The Great Guns Marketing Blog

If your campaign objective is to secure appointments with hard to reach senior decision makers, then spending time nurturing prospects is invaluable to achieving success. This means and you may need to consider some database building and lead nurturing activity prior to jumping into the appointment making process.

We regularly discuss with clients how they will experience better campaign results if they utilise telemarketing in a sustained manner and as part of an integrated approach including data cleansing and email marketing. After all, securing an appointment relies on you building a relationship with a decision maker, which doesn’t happen in one phone call alone!

One of the measures we use to assess progress on campaigns is the ratio of to calls made to decision maker conversations. This can quickly highlight if we are able to achieve our goals for our clients –simply put if you don’t speak to enough decision makers then you won’t make enough appointments!

We recently undertook a comparison between 2 campaigns, both wanting appointments with decision makers, however Campaign A was starting from cold data with no prior engagement and Campaign B was utilising a pipeline that has been worked for 12 months. To make this comparison as scientific as possible, the calls on both campaigns undertaken by the same telemarketers in the same week.

The results make interesting reading:

Campaign A

• Used cold data
• No clear decision maker identified in the data business, and no prior engagement
• 12 days of calling
• 974 calls
• 36 decision maker contacts
• Call to decision maker ratio of 3.7%
• On average took 3 calls to the organisation to ascertain the decision maker
• 3 appointments made

Campaign B

• Used highly qualified data -prospects were profiled and many had previous engagement via phone and email
• Decision maker had already been identified
• 6 days of calling
• 449 calls
• 96 decision maker contacts
• Call to decision maker ratio of 21.4%
• 7 appointments made

So, Campaign B delivered:

• A far superior call to decision maker ratio.
• Twice as many appointments in half the number of days.
• A much better ROI on the telemarketing spend.

So, if you want a more efficient telemarketing campaign then Great Guns would recommend that you allow for some database building and pipeline development before expecting appointments to be generated.

Many companies ask us about minimum trial periods for telemarketing activity, or at what point they should start to assess whether their internal telemarketers are working out for them. This really depends on how quick your sales cycle is and you need to apply a bit of common sense to it.

Sales in the B2B world is still about building relationships and this can take a bit of time. We’re just about to finish a 3 month initial contract to deliver telemarketing services for an employee benefits company. Their objective was for us to generate 40 sales appointments a month to hit their growth targets. With employee benefits, it is difficult to create a message that is truly unique, as every provider will claim they offer the best solution – our job is to persuade decision makers to consider our client as a supplier over every other employee benefits specialist.

We agreed a 3 month telemarketing campaign with the objective to prove that 1 appointment a day would be an achievable task. In month 1 we delivered 15 days of telemarketing, generated 1 appointment every 5 days and converted 5% of decision maker calls to appointment. In month 2 we delivered 35 days of telemarketing, generated 1 appointment every 4 days and converted 10% of decision maker conversations to appointment. In month 3 we delivered 40 days of telemarketing, generated 1 appointment a day and converted 14% of decision maker contacts to appointment.

This shows that telemarketing in a competitive B2B arena needs to be sustained. Testing it over the course of a few weeks won’t give you an accurate reflection of what results you can achieve in the longer term through telemarketing. Ideally you need to give telemarketing between 3 and 6 months to really test its effectiveness. If our client had have stopped at the end of the second month they would have had the conclusion that telemarketing can’t yield the results they need to make it cost-effective. By continuing they have a solution which is working really well and helping them to meet their business objectives.

As a specialist B2B new business generation agency, we’re used to generating sales appointments for our clients. A meeting must be fully qualified to pass the Great Guns management checks, and we expect our clients to convert an average of 30% from our meetings to sale. Our telemarketing process involves us gaining as much information from decision makers as possible on every call to enquire such high quality of meeting.

Here are our top B2B market research questions our clients want us to ask:

1. Which decision makers are involved in the buying cycle (how many and all their contact details)?
2. Do they have a current solution in place?
3. Is this outsourced or internal?
4. Are there any areas they feel they want to improve with their current solution (requirements)?
5. What timescales are they working to?
6. What options have they considered?
7. If there is no requirement now, when may they be considering reviewing?
8. Would they be happy to speak to us when the time is right?

You may be asking why budget questions are not there. This is a sensitive question and one not many decision makers want to discuss at an early stage. If you feel you have a good enough bond with the decision maker then you can ask probing questions about how much budget they have. If you don’t feel it’s right to ask this questions however, if you know the options they are considering and timescales they are working to you can often get good feel of whether they are a suitable fit for the budget you need from them.

The Great Guns training team holds regular buzz sessions with our telemarketers to refresh skills. It provides an opportunity for team members to contribute and feedback their experiences regarding current telemarketing activity that we are undertaking for clients.

One topic that regularly gets raised, especially from our newest team members, is the role of ‘gatekeepers ‘ and this quite often brings about a lengthy discussion.

Firstly – what do they mean by the term gatekeeper? Ask the team to explain and a succinct description would be: “ PA’s, secretaries, receptionists…. those answering the phone who block me from speaking to the decision maker”.

OK, so turning this around, we always encourage the team to step into the recipient’s shoes and imagine themselves in situ.  For example – PA’s and secretaries are simply doing their job, quite often managing  extensive diary commitments, undertaking a varied workload and in many cases representing the senior management team at a high level – in addition to dealing with inbound calls and enquiries that can be distracting and interrupting. Empathy goes a long way towards building a relationship with someone with such a heavy workload.

In our Drill for Skills sessions we reiterate some simple do’s and don’ts…

Do

• Be polite and courteous and respectful.
• Listen, show an interest and ask questions that will help to qualify the prospect.
• Build a rapport – PA’s for example probably take over 20 sales calls a day, why would they put you through to their busy boss over somebody else?
• Recognise that the individual who answers the phone is an integral part of the sales process and respect them.
• Remember, if you can’t get them on side then you won’t get through to the decision maker.

 Don’t

• Be too forceful, pester or become a pain.
• Ignore the influencing power of the person answering the phone – they can be responsible for deciding who gets transferred through to the decision maker.
• Use the term ‘gatekeepers’!

 In fact here at Great Guns Marketing we have banned the ‘gatekeepers’ term within the office, instead using  ‘influencers’ – its much more positive and has definitely had a great impact on the success of our clients’ telemarketing campaigns.

Why role play is essential to efficient telemarketing?

Here at Great Guns we host many role play sessions on a weekly basis. This gives our telemarketers the opportunity to practice their approaches and objection handling in a safe environment.

In this “safe” environment our team can make all their mistakes and approach things from different perspectives without risking our clients’ brand.

When we first started role play as a training model many of our team found themselves completely out of their comfort zone. I found that people fell into two camps- those that love it and those that don’t.

The way I persuaded them that role play was a worthwhile exercise was to let them watch their colleagues achieve higher results than average – especially in the early stages of projects.

Role play should be a fun experience. I find that these sessions are always much more successful when our team are relaxed so I encourage loads of banter and creativity. I think it’s really important that we try and preempt as many objections and therefore prepare as many answers to objections as we can.

I know role play is critical because even the best telemarketers – myself included- find it difficult to come out of a client brief, pick up the phone immediately and sound fluid, professional and competent. Carrying out these sessions prior to project start not only gives our team the great opportunity to build their confidence but also gives our account managers the opportunity to ensure our guys have really understood our clients features and benefits.

I personally carried out a role play session this week on a project. The exercise was 40 minutes long and the transformation that took place in our telemarketers and their ability to present the client was incredible. When the session started they were rusty and their voices sounded quite monotone. By the time the session had finished they sounded like they had worked for the client for years and their personalities really came through in their tone. This was because our team members were now comfortable with the subject and able to combine this with their natural telemarketing abilities to successfully represent the client.

At Great Guns Marketing we offer Telemarketing training. If you don’t currently use role play with your team and want help in developing techniques, call Great Guns Marketing 01256330571.

Sales is all about results – largely measured by return on investment.

Here are some things to think about before you go steaming ahead with the sales process, which will help you to manage your pipeline and get more out of your telemarketing activity:

1. What makes a good client? Do you really know who you’re targeting and who you want to sell to? One of the first things you can do to make your time more productive is to only go after prospects you know will be your best clients. Profile them based on the industry, size of company, where they are in their buying cycle, what the potential opportunity is etc. For example, if you are a printing company, you may want to think about targeting companies that have a minimum annual print spend, have requirements for lithographic printing, are local to you etc.
2. Build a process to manage your database and gather this market intelligence as you are calling. If you set up you database correctly, it will prompt you to ask these profiling questions and record the intelligence. Some prospects will automatically drop off your radar as you identify they don’t have the correct opportunity for you, reducing your time and money in continuing to target them. Those that do meet your criteria for an excellent client will become apparent and you will put more effort into targeting them.
3. Decide the best way to engage with each prospect. This may be a multi-channel approach. In the first instance you should ideally speak to them over the phone, identify what their pains are, what their personal objectives and business objectives are and understand how they would like you to keep in contact with them. Don’t push too hard – listen to them and respond to what they want, when they want. If you can’t offer a solution to them at the time, be honest about this as it will earn trust and respect.
4. At the end of every conversation agree a next course of action. This may be to send them some information, to invite them to events you run, to call back in a few weeks or to put them on a mailing list. Agree this with your prospect and make sure you deliver to this agreement. We still find one of the best way of achieving appointments is by calling back when we say we will. If this is difficult for you to manage as you’re too busy to stick to your promises then maybe you need to look for support to carry out the telemarketing on your behalf. If you’re not very organised and miss your call backs then maybe you should look for a CRM system where you can set alarms to remind you to call prospects back.
5. Get the level of contact right. If you have followed the above steps then you will be giving your prospect just the right amount of attention as you are agreeing next steps with them. If you contact them too often then you are likely to drive a prospect away. Don’t take advantage of an agreement to contact a prospect again – this is a sign of their trust so don’t abuse it.
6. Give it some time. Stick to the principles and you will win quality meetings with great prospects.