Telemarketing can form an integral part of a sales and marketing campaign, either as a tool for gathering the data that will be the foundation for your direct marketing approaches, as a follow up to other forms of direct marketing, or as an upfront weapon for identifying your best sales prospects.
The most common functions of business to business outbound telemarketing include:
Improving marketing data: At a basic level this may include gathering the contact details of decision makers and their usage of products and services relevant to your market, but further probing can deliver more in-depth information perhaps on distribution channels for example.
Tele-cleaning your existing data: It's your data, but is it a valuable asset? Only if it's clean and accurate. A professional team of telemarketers can ensure that your data doesn't embarrass you or let you down.
Lead generation: Using a team of dedicated telemarketers to do this tough, up-front work can make more cost-effective use of your often highly paid field sales or tele sales executives by allowing them to focus on closing sales rather than chasing prospects.
Event planning: If you're investing money in marketing events - perhaps a seminar to introduce your company to likely sales prospects in your target market, or presenting a new product or service to potential customers. Telemarketing is an effective way to ensure the right people turn up in the right numbers. This method is often used as a follow up to a targeted mailing.
Direct mail follow-up: Telephone follow up to mailings is proven to increase returns, by between three and seven times as much in some cases.
Point-of-sale promotion: For those distributing products through multiple channels, regular contact with distributors or resellers has numerous benefits. It can ensure that they are familiar with your products and have the right marketing materials to sell them successfully, but can also achieve the difficult goal of keeping your product/service at the forefront of their minds.
Company profiling: This offers the opportunity to go beyond the type of superficial prospect data held by most businesses and gain a full understanding of how potential customers operate. Information on aspects such as their decision making processes and who they currently purchase from enables much better tailoring of sales and marketing approaches.
Customer contact: While all of the above functions are relevant to existing and potential customers, there is scope for more creative uses of telemarketing that have particular relevance to previous/existing customers. For example: you've set up a new website - so call your customers to introduce them to this new way of doing business with them. Or if you change location or company name - as well as writing to your customers, call them and perhaps take the opportunity to pass on new product information and/or a special offer.
