Telemarketing - Top Five Tips To Make Cold Calls Effective Again

By Author: Daljeet Sidhu
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Telemarketing despite Do-No-Call registries is still a popular medium of generating leads for business marketers. However, businesses should not plunge into cold calling blindly unless they want more customers joining the Do-Not-Call registry listing. Measuring the success of telemarketing campaigns by quantifying calls rather than qualifying them is exactly where businesses need to make crucial changes.

Cold calling without identifying the target audience and assessing their potential interest in the goods being promoted is as wasting your own time as well as the customer's. Indiscriminate calls will only damage your brand name. What's more, inadvertent violation of Do-Not-Call regulations will get your business into serious legal trouble.

Tips on making telemarketing calls effective

Telemarketing can be made effective by doing some homework on the target audience and following simple rules that are often sidelined by businesses keen on multiplying sales revenue. Here are some pointers for businesses to train telemarketers on:

1. Understand the goal of the call and focus on it

Not all telemarketing ...
... calls are meant to make a sale. First calls are usually concerned with getting the trust of the customer. To do that, the telemarketer has to empathize with the customer's needs rather than make a sale pitch. Marketing teams should prepare a script to guide the telemarketer in this task and ensure the conversation goes in the desired direction.

2. Understand your target audience

Business marketers must do their homework by analyzing the target audience's demographics. Gauging the buying tendencies of the target audience in relation to the products or services you promote is crucial to the success of your telemarketing campaign. Trying to sell gas to someone who doesn't own a car won't do any good. In fact, irrelevant promotions just make telemarketing calls annoying to consumers.

3. Say the important things first

You have just the first 30 seconds of a telemarketing call to make an effect. Make sure telemarketers have a script to guide them on what needs to be said immediately to hold the customer's interest. A script also ensures the telemarketer does not miss any points that can nudge the customer towards a sale.

4. Treat intermediate contacts with respect

Telemarketers sometimes need to wade through layers of office personnel before getting the chance to talk to the decision maker. Showing respect to intermediate office assistants, secretaries and gatekeepers is a sign of professionalism and ups your chances of making a sale.

5. Send reminders to prospective customers

If a telemarketing call resulted in qualifying the consumer as a prospective customer, following up is good strategy. It can be done through a letter, email, mailer or maybe a brochure that describes the product or service offer again. It will remind the customer about your offer without being intrusive.

Telemarketing sales campaigns must run for a minimum of 10 days to get some results. Initially, the campaign should target a smaller audience to measure the performance. The campaign can then be expanded to a larger demographic and extended to 20 days or more. Proper qualification of target audiences is crucial to the success of a telemarketing campaign. For this reason, businesses should never buy contacts from a clearinghouse or similar agencies.

Telemarketing can lead to increased sales if telemarketers are trained to improve the quality of calls rather than pressurizing them to cover more customers. Professionalism will garner long-term results for your brand by winning the goodwill of customers.
About Author:
Daljeet Sidhu is at TradeSeam. Read our telemarketing advice. Compare telemarketing quotes. Sellers JOIN for sales leads.