B2B Telemarketing Companies
Ten Tips to a Successful B2B Telemarketing Campaign
1. Data – This is the key to gain campaign success – both for direct mail campaigns and telemarketing campaigns. It is imperative that your data is cleaned regularly – every 6 months you can expect 40% of your records to have some change, whether it be a decision maker contact change, an address change, a direct dial etc. If you supply unclean data to the telemarketing agency and are paying them for an appointment and lead generation campaign, you are wasting your money only for them to be data cleaning. A data cleaning campaign is usually relatively inexpensive; this will increase your opportunities of your success from your appointment and lead generation campaign.
2. Intellectual Data Gathering – Telemarketing is not just about booking appointments or generating leads and sales, it is also about gathering intellectual data. This allows you to build profiles on your prospects and forecast future sales. Ensure any agency you use are gathering and recording intellectual data for you and that should you cease using the agency you will receive a copy of the intellectual data gathered. An example of intellectual data could be:
Number of desktops, PCs in the company?
What software applications do they use?
Do they have a maintenance contract?
Who is the contract with?
When does the contract expire?
Value of annual contract?
When is their next project planned?
When is their next pension review?
Etc. – you will obviously have relevant data to your industry.
3. Communication – Clear communication throughout the campaign is very important. If you are expecting 100 sales for every £1000 you spend and the agency only produce 2 you are going to be very disappointed with the results. You must discuss your expectations with the agency and set clear key performance indicators throughout the campaign that way you will not be disappointed and the agency are quite clear on your expectations.
4. Staff – Ask the agency what their staff retention is. If you are looking at using an agency as a partner moving forward – you don’t want to constantly have different telemarketing agents working on your account due to staff turnover. Team Telemarketing staff retention is about 3.5 years – most agencies is an average of 6 -12 months. The longer the same agent works on your account, the more knowledge they gain, the more leads they generate, thus increasing the return on your investment.
5. Call Listening And Coaching – Only use an agency that are happy for you or your representative to visit their office and allow you to call listen and encourage you to coach the telemarketing agents. This will all help to increase the product, service and company knowledge and increase your results.
6. Brief – Prepare a clear brief for the agency.
What is your campaign about?
How is the campaign structured?
How much clean data do you have?
What intellectual data do you want to collate?
What are the criteria for a “good” appointment/ lead/ sale?
What is the Decision Maker Contact level?
What are you hoping to achieve?
How do you want to be reported to?
How will you deal with information requests?
Who will be managing the campaign on a day to day basis with the agency?
What is your budget?
7. Training – Initial training and ongoing training is a necessity to ensure your campaign success. Team Telemarketing has two qualified (in house) trainers.
8. Quality Control – Quality control procedures should be in place. If an email address is typed incorrectly the email will not be delivered, if a DMC name is spelt incorrectly it can reflect badly on your organisation when you send out direct mailers.
Team operates a strict quality control process – which involves re-checking 10% of all records cleaned. If errors are found this is rectified and the database re-contacted.
9. Over Promising and Under Delivering
We all want to know what we are going to get in return for our money; however here are some things to consider:
If a campaign is new beware of an agency who commits to a quantity of sales/appointments/leads without first doing a pilot period of the campaign. In our experience after around 15-20 telemarketing days the agency should be able to set achievement levels. It isn’t realistic to do so before the campaign is tested. The reasons for this are:
1. Until the data is called the agency has no idea of its quality.
2. Every client’s criteria for a sale/appointment/lead are different.
For example if the brief is –
(i) Just book appointments with anyone in the company you can contact
Or
(ii) Only book appointments with Financial Directors.
The quantity and quality of the sales/appointments/leads is going to be completely different for both campaigns.
It is important to get good quality selling opportunities from your agency and not a high quantity of time wasting, worthless leads.
The agency should be able to guarantee call stats and decision maker contact levels for the first 15-20 days, after which they will have the knowledge to confirm expected sales/appointments/leads for their future calling.
You should expect the return on sales/appointments/leads to gradually increase as the agency “farm” your data – more intellectual data is gathered, prospects can be profiled, and thus opportunities increase.
10. Don’t Continue To Waste Your Money without Return
We are always shocked by the amount of companies we visit who have used/using a telemarketing agency or an internal team who quite simply they are not happy with or are not returning on their investment.
Quite simply if you are not getting a return stop using the agency/internal team, don’t waste any more money as the likelihood is they will never produce what you want if they haven’t shown you by now that they can do it!
www.teamtelemarketing.co.uk
Jaine Husbands
