B-to-B Telemarketing and Telesales: Do’s and Don’ts as the Economy Recovers

by Michael Brown

When the economy tanked in 2000, many companies hit the phones in a mad scramble to replace business that was going away. Now that the economy is turning upward again, many firms are hitting the phones in a mad scramble to capture some of the newly-loosened dollars. What can we learn from the bad times that we can apply profitably now as we market and sell by phone?

What didn't work

• Cold-calling. Because it sounds too much like consumer telemarketing, most business prospects resist cold calls. A businesswoman here in Austin put it this way:"If a cold-caller gets me on the phone, I must have made a mistake!" Indeed, cold-calling produces the lowest ROI of any phone marketing application.
• Generic, undifferentiated calling to high-level contacts fails, unfailingly.
• Out-of-context campaigns and offers. Customers and prospects want whatever we present to them to make sense in their business life and timetable, not ours. The"call from out of the blue" confuses and annoys.
• Asking outbound reps to make 100 dials a day. Dials without resulting conversations mean nothing. Talk-time without qualified leads, positive next steps, and orders causes poverty.
• Directing inbound reps to make outbound calls"when they have time." Layoffs led to smaller phone staffs, so the remaining reps often struggled to keep up with inbound calls. Also, most inbound reps dislike making proactive outbound calls, so what better excuse than"I didn't have time."
• Over-automation. In their attempts to reduce costs, too many firms replaced live people with automated response systems. And don't we all love automated response systems.
• Disguising sales calls as surveys. Deception eventually destroys the deceiver regardless of the economy.

What scored"style points" but little or no actual business

• Professionally prerecorded"call me back" messages left on prospects' phone mail. The return rate remained under four percent.
• Narrative marketing messages (2-3 minutes or longer) left overnight for prospects to listen in the morning. After clearing 83 spams from their e-mail and hearing "you have 24 new messages" on their phone mail, the last thing prospects wanted was story-telling.

What worked and will continue to work

• Behavioral and affinity lists, not demographic or segment lists. Behavioral lists are based on verbs in addition to SIC code; e.g., grew by n%, merged, moved, etc. Affinity lists are based on recent purchases of related products or services or other marketplace actions such as magazine subscriptions. Such lists cost more but perform much better.
• Diligent pre-call planning, especially a 30-second visit to the prospect's web site to find out what they do and how they market themselves. A little homework beats "tell me a little about your business" every time.
• Relevant-event marketing. Make calls of inquiry or exploration based on an organization's events or news … recent past, present, or pending … that move them into your sphere of better-than-average prospects and on which you can build a conversation.
• Lose the elevator pitches, hype, and feature-dumps and ask meaningful questions instead. Ask before telling and learn before selling.
• Get really good at multi-media marketing: phone plus e-mail plus live web site tours and, for software, customized, guided, on-line product demos. Encourage and enforce marketing-sales coordination. The two disciplines may never love each other, but the more closely they collaborate, the better off you and your customers will be.
• Provide for time. Market and sell with vigor and enthusiasm tempered with humility and patience.