometimes, not solving a business issue can get you the sales leads you wanted. The idea behind it is actually sound.
To begin with, you must first understand that some of your prospects may be aware of their problems already. They might just want to have a sounding board, or probably a second opinion on whether this is their real concern. Also, it is possible that they know the solution already. Your telemarketing team may not need to talk much. Your team will just have to listen, and the answer will present itself on its own. And would it not be a much better appointment setting tactic. At least you will get the full cooperation of your business leads. All you need to do is to be sharp at the details.
While it is possible that you have a lead generation team ready for the task, it may not be economically feasible to have a large one for a seasonal campaign. Perhaps outsourcing the work will do you good. There are a lot of telemarketing, advertising, and other agencies that can do the job for you.
This week, we’re going to tackle the basics of how to set up your own blog for your business. A good blog will attract quality sales leads using your content and can eventually become the main lead generation channel of your business.
Every day, there are about 2 blogs created every second around the world, and a significant percentage of these blogs are by beginners. Due to the popularity of online entrepreneurship, most of these blogs are probably connected to a company website from a fledgeling business, much like yours. If you really want to make a significant dent in your target niche, then you have to make sure that your company blog will be able to attract your sales leads. To help your businesses get better returns for your efforts on blogging, we have provided here the essential tips on how to start a company blog from scratch.
The best way to start a blog is by using available free platforms for blogging, the most popular of which are WordPress and Blogger. Both platforms have their own strengths; Blogger, being affiliated with Google, allows for faster integration with Google-owned business tools while WordPress, being a bit more for professionals, offers more customizability for your blog. Using free hosting sites such as these will save you from the expense of purchasing the services of a hosting company. If you have funds set aside for you blog however, you can make use of a self-hosted WordPress blog for a few dollars, the cheapest web hosting service being about $3-$4 a month.
After you’ve selected a good blogging platform, it’s now time to create the design of your blog. A free hosted blog provides free templates from which you can choose and easily apply to your site. A self-hosted blog will let you create a more customized blog or, if you want, you can hire a web designer to design your blogsite for you from scratch. This is the best choice if you want to integrate your blog design to that of your website.
The important things to consider about design are:
Do not forget to include a call to action on your blog. A splash page which instructs your viewers to sign up for newsletters will allow you to easily add them to your business list in case you have to email them or need your telemarketer to call them about product updates.
The next post will be all about what to write on your blog, what your posts are about, and how to make these easily searchable through search engines.