Who’s Calling, Please?

WHEN IT COMES to sales and marketing executives’ perception of business worth, telemarketing services too often are seen as relatively low on the value scale. No surprise there: At most companies, volumes of poorly targeted calls made by inexperienced individuals result in low-level leads that waste sales representatives’ valuable time.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are thousands of highly skilled, ethical business professionals who add value to their organizations and increase sales every day through the conversations they have with prospects and customers. So before you decide to throw away the telephone altogether, there are ways to make telemarketing services a strategic sales tool rather than a stand-alone tactic.

When backed by data that helps the organization better understand its customers, and when calls are conducted by people with vertical experience who focus on identifying and resolving these customers’ problems, telemarketing services can add value to any sales process.

Businesses that make the move from impersonal outbound calling to value-added telemarketing services — those focused on building rapport with targeted prospects — can reap the benefits of more predictable forecasts and a boost in sales and conversion.

Because many companies measure marketing results by the number of leads generated as well as gains in lead conversion and revenue, most fail to understand that having fewer, well-qualified leads is better than coming up with more of them. So the first mindset adjustment required in a switch to value-added telemarketing services is a focus not on cost per lead, but on obtaining qualified, profitable leads. Cost per new customer should be the short-term financial metric by which telemarketing services are measured. The lifetime value of that newly acquired customer ought to be the long-term metric.

To that end, business intelligence helps firms pick up sales by identifying, nurturing and converting leads into opportunities. There are many definitions of business intelligence. In telemarketing it effectively means deriving key insights from a set of actions and then feeding that understanding back in the form of different or better actions to upgrade a marketing program’s overall performance and allow more chances for sales leads.

As a first approach to creating a marketing campaign that will increase sales, segmenting is a powerful tool for defining the prospects that most likely will be ready buyers and what messages are best targeted to them. However, sometimes what a company thinks is a target is different from what the target actually is.

One large IT outsourcing company, for example, had targeted 80,000 firms for a marketing effort. However, by segmenting more effectively, eliminating parts of the market least likely to convert and implementing a campaign mix of telemarketing services, direct mail and e-mail, the company gained some astonishing insights about how to boost sales leads and conversion. It learned its actual target universe was 36,000 rather than 80,000 companies. When attention was focused on that smaller subset, response rates rose by more than 50%.

Effectively defining a target market takes a combination of art (practice and knowledge) and science (data and intelligence). It includes the following steps:

• Identifying discriminating characteristics among databases and lists.

• Segmenting lists into small, homogeneous cubes or layers of like companies.

• Testing to profile and uncover opportunities in the cubes.

• Analyzing cubes to find high-return segments and rank them as separate mini-markets.

• Using this intelligence to fully fund the right model for future programs.

Various filters can be applied to the segments, including:

• SIC codes.

• Revenue or number of employees.

• Annual growth percentage.

• Decision-maker level.

• Geography.

• Offer (price, bundling, terms or delivery mechanism).

• Media (telemarketing services, direct mail, e-mail or print).

Business intelligence is important, but data alone doesn’t deliver enough value to truly change the results of a firm’s telemarketing services outreach and make a positive impact on sales. So before putting anyone on the phone with a potential customer, every organization should ask potential reps a question: “Do you remember how you might have communicated when you were about 23 years old?” And a natural follow-up: “Would you have felt comfortable having a conversation with a very senior executive like a CFO or CEO?” Most likely your answer, at least to the second question, would be “No way.” Even an exceptional 23-year-old who nonetheless lacked a certain level of life experience and business dealings would have a hard time holding the attention of someone at that level.

But the truth is, the average age of those making calls at a typical telemarketing center — even many B-to-B centers — is about 23. Often it’s a first job out of college — and in many cases callers aren’t college graduates at all. As a matter of fact, only about 50% of the reps at most telemarketing centers are college graduates.

If there’s one thing value-added telemarketing services don’t do, it’s putting inexperienced people on the phone with potential customers. Companies should ensure that anyone speaking to their prospects holds, at minimum, an undergraduate degree — and if possible an advanced degree. Value-added telemarketing services associates can have 10, 15 and more years of targeted experience in specific industries — and should have a proven track record in business.

Yet even experienced people need training and product context to have any positive affect on sales and revenue. The immediate start or on-the-job training approach is another hint that one isn’t dealing with a value-added telemarketing services provider. The last thing a growing organization needs is a staff of minimally prepared reps speaking to its prospects. Many wily prospects delight in throwing someone “off script,” and only those with proper industry perspective or product knowledge are successful at getting the conversation back on track.

A value-added telemarketing services program may require 30 days to get up and running, with built-in processes for redefining and fine-tuning the target market. Taking time on the front end to truly understand and define the organization’s business challenges and needs, and the market’s wants, helps drive conversion on the back end and hike sales. As a rule of thumb, after training, every person on the phone with your prospects should sound 80% as good as your best salesperson.

As a client of an outsourced telemarketing services firm or even as a sponsor of an in-house program, you are partly responsible for ensuring this objective. Rather than sending a marketing person in to train telemarketing services reps, ask your best sales reps to share what real people are saying, to tell true “war stories” and define the actual objectives that must be overcome to boost sales.

Rather than simply foisting Marketing 101 on your company, these sessions should be dynamic, interactive discussions of the three keys that your industry is focusing on immediately to raise sales, and what everyone should be communicating to engage prospects in meaningful conversation.

Anyone who’s ever spent 90 seconds listening to a telemarketer trying to convince him to switch to a “new, different or better” service has felt hijacked — or tricked into doing something he really didn’t want to do. The hijacking approach to telemarketing never works to foster sales or identify qualified leads. All it manages is death by boredom. Instead, value-added telemarketing services take a consultative approach to determine what the prospect’s needs are and what the next best step is for the organization to meet those needs.

The difference between leads and sales opportunities is that a sales opportunity can be placed on the organization’s sales forecast and shared with management. A highly qualified sales opportunity — a decision-maker with an initiative, a budget and a time frame — is as close to a sure thing as a sure thing gets.

Value-added telemarketing services, informed by business intelligence and experienced, trained associates speaking on a company’s behalf, can spur sales and satisfy a firm’s forecast, not just fill its pipeline. And without low-level leads clogging up that pipeline, there’s real visibility into the sales organization and market opportunities, as well as keen insight about which deals will close and when. And when it comes to sales, that’s value added.

DAN McDADE ([email protected]) is president and founder of PointClear, a direct marketing firm in Norcross, GA.

Better Reception

Tips for targeting telesales campaigns

• Carefully define qualified leads. And when you think you’ve defined them enough, ask your sales and marketing executives what their definition is. You’ll likely get a different answer from each of them. Come to an agreement on who you’re after.

• Make sure your market is highly targeted. That means a tight prospect list. Most companies’ prospect lists are so broad that they end up wasting a lot of money.

• Measure the cost of short- and long-term leads. Many firms think short-term leads are more valuable, but it’s not always so.

• Ensure that front-end costs (cost per lead) as well as back-end expenses (costs per closed sale) are measured. If you’re not doing this, figure out what it’ll take to do it and start now.

• If you value lead-generation efforts, put all short-term leads on the forecast at 10% using your average deal size. Require a sales executive’s approval to remove one of these leads from the forecast. Use this process to both measure the quality of the leads generated and gauge the effectiveness of your sales force in following up on leads.

• Lead audits — or prospect satisfaction analyses — are incredibly powerful in assessing the quality of leads and sales force follow-through.