Let’s talk about B2B telemarketing. Telemarketing has a number of pros and cons: It has proven effective for years, and targeted managers reported feeling more valued through telemarketing compared to other less personal options of direct mail, mobile marketing and email marketing. But in the digital era, it seems passé and it’s certainly time intensive.
For many business leaders, the pros of telemarketing outweigh the cons. My friend Mark, an owner of a small B2B software service provider, recently dealt with the challenges of telemarketing. Here’s Mark’s story:
He has 10 loyal customers who love his service in Perth, WA, and he is anxious to grow, but he was at a loss on how. Mark has tried yellow pages, online ads and other form of advertising and has failed. He knows specifically what companies would benefit from his service, and he wants to target local owners only. For his situation, he understood his best lead generation option was telemarketing. On average, it takes 80 calls to get an opportunity.
For Mark, His success rate of closing a sale is 1/7 opportunities. Each sale would bring his business between $6,000 to $15,000 in Gross Profit. To reach his business goals he was going to need 4 sales per month. With an average of 80 calls to gain a opportunity Mark needed to make a minimum of 560 calls per week. With each call taking anywhere between 2 to 5 minutes Mark realized it was going to take him close to 23 hours per week of cold calling to reach 7 opportunities.
He then started researching this space and various telemarketing options. When sharing stories, I was baffled by how difficult it is to solve this seemly critical function for business owner. Realizing that his time was better spent engaging with local businesses progressing and closing current opportunities Mark realized he had two options.
The first: Hire an independent telemarketer.
Mark hired an employee on to make phone calls, he quickly realized that training and managing the telemarketer was taking just as much time as if he were to be making the calls himself, the telemarketer started asking: “What is my script? How do I handle the call? What data should I use? Do I send follow up emails?” Wow. This was getting technical, and Mark didn’t have the time or experience to handle this.
He then started exploring his second option:hire a telemarketing services company.
A telemarketing service would take care of prospecting potential clients, making cold calls, setting appointments and everything else in between.
Hiring a telemarketing service is easy right? Pick up the phone, ask for telemarketing services, and you’re up and running? Not so fast. Mark immediately ran into a problem; the company wanted one month payment up front. He wondered: But what if I don’t get results? The answer: Too bad.
Then Mark came across www.salesassist.com.au, which offers a risk free telemarketing service. First, he emailed, with a outline of what his business goals and some of the challenges his business was experiencing. After confirming his business goals, Sales Assist put together a campaign which offered a Price per appointment structure, No weekly retainer or further commissions.
The hard work didn’t stop there; getting results was hard, too. But Mark now had an experienced company to offer guidance. After all, almost 70 percent of B2B sales involve human interaction, be a phone call or a meeting, so he’s heading in the right direction.
The result was a average of 450 calls made per week with 7 to 10 set appointments with decision makers interested in how his software is able to benefit their company. There was also a 53% gain in productivity as he no longer needed to manage, train or call himself. 100% of his time was spent on Progressing the opportunities in the sales funnel. And closing them down.
For more information on our service contact us at:
info@salesassist.com.au
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