Posts

Moonwalk Your Way to Sales Leads: A Michael Jackson-Inspired Primer on B2B Telemarketing

/in /by

Moonwalk Your way to Sales Leads - A Michael Jackson-inspired Primer on B2B Telemarketing

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 Three T’s Of Better Sales Leads Customer Service

/in /by

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:

  • Technology – here is the thing about business: it is too complicated in the minds of customers. Jargon, technicalities, inside jokes, etc. are stuff heard by prospects that you would rather keep to yourself. Your job, as a marketer, is to reduce the pain that potential B2B leads have to go through when having a transaction with you. Try investing in updated software systems, spend for a user-friendly website, buy new phones for your telemarketing team, etc. Your business prospects will thank you for that. There are so many things that you can do or attend to, once you have the right tools for the job.
  • Transparency – in any kind of relationship, but certainly most pronounced with businesses, being open and honest with your prospects can be a powerful aid in relationship building. Establishing good rapport with your prospects should be foremost in your minds. Remember, these prospects may not buy from you yet, but you would want to keep them in the record for future appointment setting campaign. And do not think that building trust is an overnight task. In some cases, it might take you years to reach the level of trust that will give business prospects the reason to do business with you.
  • Training – in marketing, employees mean everything. They are the people manning the frontlines, the face and voice that your business prospects see and hear. You would want to make sure that your front-liners are at their best, ready to answer questions and generally make life easier for anyone who gives them a call. To ensure quality service, you have to set up a monitoring and feedback system over them. Check how they do their work, and if there is something amiss, then you can help them improve their service later on. This is a great help for both prospects and you.

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 In A Telemarketing Campaign

/in /by

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

Maximize Sales Leads Generation In Three Ways

/in /by

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:

  1. Set you bar too high – yes, this is unrealistic, but if you constantly push yourself to reach impossible goals, especially ones that exceed the average of your appointment setting colleagues, then you will find yourself improving way better.
  2. Keep yourself motivated – basically speaking, have an end in sight. Once you have reached that end, try creating another goal. Maintaining a proper motivation will help you reach your B2B leads goals much better.
  3. Believe in yourself – this can be a real game-changer. How can you make people believe in what you are offering if you do not believe in it yourself? Before you go marketing your product to prospective sales leads, you should market to yourself first.

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.

Keeping Sales Leads Through Stellar Customer Experience

/in /by

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.

  1. Being user-friendly – be it on the web or at your company’s doorsteps, how do you present your business to your clients? Is it easy enough for them to access, or do they have to navigate too much all the way to their intended page?
  2. Accessibility and approachability – what kind of ambiance or image do you project to your customers? Is this what you want them to see? Do your employees treat your customers exactly as you envision it to be?
  3. Presentation – in all customer and client interactions, how do you and your telemarketing team talk? How do you dress up or present yourselves? Are you approachable, informative, or professional? What kind of personal image are you trying to create?
  4. Following-up – once your appointment setting team has found prospects, are you following up on them, or just sitting back and wait for them to call? A little aggressive marketing can do mean a great deal.

Providing an excellent customer service is crucial in keeping sales leads that you worked so hard to gain.

Why Sales Leads Prospects Doubt You

/in /by

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:

  1. You begin with a lie – a successful business relationship is anchored on trust. How will you be able to maintain that if you started the whole process with a lie? Sure, this might help you get more business leads in your appointment setting campaign, but it will not help you at all in the long run. In fact, it will lose you more leads.
  2. Your claims are unbelievable – with so many companies claiming that they are the best, or the cheapest, in the market, it is only natural that business prospects would be tired of hearing the same song over and over again. If you really want to get their attention, show hard facts. Even if your outlandish claims are true, no one will believe you until you show proof.
  3. Your opinions outweigh your facts – when all your prospects here are your own praises for your products, they would naturally be suspicious. To make it easier for them to believe your claims, make it a point to use testimonials from your clients, especially the big ones. Also, substantiate your claims by giving facts.
  4. You focused too much on closing – yes, you need to get that deal, but if your focus is just that, without regard to what your prospects need, then you achieve nothing at all.

Correct these bad habits and your sales lead generation campaign will be more credible.

How To Secure Your Sales Leads In Cyberspace

/in /by

 

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.

  1. Load on tech – as a business owner, you need to invest in the right equipment. You need to have the latest technology, like firewalls and antivirus, installed on your computer and communication equipment (like the phone lines used by your telemarketing teams). This makes securing them easier.
  2. Lock everything down – clear cache, create passwords, use secure back up, etc. are just some of the things you need to observe in order to secure your systems. In case an actual hacking takes place, the damage can be put on the minimum.
  3. Spread the word – not everyone gets the same information as you do. If, say, your appointment setting representative is using VoIP to make calls, recommend them a powerful antivirus or firewall to prevent illegal access to their VoIP account.

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.

 

Lead Generation In the Post-Internet World

/in /by

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.

When Not To Solve Problems During Lead Generation

/in /by

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.

Important Tips When Creating Your Telemarketing Script

/in /by

When you’re planning on having a telemarketing campaign to generate as much b2b sales leads for your business as possible, you have to make sure that you’ve covered the most important factors of making your telemarketing campaign a success.

One of the most important equipments you will need to have a productive and profitable telemarketing campaign is to have a really good telemarketing script. Every telemarketing campaign needs to have its own telemarketing script. Recycling a previous script is possible, but you have to alter the content so that it is not recognizable as a recycled script at all. Here are a few more things to remember when choosing or writing your telemarketing script for your new business to business telemarketing campaign.

  • While it’s alright to recycle, ideally, the script needs to be completely new and originally written for your current telemarketing campaign. This helps to ensure that the script really expresses the benefits of your products and services. A generalized script will do nothing to help convert your prospective sales leads, and patching up an existing script often turns out to be sounding just as that: patchy.
  • To facilitate the natural delivery of telemarketing scripts, this must be written in a free-flowing way of speech. But it mustn’t be too casual or else the leads and gatekeepers would think you’re only calling to chat on the phone. Make it professional sounding, but never too technical or haughty. Write it like how you want to tell your friends about your new product or service. If you want your telemarketers to sound natural when cold calling, you have to start with your telemarketing script.
  • Write your telemarketing script for your target market. Write responses with all the potential questions they may have, don’t just talk about what you want them to know about your offer. Yes, you can say that you have a 30% discount for those who purchase through your telemarketers, but before you get to this, you have to make them believe that your product solves their problem first. Present to them as the provider of a viable solution, and mention the discount as an added bonus; not the other way around because no matter how large the discount you offer, if your b2b sales leads don’t find your offer beneficial to them, they wouldn’t buy it.
  • Have professional b2b telemarketers practice your script until the delivery comes natural to them. Give them room to improvise (especially when a client asks a question or mentions something not included in the script), but for the most part, require them to stick to the telemarketing script. There’s an important reason why it was made, and this is why they must use it.

How To Balance Business Lead Quality And Quantity

/in /by

As discussed in the previous post, the decision to prioritize sales lead quality or quantity is dependent on the nature of your business. As a business to business company, your b2b lead generation campaigns should concentrate on finding quality business sales leads so that no effort is wasted even if the conversion process takes a long time. However, just because b2b companies have to focus more on the quality of business leads during lead generation, it doesn’t mean that you have to forget about the quantity of b2b leads being generated. In fact, it is possible to find quality b2b leads in quantity. Doing so is not that simple and will require considerable effort on your part, but the rewards will certainly be well worth it.

Here are the important factors required to find quality business sales leads in quantity:

Market research.

To increase the quantity of your lead generation campaign results, you have to be able to reach as much qualified prospects as possible. To do so, you need to perform thorough market research on your target market. It may take some time before you collect the necessary information that would allow you to efficiently identify qualified business prospects, but it will all be worth the effort. Hiring a telemarketing call center to perform data profiling services on your company’s behalf can be beneficial. Or you can also hire telemarketers to carry out telephone surveys to find out more about your target market.

A/B testing.

No matter what marketing strategy your company uses, it is important that it undergoes a testing phase before being formally implemented as a part of your b2b lead generation campaigns. Direct mail, newsletters, and email correspondences should be tested before sending to all prospects in your business list to make sure that there are no grammatical errors or wrong spelling in your content. Even the telemarketing scripts used for cold calling and appointment setting should be tested to make sure that there are no flaws or lacking information in the spiel. Listening to the telemarketing script first will also help you identify whether the choice of words are compelling enough to attract your business sales leads right away.

Preparation.

Before you launch a b2b lead generation campaign, your sales and marketing team should be well prepared to respond to each prospect inquiry. You must also have more than one appointment setter on duty to handle the meeting schedules. Ideally, it is best to generate only as much business leads as you can handle at a time, but keep the lead generation process ongoing so that you continually have business leads coming in. This way, your team will not be overwhelmed and can follow-up on all the leads without any lost opportunities.

Once you have found the criteria for identifying your target business leads, perfected your marketing script and prepared your team to cater to your business leads, you can launch a much larger scale b2b lead generation campaign to find more b2b leads without worrying about whether you are actually reaching the right sales leads for your business.