Telemarketing Is NOT Dead....My Experience

Recently I hired a telemarketer to help me do most of my cold calls. When I mentioned it to my business contacts, the response I got was - "does it really work?", "I don't find it useful leh...."

Well, here is my experience after almost a month of cold calling and what I think we did right.

Before I jump into the tips, here is what you need to know. Telemarketing doesn't work for every trade, but it works for most. You have to decide if your services or products can be easily explain over the phone.

Ok, it is...these are the things we do right....

Having a Calling Script is Not Enough

That's right. Having a calling script is not enough. Before I start crafting out the script, I set two goals. The primary goal and the secondary goal. The primary goal is simple - Getting an appointment. The secondary goal, getting the decision maker's contact information.

Once I have these two goals, I work backwards and craft the script to reach that goal.

The second element I add into my script is FAQs. If you are at the receiving end, what would your questions be? And how will you handle them?

Voice is Key

Like it anot, having a sweet, pleasant voice is key to retaining the person on the phone. I was told, you have 15 seconds to make an impression when you meet someone for the first time. Likewise, you have 15-20 seconds to get the person to listen to you. Therefore, make sure you get someone with a pleasant voice, it will be the deciding factor between being rejected and getting the appointment.

Call to Agitate The Problem

See, most businesses make a mistake by calling up anyone and everyone. For us, we don't just call any businesses we find. We are very specific in who we call and why they should engage us.

We deliberately find a pain spot (poor looking web design and pathetic content) and highlight the severity of not relieving the pain (unable to convert browsers into leads). In short, we force them to meet us to know how we can relieve their pain (increase web conversion).

Provide Value Upfront

Why would a company decide if you are the right person to solve their problem based on one phone call? To solve this, I make sure my telemarketer follow up with them with additional information. Information that can instantly help them. You can call them tips, content, advice whatever. I call them 'value proposition'.

For example: My telemarketer will email them a website diagnosis and highlight to them the key areas we believe they need to change if they want to improve their web conversion rate.

Do we do this with all the businesses we call? NO.....We do that if they are interested to find out more.

But in our first email, we will mention the key elements that are missing and give them an opportunity to find out more. (if they reply, we will send them a diagnosis).

Closing The Loop

There are 3 scenarios when we cold calls. The first - Getting an appointment. The second, getting the contact information of the decision maker. The last, getting NO.

Obviously, the first scenario would be ideal. But what if we got the second or last scenario?

For the second scenario, we will follow up with an email, call and email again to close the loop.

The first email is to give us a reason to call them. It's also in this first email that we provide our 'value proposition'. If the prospect is not interested at this point, we will send the last email to close the loop.

For the last scenario, since the prospect give us a straight up 'NO', we simply drop them and move on.

Our Results

I am not sure what is the typical result for telemarketing but since this is the first time I am doing this, I am pretty happy with my results thus far.

We made 86 calls over the last few weeks (my VA does other stuff too) and got 5 appts. That is about 6% hit rate. Out of those 5 appts, only 1 couldn't work with us (due to budget constraint) while 1 closed on the spot and 3 requested a detailed proposal.

Not bad right?

Telemarketing is NOT dead. You just need to do it right.

PS: Well, if you are doing telemarketing and have different opinions, feel free to share. Like I said, this is just my experience and though I like what I see here, I am sure there are ways to improve my conversion rate.