Demand Generation –
Driving awareness for your company and its products or services is at the forefront of every marketers mind. We know that with the technology today, utilising the numerous channels available to us in an innovative and educational fashion drums up a lot of interest in your business. The various channels of engagement available to us are very exciting and rewarding; however, whilst we should certainly embrace inbound marketing, we also shouldn’t forget our roots, the crucial piece of the puzzle.
Last week the Sales Accelerant team posted the blog Why You Need to Continue to Embrace Outbound Marketing. In this post we used statistics and advice to cover “why Outbound is still important today”.
Outbound Marketing.
Now I am highlighting 6 examples to show how fundamental telemarketing is to demand generation.
BANT Sales Lead Qualification.
1. BANT, Precision Lead Scoring
Many Marketer’s use lead scoring, but most of them no longer consider telemarketing as a channel to do this. Instead using methods such as analytics to see which pages leads are interested in, or which emails they have responded to or acted on most. While lead scoring is possible through various means none are really quite as effective as simply making a call.
Finding crucial sales lead qualification information such as BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs & Timescale) is much simpler for many prospects when discussed over the phone. The other benefit of lead-qualifying over the telephone is that you have the opportunity to immediately ask deeper probing questions based on their responses.
Outbound Calling.
2. Expand Your Reach Beyond The Internet
You may be surprised to hear that even today there are large organisations which prohibit use of the internet. Most marketers will assume everyone has complete open-ended access to the internet while in their business environment. However there are cases where the internet is either monitored or heavily restricted, this is mostly in firms which handle sensitive data. While taking a call is a generally accepted as a benefit to the business, meaning that telemarketing is likely the most effective demand generation route for such prospects.
Direct Marketing.
3. Direct Mail & Email Marketing
Direct mail and email marketing, whilst very relevant and effective marketing channels, do have some issues in comparison with other channels. For example attaining quality responses can be difficult as well as being relatively expensive (referring to direct mail more so than email marketing). If you knew exactly what was required for your direct mail and email marketing to achieve optimum success, ROI would be easy.
If only there was some way which we could evaluate how effective our direct marketing is. That’s where telemarketing comes in. Personal calls are without doubt the most efficient way to get concise and detailed feedback from your leads. This could help you avoid many unnecessary costs moving forwards as well as the opportunity for a memorable, personal chat with one of your leads, which will help the lead nurturing process.
Better Qualified Sales Leads.
4. Better Quality Meetings With Prospects
When a decision maker is looking to find a service or product in the B2B environment they will most likely be very reluctant to make any appointments, without being certain that this will be worth their while. Equally, you don’t really want to be attending meetings or sending your sales teams to fruitless meetings either.
Having contact, via telemarketing, with a decision maker gives the opportunity to build trust and credibility for your company, alongside content marketing for example. Even if the decision maker is already convinced about the product/service itself they need to be sold on you and your company too, especially when it comes to high ticket level transactions and potential introduction of disruptive changes. The only way to develop the deeper trust, alongside well thought through and delivered lead nurturing, is to get a face to face meeting.
That’s why using a telemarketing team to encourage prospects to commit to some quality face to face meeting time at some point is so critical. You simply cannot connect on the same level with inbound marketing as a real conversation can. If you are using inbound straight into a sales meeting then most likely there is more often than not a void you need to fill in your sales cycle.
Event Marketing.
5. Personal Invitations
So, you have invested a large budget into a trade fair or convention relevant to your industry. How are you going to make sure that people attend this event with your business in mind?
Many events rely almost entirely on email blasts for promotion, causing an unjustifiable lack of attendants and engagement. How can you ensure that prospects commit to your event like you have? Give them a personal call, make them understand how beneficial your presentation will be, while dismantling their objections. Of course, depending on the scale of event and budget available, this may not always be a practical or viable option.
Using telemarketing pre-event, you can help to ensure that when your attendees/delegates step into the conference centre, your stand is the one they are looking for, because they have come to see you and other representatives of your company.
Post Event Sales Lead Generation Telemarketing.
6. Post Event
When you have spent such a large sum on an event it’s fair to say that you will desire and expect many leads to be generated from the activity. However it’s not always as simple as that, efficient management of your leads is key. Whilst most of your leads will be happy with your inbound nurturing follow-ups. Some may even be sales-ready and there will be others who prefer being nurtured over the phone. One size does not fit all. Often it’s not just tailored content which will grant you a sale but also a marketing channel which the lead prefers.
Marketing Channel Options.
Therefore telemarketing not only enhances your brand image, by humanising your business. You are also giving your leads more options. Ultimately giving your sales team more opportunities to convert a lead into a sale/client.
Take a look at the Sales Accelerant blogs.Call Sales Accelerant to discuss B2B telemarketing.
Call the Sales Accelerant team TODAY on 0845 3058145 or Email Us and experience the sales approach difference that makes the difference.
