Good Call

Sure, all that newfangled new media is grand. But today we’re here to pay tribute to the good old telephone — the most versatile, flexible and consistently reliable tool in the business-to-business toolbox. It’s the closest thing to face-to-face selling, but without the expense of an in-person sales call. Best of all, it can be applied at nearly every stage of the marketing process.

B-to-B DMers spent $28 billion on telephone marketing last year, according to the DMA’s 2006-2007 “Power of Direct Marketing” study. That’s big bucks — bigger even than their $21.4 billion investment in direct mail, and certainly bigger than the $10.9 billion they laid out to do business on the Internet.

Most of the phone spending ($17.5 billion) was used to drum up sales leads. Another $8.6 billion went toward driving direct orders. The DMA study says phone-based lead generation resulted in revenue of $143.1 billion. And another $64.4 billion in B-to-B direct merchandise sales came from phone efforts.

How can B-to-B marketers take full advantage of the telephone? Here are some suggestions.

• Market research

  The Internet has become a leading medium for survey and even focus group research, but the telephone still has its place. The phone allows more reactive intelligence to be applied to the Q&A process, and, in the right hands, lets users probe and gain unusual insights into customer needs and motivations.

• Inquiry qualification

  Traditionally, the phone was the primary means of outbound contact to assess the quality of a campaign inquiry. E-mail has come up quickly as a useful alternative, but a combination of the two could be ideal.

• Lead nurturing

  A judicious media mix can be used to stay in touch with unqualified leads, keeping them warm until they’re ready to see a salesperson. Smart marketers blend phone touches with other tools (e-mail, direct mail, events, Webinars and newsletters).

• Outbound telemarketing

  Certain B-to-B product categories work well for traditional one-touch telemarketing. Richard Simms, co-author of “The DialAmerica Teleservices Handbook,” says these include trade-publication subscriptions, training products like books and videos, regulatory compliance products, software, utility services and consumables like paper or toner.

• Account management

  Many companies assign field reps to top accounts, telereps to the middle tier, and use direct mail and e-mail to cover smaller clients.

• Inbound telesales

  For a catalog or e-commerce operation, this is an excellent way to sell replacement parts and other low-value, low-involvement products.

• Setting sales appointments

  Appointment setting — the top of the lead-generation food chain — is a perfect way to use the telephone. Why? Because the phone is really the only tool that supports the sophisticated interaction needed to qualify and arrange meetings with prospects.

• High-end relationship management (lead development)

  Phone-based but highly skilled and experienced professionals — often retired executives — can be used to conduct quality conversations with senior targets.

• Data hygiene

  The phone is perfect for contacting key accounts to confirm titles, phone numbers and the like, and to identify additional sales opportunities.

• Guided voicemail support

  Pioneered by companies like Boxpilot, this involves a live phone call to search out the right voicemail box and then drop in a canned voice message. The reps report back on what they’ve learned about the players and their contact information, which becomes valuable fodder for the database.

• Pretesting of lists and offers

  B-to-B mail universes tend to be small, which limits traditional split testing in the mail or on the phone. So a pretest using phone or e-mail can help narrow down campaign options.

• Campaign enhancement

  Just as with consumer efforts, phone follow-up to direct mail and phone/mail/phone strategies works well in B-to-B.

• Data-driven cross-selling

  The phone is great for delivering outbound offers developed by database modeling. For example, IBM’s database analysts routinely produce “reason to call” lists for the company’s telereps. The lists employ modeling to spot opportunity in the client base and give reps something relevant to say when they call. Another popular B-to-B application is modeling data to suggest the “next logical product” that might be offered to each account based on past customer purchase patterns.

RUTH P. STEVENS ([email protected]) consults on customer acquisition and retention, and teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School. She is the author of “The DMA Lead Generation Handbook” and “Trade Show and Event Marketing.”

Ringing the Numbers

While telemarketing was tops in the DMA’s 2006-2007 “Power of Direct Marketing” report, it didn’t fare quite so well in the group’s more recent study on business-to-business DM practices.

In “B-to-B Direct Marketing Benchmarks: From Lead Generation to Customer Retention,” telemarketing accounted for just 12.1% of respondents’ media allocation. Direct mail took the lion’s share with 27.5%, and Internet marketing came in second at 18.8%.

“When we asked people how much of their DM budget went to telephone, they may have read this narrowly as outbound call campaigns,” says DMA research manager Yoram Wurmser. “Also, while internal and external sales forces rely on the telephone, their costs may lie outside DM budgets. In other words, telemarketing as a cost disappears into other line items, such as sales or operations.”

The telephone was the No. 2 medium for qualifying inquiries (used by 57%), after e-mail (60%). For lead nurturing, the phone was tops, used by 62% of respondents.

E-mail ranked as the most-used medium for retention marketing (71%), with the phone again coming in second at 60%.

Phone calls also were mentioned as the most common way for salespeople to follow up, either exclusively or when coupled with face-to-face sales visits.
— RPS