A telemarketing campaign is a proven, cost‐effective method to promote and sell small business services and products to a large audience. When partnering with a qualified list of potential customers, telemarketing campaigns can increase sales, profits and customer satisfaction – without increasing your staffing and training costs.
This is especially relevant if you’re facing staffing shortages and struggles because of inflation. 41.5% of small businesses say they have experienced inflationary pressure in the last 1-3 months. This is compared to 25% of small businesses who say they have experienced inflationary pressure over the last 10-12 months. A telemarketing service can be a cost-effective solution with a shocking return on your investment.
The Key benefits of Campaigning
- List hygiene / keeps prospect database up-to-date
- Builds market awareness
- Identifies decision makers
- Qualifies potential buyers
- Ability to sell to new customers
- Can up-sell or cross-sell to existing customers
Below are simple proven guidelines to building a successful telemarketing campaign. There are many elements that need to be considered in the process, but using these steps is a great start to launching an effective telemarketing program for your company.
1. Set the Scope of Work
What do you want to achieve? You should step back and set realistic expectations for your program. Focus on building a strong foundation first. The call center team you’re working with needs an in-depth scope, which they’ll use to benchmark the success of the program. The scope also helps the workforce management team forecast the staff and project timeline – setting you up for success right off the bat.
2. Create your Goals
Goals are important in business, and they’re extra important to a telemarketing campaign. You want to be sure to make them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Timely, and Realistic all at once. You can remember this by thinking of the acronym “SMART.” The more you’re able to define your campaign goals, the better you’ll be setting up the call center to perform.
3. Know your Audience
Do your demographic research. Know who your customer is, where they live, what they like, and how old they are. Being knowledgeable about your target audience will better enhance your call center’s ability to produce results.
4. Find the Decision Maker
After you do your research and determine who the target decision maker is, build your campaign around them. This will not only help your company, it will help the agents, and streamline your sales process. This is a step you don’t want to skip, otherwise agents will spend valuable time bouncing all around trying to reach the decision-making power.
5. Know what you’re offering
People need to know what they are getting, and what they’ll gain by choosing your offer. The offer is crucial to the success of any program. It needs to be compelling and address a pain point of the prospect in order for them to react to the call.
6. Write a Great Script
Scripting is the key to call center agents staying on track and on point. Your script should include a strong introduction, your offer, benefit statements and a very strong closing pitch to sell the prospect.
7. Provide Product and Service Training
Your call center needs to know your product or service inside and out. This is unique from ‘what you’re offering’ because it’s the actual nuts and bolts of the product, and the details of the contract(s), whereas ‘what you’re offering’ can be more emotional or existential. Creating product and service training guides for agents will result in increased productivity, and improve customer satisfaction.
8. Define Data Requirements
Most reputable call centers can develop a custom database for your telemarketing campaign that will parallel your existing data field layout. That means data can be seamlessly imported from the call center into your customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This keeps campaign data easily manageable so that results are very clear, and you know how to move forward.
9. Set a Proper Timeline
It is important for your call center team to understand the overall start/end of the campaign. Doing so will allow the call center to schedule properly, allowing time to calibrate and adjust messaging if necessary. Map a hard start and end date, and choose points along the way to assess and determine how to recalibrate if necessary.
10. Review Reporting
Review your data files, digital reporting and other reports on a daily and/or weekly basis to find areas of improvement. Most call centers can customize productivity reports based upon your exact requirements. Make sure you get that quality assurance that’s always promised!
AnswerNet has launched over 500 campaigns, to the success and delight of our clients. We understand that a telemarketing campaign worth its weight takes planning. Yet many people don’t even know where to start. They buy a list or write a script – and skip developing the strategy. Doing so almost always results in less than stellar ROI.
AnswerNet’s Telemarketing Services provide reliable and customizable programs designed to increase your profitability through Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Telemarketing Sales, Appointment Setting, Up‐selling/Cross‐selling, Seminar/Event Registration, Customer Satisfaction Surveys and Customer Retention Programs.
