Are you calling your leads wrong?
Telemarketing is said to still be one of the most potent methods of lead generation and nurturing. However, regardless of how powerful a technique is, you will never realize its true potential if it’s being used wrong.
Today we take a look at why a telemarketing and appointment setting strategy can miss its mark and how we can avoid these things from happening to our campaigns.
Failing to Segment
You will not be able to qualify prospects or set appointments if you are too busy trying to cold call. The main difference between cold calling and telemarketing and appointment setting is the fact that one utilizes a general approach, while the other is targeted.
We should all take a page from the way account-based marketing (ABM) works.
Instead of trying to call everyone on your list, you should start segmenting people based on their buyer personas. Within these buyer personas, we should be cultivating specific campaigns that are designed just for them. This will enable you to personalize for the prospects that you are trying to reach.
Failing to Test and Adjust
Telemarketing and appointment setting – just like any other form of marketing – has to be a measurable process for it to be an efficient and effective acquisition channel. By failing to record the results of a telemarketing or campaign run, you won’t be able to find which areas you can improve on.
Furthermore, it’s not just the feedback system that you should be working on; you should be able to split-test different variations of the same campaigns on your audiences. This makes the process efficient. You will be able to judge what works and what doesn’t, making your campaigns agile enough to switch.
Failing to Make it Personal & Hard Selling
Telemarketing allows for an avenue for you to make your marketing personal. Apart from “personalizing” for the prospect, you have to make it personal as well. Get to know the client, their pain points, their company culture, etc. In turn, tell them about your company and your products.
Don’t be afraid to strike up a conversation, the more you build rapport, the easier it will be for you to strike a sale. Even if they don’t buy from you, at least you’ll be able to reach out to them in the future for a referral.
Another mistake in this department is hard selling. Engaging in a process where all you are doing is pushing your product makes the whole process of telemarketing extremely impersonal.
Failing to Improvise
Here’s what.
Every client on the phone is going to have different needs, it’s one of the characteristics of a personal marketing approach like telemarketing, and if you cannot improvise to meet their needs, there’s no use in talking to them.
More often than not, telemarketers are bound by a script that they feel like they have to read, but that should not be the case at all. Your prospects will know if you are reading from a prepared script. Reading from a script removes the personality from telemarketing and renders the call process as general as an email blast.
Here are a few points that you can work on:
- Building rapport with the person that you are speaking to – as we’ve mentioned earlier.
- Trying to adapt to the company’s needs
- Making your products or services relevant to their business process.
Failing to Follow-up
One reason that your telemarketing campaign could fail is the failure to follow and we are not talking about following up after they said they’re busy. A good follow up process encompasses several factors including targeting past the telemarketing stage.
If you have a list of their emails you can easily retarget them again using a social media platform like Facebook. By being able to do this, you will be able to subconsciously target them reminding them about the solutions that you have.
This type of follow up is integral in ensuring that they get a form of omnichannel marketing. However, you still have to design it in a way that doesn’t overload them with information and turns your marketing abrasive.
If you can harness the power of telemarketing, it makes for one of the most effective lead qualification and acquisition channels available in the market today. This not only saves resources but also ensures that a marketing team is more efficient in the way it operates.
Implement smart calling and proper appointment setting and get your telemarketing strategy in order. An efficient telemarketing campaign is an effective one.
