The best-practice approach to telemarketing

Telemarketing is often perceived quite negatively, but it does not have to mean cold-calling, or automated messages from robotic voices telling you that you can make an insurance or compensation claim; particularly in the B2B space, telemarketing can be a positive experience for the marketer and the prospect alike, can help customers to find products or services they might otherwise not be aware of, and can drive sales significantly higher, without creating negative brand perceptions.

For a best-practice approach to IT telemarketing, you need to begin by identifying your potential customer base. It could be that you choose only to contact past customers whose accounts have since lapsed, in order to try and reignite their passion for your brand. Or you might go through all of the potentially interested companies in a particular area. The key is to make sure every person you call is genuinely likely to have an interest in what you have to offer.

If you’re spending all day on telemarketing, be realistic about which times of day are least likely to be met favourably by the call recipient; nobody’s particularly likely to welcome an unsolicited sales call at 9:01am on a Monday morning, and equally you might find people unwilling to talk to you at 4:59pm on a Friday afternoon.

However, if you’re contacting people you’ve worked with in the past, you might know that some of them begin work at 8am, or stay in the office until 6pm, and you can easily shift their calls to the parts of your schedule when most other workplaces are still filling up or are already emptying.

Perhaps the most important thing is to be polite, however annoyed the recipient of your call might be by having their day interrupted; you may simply have caught them at a bad time, so remain calm, offer to call back later, and respect their wishes if they tell you they would prefer not to be contacted again.

A calm and polite telephone manner, even if the call does not go well, can avoid exacerbating the situation, and can therefore avoid creating unnecessary negative perceptions of your brand; the prospective customer, once they have calmed down, may well decide to give you a second chance and make contact themselves.

Knowing when to quit can be a real challenge, as even the most disastrous call can end in a sale if you catch the prospect in a good mood, so remember the overall aim of your marketing campaign. If it is costing you more to hold the line than you stand to make from the sale, or if the chances of making a sale are dropping well below 50%, politely end the conversation.

By doing so, you can move on to the next prospect, accelerating your campaign towards its next sale – and, therefore, its next profit – while avoiding wasting the time of the call recipient too. Together, this maximises the best-practice combination of generating the greatest number (and financial amount) of sales, with as positive an overall impact on your brand perception as possible.