Telemarketing is a marketing method that uses telephone calls to potentials customers for deliver the offer message. Typically these marketing calls are unsolicited, characteristic that makes telemarketing a bit difficult to reach its target without a good strategy.

Before any telemarketing campaign all operators should be train how to approach any potential customer.

Telemarketing strategy

1. Define your offer
   What specifically you have to offer (services or products)? This includes the price and discounts available, conditions, place, timeframe and any relevant details for this offer.It is important to have answers for any potential questions that come from your potential customers / clients.
2. Define your target
   Who is your target segment of the market (businesses or persons)?Preliminary research of your potential customers may be required in business to business marketing. This information is accessible through internet, but preliminary phone calls to kindly and nicely find the proper person to talk and his / her name and position will make the difference between a “brutal approach” and a professional one.
3. Build clients / customers database
   All details regarding persons or businesses contacted during a telemarketing campaign have to go into a database that will generate reports for current and futures campaigns.This database will show exactly persons / businesses that are not interested on your offer and will consider you a spammer. This is a “dead” line for telemarketing if is used again (lose time, lose money, personal aggression, telemarketer will gain bad reputation).

   This database will show the success of this telemarketing campaign. You will have the names of persons / businesses that accepted your offer and they are converted in actual clients or customers. Post sells actions should be taken: build customers / clients’ loyalty, post service, warranty etc.

   And finally this database will show the future potential clients or customers, the segment of market who was not yet converted in customers and clients, but who did not reject the offer either.
   For this segment of market further actions are required and the question: “When will be the proper time for you to remind you our offer?” should have its own field on your database.

Telephone approach

1. You should begin by introducing yourself and your organization
2.  Ask to talk with the right person within called organization
3. Ask if it is the proper time to talk, eventually set up another date and time to finalise the proposal
4. Use Clear Offer message. Talk about offer not your company. Be ready to talk about prices after the listener express his / her interest in your offer. The price is a sensitive element of the offer, be ready to negotiate or make the offer to sound more valuable
5. Always use Plain English – the listener can be or not familiar with specialised language
6. Put no questions prior catching listener interest. Respond polite to any questions of your listener.
7. Call ending:

The operator should ask questions to build customer / client profile only if it is any chance to convert him / her. For that segment who do not accept the proposal the operator should finalize the conversation in most possible pleasant way like “Sorry for taking your time. I will make sure that you will not be disturbed again with this matter.”

For successful proposal, the operator always has to end the conversation with something like “Thank you for your business. You are a valuable client / customer for us; please fill free to contact us for any further enquiry.”

To Dos for operators

Always the conversation should be relaxed and should not put stress on the person that you called, this is way you should avoid irrelevant questions or long speeches.

The key in telemarketing campaign is to keep a professional, short and clear, polite tone of conversation. Make use of diplomacy and be ready to have right answers for any questions. Always keep a relax way of communication. This way of approaching allows you to “open” a communication channel even with people / businesses that are not just now ready to engage in anything, but still you will be able to keep on your database as potential future customer / client.

And again, it is not advisable to use mechanical and repetitive expression that put the operator on machine position. This is a barrier on communication.

The operator should have a nice English (good pronunciation) and ability to understand foreign English accents.

If you need more help with your telemarketing campaign please feel free to contact us for assistance.