How Telemarketing Can Be A Useful Marketing Tool
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How Telemarketing Can Be A Useful Marketing Tool
It can be tempting to invest your marketing energies in a delightful whirl of networking, punctuated with a little bit of Twitter, a lot of LinkedIn and a few timely press releases when you have news to shout from the rooftops. If your business is thriving on this palette of marketing activity, then you can enjoy the rest of this blog without having to bring yourself up short and question whether you could and should be doing more.
A subject that periodically crops up in conversations at Marketscan is that of marketing comfort zones. As individuals and indeed as businesses, we can fall into a pleasant marketing comfort zone cherry picking what we enjoy. The thought of stepping outside it is enough to have us justifying why we don’t need to.
Two activities outside of most people’s marketing comfort zones are public speaking and telephone cold calling.
We’ll look at public speaking in another blog, but for now let’s tackle telephone cold calling. There are a few compelling reasons why so many of us recoil at the prospect of telephone cold calling. One is that we don’t like being on the receiving end of telephone cold calls ourselves and so bring these intense feelings when challenged with making them. From the outset we have a negative mindset dooming ourselves to failure before the opening line has been uttered. Another reason is that we don’t like being rejected; being made to sound or feel a fool.
The inescapable fact is that for so many businesses in the B2B sector, the telephone remains one of the most powerful tools that we can use to engage a cold prospect or a lapsed client.
A conversation of just five minutes can move a cold prospect from having no awareness of our business to being open to the idea of a meeting with us. A couple of conversations; one stone cold with a warmer follow-up can result in a very warm meeting or even clinching the deal – depending of course on the decision-making process that the organisation has to go through before making a commitment and the decision-making unit that has to back the decision.
There are some simple techniques that you can use on the telephone when communicating with cold prospects but the most effective approach of all is complete honesty in your intentions blended with respect and charm. When you pick up the phone to speak to a cold prospect, instead of trying to bamboozle them with your sales rhetoric, ask them if it’s okay to take a couple of minutes of their time instead of assuming now is the time. Then, when you have been given the opportunity to outline some of the benefits you offer but only after listening intently to what your prospect is looking for, ask this question. It cuts through all the waffle:
“We would love to do business with you and I think that having listened to you we could really work together for mutual benefit. What’s standing in the way of us achieving this?”
It’s the truth isn’t it?
And don’t forget, if you need accurate, clean top notch prospects that fit the exact profile of cold prospect you are looking for you can do no better than use our acclaimed Sales Generator Service. Prospects you can call with confidence knowing they have not subscribed to any of the Telephone Preference Schemes.
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