Carlos DaSilva is an Account Manager for Direct Marketing Services. Here Carlos tells us more about how telemarketing can be used successfully to generate leads and sales, and lets us in on his top tips for improving your response with this direct marketing channel.
What kind of conversion from telemarketing call to lead should a small business aim to achieve?
It’s important to remember that you won’t always speak with every prospect on the first call, but once you have spoken to 100 prospects you should be able to convert a quarter of them into actual leads for your business.
How can you increase the conversion from call to lead when telemarketing?
When you speak to prospects, use your voice to sound positive and friendly. You should also sound very enthusiastic about your products and services. Ask them lots of questions to find out as much as you can about their business, their goals and the problems they face so you can identify how you can help them.
How can you increase the conversion from lead to sale over the phone?
Once you have the customer’s attention, most businesses are more than happy to talk to you about what they do and how they compare to their competition. Once you know about their business, recommend the most suitable products and services from the ones you offer to help them meet their goals. And remember to highlight the return on investment they could make by investing in your product or service - they won’t be able to say no to you.
How do you know if a prospect is genuinely interested in your product when you are speaking to them on the phone? Are there any tell tale signs you look out for?
If a prospect starts asking you lots of questions and the conversation is free flowing, you can be sure they are interested in what you are saying. Listening to their tone of voice is also very helpful as an indicator of what they really think – interested prospects will sound interested.
What is the one thing a customer should make sure they do on each telemarketing call they make?
Always be polite on every call and try not to be too pushy – you don’t want to put people off before you have really got them interested. Also, try to distinguish who is actually interested when you are speaking to them. It’s not worth wasting too much time on people that aren’t going to buy when you could be focusing on ones that will.
What do you say to a business that says it doesn’t have time to be calling prospects aswell as running their business?
For any business that is looking to grow, they need to invest time in achieving this. Even spending half an hour a day on effective telemarketing will bring in results eventually, as every phone call counts. Of course telemarketing is a numbers game and the more calls you make, the more business you will generate for yourself.
The important thing is to manage your time well so you can market your business effectively - and telemarketing is a great way to do this.
Alternatively, if time really is limited, you could try other direct marketing channels such as email marketing or direct mail which enable you to contact a large volume of prospects in one go.
