Today’s business enterprises usually assign dedicated personnel to man the phones for the purpose of receiving customer inquiries about accounts and answering questions about products and services from prospects. Many business leaders have found that these calls are also great opportunities to teleprospect. As a result, a lot of companies have either set up their own teleprospecting departments or hire an outside B2B telemarketing company.

Teleprospecting is the act of calling current customers or prospects to determine their interest in a product or service. Businesses that spend significant time on teleprospecting can improve their revenues considerably. Teleprospectors should be able to identify the customer’s level of interest by the end of each conversation, do a timely follow through, set an appointment or get a commitment from them.

There are teleprospecting essentials businesses need to keep in mind in order to achieve great outcomes:

Conduct teleprospecting with a personal touch. In order to have a genuine connection with customers, teleprospectors must communicate with them in a personal way by listening carefully, digging deeper and knowing what they really want and need.

Plan calls. In any type of work, people are able to perform better when they plan. Teleprospecting is no exception. Calls should be planned by taking into consideration what your expectations are from your customer or prospect. Do not be pushy in trying to bring the subject up regardless if you call them or they call you.

Engage your customers or prospects. Avoid dominating the conversation. Allow your customers to speak up and appeal to their needs. Successful B2B telemarketing depends on being able to ask customers questions and give them the opportunity to tell you what they want and how you can satisfy their needs.

Respond accordingly. It is important for teleprospectors to be able to answer all of the customers’ questions. If clients ask questions which agents are not prepared for or do not know the answer to, they have to respond as best as they can or find out the answer and get back to them.

Educate the customers or prospects. Let the customers or prospects know the value and benefits of the product or service. The reason why people decline telemarketing calls is because they don’t have the slightest idea how the offer can help them. Teleprospectors must educate customers about the real value of what is being offered.

Keep track of calls. Teleprospecting can produce call backs, appointments or emails that agents need to follow up on. It is necessary to keep track of calls to make sure that nothing is missed or forgotten. Representatives should keep a record of what transpired in each conversation so they know what to do or say on the next call.

Teleprospecting is a vital part of the sales process therefore it should be carried out properly. It is essential for businesses to make sure their in-house or outsourced teleprospecting teams are performing the task appropriately to ensure success. These guidelines will help phone representatives make the most out of their teleprospecting calls.

Putting together a good product launch strategy starts with establishing your expectations. Are you going for a huge number of sales the first week, or taking a slow burn approach? At any rate, your plan will depend on what you are trying to accomplish.

Once you know what you are trying to do, the next step is to prepare everything you will need for your initial product launch and traffic campaign. At the very least, you will need a product and a website that automates the process of selling and delivering the product. But it doesn’t just stop there. A winning eBook launch campaign also involves other important elements, for example free give-aways, email auto-responders, affiliate tracking and more. Figure out everything you will need to have prepared and set up before you can ever launch your product. Then, get to work.

Next, you will want to make sure you have a plan in place for getting traffic to your website. Do you have a budget, or are you going to go after free traffic only? If possible, try to develop a multi-faceted approach to getting traffic, including long term SEO, article marketing, email marketing, affiliate traffic, social networking, content trading and more.

One of the very best ways to get traffic is to tap into the power of networking with other webmasters that have mailing lists full of targeted prospects, and put together a mutually beneficial plan for taking advantage of their list and your product. When it comes to launching your product, there is no finer resource you could have at your disposal than a mailing list of opt-in targeted prospects.

Generally, the more places you can get coverage for your new product, the easier it will be to launch your product. Always track your results and measure what works, it will allow you to refine your product launch strategy for any future projects.

Many businesses have embarked on telemarketing as a tool for their business through a “simple approach”, find a telemarketer through the internet, tell them they are after and pay a fee. It is our experience that telemarketing, if not handled with a “scientific” approach, does not yield results.

Here are the considerations:

Prospect: Begin by listing every type of customer available in your organization. Prioritize by what is important to you for this camping, considerations: ease of contact, size of average order, geography.

Contact: “Decision Maker Please” is not always the right way to go, they are difficult to get on the phone and often do not handle the research into the buying decision.

Data: Garbage in, garbage out. Data is the foundation of your telemarketing campaign, cheaper data could substantially reduce your conversion rate and greatly increase the expense of telemarketing.

Pitch: Here things get complicated. Best telemarketer working on the most refined data will not be able to succeed without a strong Pitch. Offering a free, no obligation next step will increase your changes of setting up an appointment. However, be carefully not to keep this to open ended to have many unqualified appointments clogging the pipeline and discouraging sales folks.

Objections: Must, must prepare telemarketers for most common objections to ensure phone conversation is not finished prematurely. In fact, this is possibly the most overlooked step in the process, this is a surprise call and your prospects are busy professionals, they will often have multiple objections before agreeing to the next step.

Follow Up: Do your best to educate your prospect about your company, to warm up to your next step.

Track Results and Improve this Formula continuously.

Adam Fridman
Idea2Result Founder
http://www.Idea2Result.com

B2B Telemarketing has become very popular with companies around the UK in recent years. We can see this in almost all industry sectors (engineering, legal, sports, construction) businesses are desperate for more work and are opting for a more proactive form of marketing rather than the more traditional forms. Normally all that is needed is the target audience data information, and calling can commence. This could be a list of hotels in London, engineering companies in the South of England or list of pubs in the Midlands. No matter what the data, telemarketing can produce results – given enough numbers. However what sort of calling would be used in B2B telemarketing?
Appointment Making

If a business is looking for more appointments, then telemarketing is a great way to quickly target and prospect a select target audience, introduce and gain a meeting. Of course there is more to it; but in general this would be the process.
Lead Generation

Many businesses are not looking for appointments, but are looking for new sales leads. This could be from prospects interested in buying a product or service. Again, agencies can call around and explore areas of interest.
Market Research

Many companies will use this to get valuable feedback on their products of services in order to assess how their products are viewed by their audience or to make valuable changes to their products.
Follow Up

Many companies that attend events or conferences then have data they need to be called within a certain time period. Say for example 500 or 5,000 prospects showed interest in your services at an event. All these prospects would need to be followed up quickly before the interest died. Telemarketing is a very powerful form of marketing that can be used in different ways to achieve all of the above; no matter what it is that you are looking for. There are many data companies around the UK that can provide business data; so if you do not have data to hand for calling, this can be purchased and given to a telemarketing company to call.

Things to bear in mind There are a few things that do need to be considered when using B2B telemarketing:
Telemarketing takes time

Due to the sales process, it does take time to research, contact and close prospects (sometimes taking weeks or months depending on the sale).
Telemarketing is expensive

The costs for telemarketing are normally based on set day rates ranging from £150 up to around £600. So selecting an agency based on their experience and track record is important.
Not all telemarketing companies are the same.

There are over 600 telemarketing companies around the UK, so choosing one would need to be done with care. All agencies are different, different skill basis, experience and conversion ratios.
Choose a local agency

It is always advised to meet up with the agency before you set them loose. You need to understand them, how they work and function; but more importantly they need to understand you, your product and objectives.

By its very nature, in order to be cost effective, an outbound telemarketing service needs to have, at its core, effective and efficient telemarketers. There are a number of traits that are common to all successful marketers.

If you choose to ignore these traits during the hiring process you will undoubtedly jeopardize the success of your campaigns. However, if you decide to incorporate what you will read about in this article, then you will be well on your way towards many successful and very profitable telemarketing campaigns.

Your Telemarketers Should be Intelligent and Have Common Sense

It should go without saying that your telemarketers should be able to immediately react calmly and enthusiastically to any questions or challenges that are thrown their way. A vital characteristic of every successful telemarketer is presence of mind.

Your Telemarketers Should be Extroverts

If your telemarketers cannot engage your prospects in animated conversations then their calls will not be successful. All great telemarketers have outgoing personalities.

Your Telemarketers Must be Able to Focus on Specifics

It’s a given that your telemarketing staff needs to know everything about the products or services they are promoting. However they have to be able to focus on using the first few minutes of any outbound conversation to grab their prospect’s attention. Only then will they be able to lead them where you want your prospects to go.

Your Telemarketing Staff Should be Good Listeners

In order to qualify a potential buyer and then sell them on taking a specific action your telemarketers should have the ability to listen to and hear what their prospects are saying. Just running through a telemarketing script does not pay the rent. It is imperative that your telemarketing staff understands what the prospect needs to hear in order to be sold. And the only way that they can do this is to listen to what the prospects are saying.

Your Staff Should Be Able to Cope With Rejection

The people you hire should be extremely thick skinned because there is a very good chance that every so often someone will slam the phone on them, yell at them, or even curse at them. And when that happens your telemarketers should be able to take it all in stride and be able to just let it go. They must be professional enough to take a deep breath and pick up the phone to make the next call energetically and enthusiastically.

Every Telemarketer Should Be Able to Get to the Decision Maker

Unless your employees are talking to the decision makers then are wasting their time and your money. They must also be able to identify whether or not whom they are talking to is a potential customer before continuing with their presentation.

Your Outbound Telemarketers Must Be Able to Get Past the Gatekeepers

If your company is doing business to business marketing or if your staff is calling people on their telemarketing lists who are at work then on most calls they must be able to first get past the gatekeepers.

To do this your staff must be confident – and that has to come through in the sound of their voice. Confidence is of paramount importance when it comes to reaching decision makers. Secretaries must be sufficiently impressed to put your call through to his or her boss.