Telemarketing Good Practices
September 25, 2010
Telemarketing good practices are no different from any good business practices. Here are four classics:
- Set concrete goals for marketing programs by defining what you want to gain. Make your goals clear, realistic, and measurable.
- Track and understand customer data so that you know who your most profitable customers are. You want to know the characteristics of organisations that purchase your products and services. Keep on top of trends in the customer database so that you can more accurately target your new prospects.
- Take advantage of telemarketing’s inherent flexibility by listening to your market and adapting your message accordingly when you need to. Verbal communication can be easily adapted to new circumstances. Listening to telemarketing calls regularly will help you uncover market changes that mean you need to modify your message to keep up.
- In all your marketing communication, focus on the real benefits of your product or service. Focusing on your product or service’s features does little. It’s the benefits that sell, so avoid empty buzzwords and boring lists of features.
Unified Communications (UC) Platforms
September 18, 2010
The year 2012 is the target time frame of a majority of European organisations unified communications (UC) platforms, according to a recent survey. Aspect, a vendor of UC technology, surveyed 237 companies located in 13 European countries on their UC plans and perceptions.
UC is the integration of real time communications like telephony, instant messaging, video conferencing, and speech recognition with non-real-time communications like voice mail, email, and even faxes. The idea is to simplify and integrate communications forms to make businesses run more smoothly. Clearly, UC is of great interest to the telemarketing industry.
Currently, however, only 17% of the survey respondents actually have a UC platform. The main goal of having a UC platform is improved employee productivity, cited by 22% of respondents as their main perceived benefit of a UC platform investment. Telemarketing is in a constant state of pursuing productivity increases, and UC platform investment is one popular approach.
However, the UC platform adoption across European organisations is not coordinated due to the economic climate of the past few years, so the realisation of these gains is not yet proceeding in a universal fashion.
The BP “Clean Up” Telemarketing Scam
September 11, 2010
One of the latest telemarketing scams comes in the wake, so to speak, of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Scam artists are busy trying to impress people with hot stock tips concerning companies with new clean-up technologies.
This particular telemarketing scam is just the latest variation in the well-worn “pump and dump” stock scam. The way it works is that scammers tout the promise of some lightly traded public company that they allege has amazing new clean-up technologies in the works. And they tell victims that they, too can get in early and make tons of money off this pink sheet stock that’s priced at pennies per share.
They don’t mention that they are usually primary shareholders in these companies. So gullible people buy worthless stock, sending the share price up and letting the scam artists sell their shares and collect huge profits. It doesn’t take long for everyone to figure out that there is no new technology and that the stock really is worthless. No offense, but why would someone with a legitimate stock tip this hot cold call you? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Hardly!
Beating the Summer Lull
September 4, 2010
If your telemarketing centre experiences a “summertime lull,” you may wonder if it’s worth the effort to keep sales figures up during these slow months. But the calls you don’t make are sales you won’t get. Sure, many people go on holiday in the summer, but there are ways around the summer lull.
Keeping in touch with prospects throughout the summer will help prevent other telemarketing centres from whisking them away from you. So don’t let your prospects forget about you. If you shelve these follow-up calls during the summer, there are others ready to woo them during that time.
If it is difficult to track down prospects during the summer or get them to make a decision, then it’s a prime time to set up your appointments for later in the year or simply build up your relationships with prospects. Consider the effort spent doing this as investing in later sales.
On the other hand, some industries really do close down for periods during the summer, creating a telemarketing “blackout.” If you find out which industries these are, you can plan your telemarketing efforts around it. This will help you avoid wasting time calling businesses that simply aren’t available in the summer.