Telemarketing 101

Call centers are often thought of as large office rooms full of cubicles with dozens of people chattering away to thousands of contacts everyday (think the movie Boiler Room). These places will never work in the B2B lead-gen world because most companies have a more technical sale with a longer sales cycle. Corporate buyers would never stand for a boiler room approach. Besides this is the approach for high volume tele-sales not lead-gen. A telemarketing lead-gen campaign should be designed to find leads that match a set of pre-defined attributes and hand them over to sales. Marketing managers know that the buyer's profile identifies who is ready to buy and when. And there’s no better way to get this information than by calling a person and asking for it.

So how do you go about making these calls? Well you don’t have to setup a boiler room. A "call center" can be as simple as one person dedicated to making calls for 4 hours a day or 1 day out of the week. It can be 4 people making calls to a wider pool of contacts. It can be 20 people running multiple campaigns for a variety of products or services. It can be members of your customer service team calling past customers and keeping a "power list" up to date. The point is that a call center is whatever you need it to be. If you’re selling to a market of 10,000 potential users and covering the country with a 5 person sales team it might be hard getting around to each contact when they are at the right time in their buying cycle. A couple of tele-reps making nurturing calls may be a more effective use of your money to find the right people at the right time. Lets face it, salespeople are expensive. They are much more successful when they are calling people that are known to be 'in the mood' for your product.

So don't pigeon-hole telemarketing. It can be the single most effective way of getting the sales increases we are looking for. A good lead-gen call center can be whatever it is that you need it to be. The only thing you need to ensure is control of the  the process, the information gathered and transmitting it to the right people at the time they need it. There is nothing more frustrating to a sales person than finding out that the buyer at their last call just upgraded their equipment 3 months ago and their product wasn’t even in the running.