Until recently, in telemarketing there were only two possible scenarios:
- the seller who makes phone calls on his own, qualifies them, takes very few but very good appointments, and everyone is happy with a new customer per year …
or…
- the classic telemarketing agency or call center that makes the calls and gets a fair number of appointments. But these are cognitive appointments, where the seller goes around empty in 80% of cases. The prospect isn’t a real prospect: the telephonist was just so kind that the prospect couldn’t say no. These types of “emotional” appointments are suitable for B2C, not for a professional context like business-to-business.
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Today there’s also “B2B Telemarketing”, with a capital T, thanks to the fact that we created a new and different telephone lead generation for business-to-business markets.
What’s this new and different way?
It consists of reversing the approach: instead of trying to make appointments with anyone as long as they breathe, we skim opportunities and only take “qualified appointments“.
To explain what “qualified appointments” mean, and how they differ from the appointments that any other telemarketing provider takes, we need to see what our operators do differently.
Unlike what happens elsewhere, B2B Telemarketing operators no longer have just one task, which is to open the door to your seller: they do a triple – indeed, quadruple – job:
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first of all, they don’t just talk to anyone who listens to them, but they get to talk to the RIGHT REFERENT, or the person entitled to deal with the product/service you offer.
Then, when they finally got back to the right person:
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They must QUALIFY that company, deciding whether it could be a potential customer.
After that
- they try to make an appointment only if the customer is “QUALIFIED”, i.e. if they have established that it can be a potential customer
And finally, in all cases,
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They collect and write down the answers and references of ALL contacts, having their name, role, email contact, internal phone number released.
This information is invaluable, both for creating a database of customers and potential customers, and for doing a market intelligence activity. They allow you to feel the moods of the market through reading the conversation notes, understand if there’s any competitor aggressive or in difficulty, or to discover contractual deadlines, etc.
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What does it mean that a company is QUALIFIED? And how do you determine this?
Everything is based on an exclusive method that we have developed thanks to our twenty years of experience in business-to-business sales.
A method that today allows us to identify the qualification of prospects with great accuracy, and that we make available to our customers in the preparatory stages of the campaign.
We help our customers establish objective qualification criteria. Then, based on this qualification profile, or “qualification grid”, we screen opportunities and only make qualified appointments.
The results that are invariably obtained in the campaigns set up in this way are two, closely related:
- a number of appointments that are almost always LOWER than those made with the traditional methods of other suppliers;
- but these are QUALIFIED appointments, i.e. there are the conditions for that potential customer to become your new customer to all intents and purposes.
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What is the advantage for your company in using such a different model from common practice?
There are multiple advantages:
- Generate a constant volume, month after month after month, of QUALIFIED appointments, with companies that have the requirements to be a customer of yours;
- Save valuable salesmen time by only sending them to qualified appointments;
- Save the costs of mileage reimbursements, expense reports, travel;
- Don’t create a bad mood in the sales network, because there is nothing worse than sellers complaining about going around for nothing;
- Build a database (or increase it, if you already have one) that is a real mine of information about the market and the competition; and that is full of emails to work on for subsequent recall activities, for email marketing campaigns, for mail campaigns.
Basically, in 12-18 months, you’ll have set up a machine that can feed your sales network with fresh new contacts every month.
This will make your sales forecasts stable and reliable, avoiding the annoying “roller coaster” effect that those who can never count on new customers entering next month are suffering from.
To find out more about the services that make all this possible, look at what is the
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