Should You Stop Telemarketing During A Recession?

During a recession, a lot of businesses focus on reducing expenses. While it is commonly a practical choice to make, this must not include straining sales and marketing endeavors.

Business lost due to unfavorable economic conditions is usually irrecoverable, and the only solution is to find and replace it with a fresh one. This is the reason why limiting sales and marketing endeavors inherently means opting out to compensate for the business lost and probably sending the company to its downfall.

There is plenty of new business out there ready to be found and had. It may be difficult to acquire but it does exist. If organizations discontinue prospecting and generating new business, their competition surely won't. Businesses could capitalize on recession as their best time to emerge from the crowd and show their customers and prospects their resolution, strength and resiliency to weather the storm and maintain their competitive edge.

Telemarketing has proven itself to be an effective tool for increasing profits. It can be utilized to lessen the burden from salespeople and let them concentrate on being more productive at other sales projects. It also provides sales pipeline stability which is usually one of the most difficult things to achieve in a business.

Telemarketing enables businesses to track their return on investment accurately and provides an economical way that will bring out quick results. It offers an avenue where customers or prospects are more accessible for companies. Telemarketers can interact with customers with ease and efficiently resolve any issues or concerns that they may have.

Well-structured call guide or script is a vital tool for improving customer relationships and can add a significant amount of relevant information in a short span of time. Telemarketers are capable of making calls to anywhere in the world and they can cover different timezones. This makes business expansion easier to do.

Businesses may have a hard time surviving the recession, but it does not mean they should give up. It is all the more important to be creative and use all available tools to stay ahead in the competition.

What Makes A Good Telemarketer

It's only logical to assume that to have a cost effective and professional telemarketing call center, effective and professional telemarketers are needed. It shares the same logic as an apple tree bearing apples. Rocket science not required. If you're planning to migrate your business' sales and marketing to a telemarketing company, make sure that the telemarketers they'll be using possesses at least these qualities:

Smart Telemarketers

Needless to say, hiring a telemarketer with a room temperature IQ will do your business no good. This means that the telemarketers are expected to think on their feet, respond smartly and professionally to any inquiries or situations that they might come across.

The Telemarketers Must Know Their Product / Services Specifics Inside Out

It goes without saying that your telemarketers needs an in-depth knowledge regarding the specifics of what they're trying to promote. No matter how engaging or interesting your telemarketers are, if they haven't got a clue as to what they're supposed to be selling, then everything's all pointless.

Must Be Excellent Listeners

The telemarketing company should take great measures to ensure that the telemarketers that's about to work for them not only be capable of physically hearing, but also listening. The telemarketers should be able to discern buying signals as well. It is highly advisable that your telemarketers listens and thoroughly understands what the prospective customer is really saying for them to make that sale.

Be Capable of Handling Rejection

The telemarketers they hire should be impervious to the damages of rejection. Getting roughed-up or verbally abused by prospects on a daily basis is a normal occurrence – it comes with the territory. Your telemarketers should be able to take this all with a grain of salt and just shake it off. They must be professional enough to proceed with the next call and be decent enough not to go ballistic on the next prospect.

Capable of Reaching the Decision Maker

In telemarketing, the number one time and money waster is talking to someone who's NOT the decision maker. Identifying if they're talking to a potential customer or not is an important skill set a telemarketer must possess before pursuing with their presentation. Which means the telemarketers...

Must Be Capable of Working Their Way Around The Gatekeepers

This is where the telemarketers' savvy is tested. With gatekeepers, push comes to shove. Telemarketers usually get rattled in this part of the call and when they do, they will get stressed. A nervous wreck can easily be spotted over the phone. The telemarketer must be confident and smart enough to wiggle their way past the gatekeepers.

If the telemarketing call center refuses to take notice of these traits during the hiring process, it will compromise the outcome of your campaigns. However, if you work with the contact center to make sure that mistake is avoided, then you're well on your way towards a successful and very profitable telemarketing campaign.

Generate New Business with Appointment Setting

While it is true that in the business community a ringing phone cannot be ignored, it is also true that there is still nothing more effective than a face-to-face meeting to close a sale. The likelihood of closing a sale face-to-face, as opposed to doing it over the phone, is still high. Smaller businesses can benefit greatly from this approach as they may not have enough resources to find new prospects like dentists, doctors, financial planners, mortgage brokers, insurance agents, contractors and other service oriented businesses.

Outsourcing Appointment Setting service helps your business save on:

• Hiring qualified employees
• Training the employee
• Paying the employee wages and benefits
• Providing the employees their own workstations
• Providing the technology needed like a computer, software and hardware, phone, Internet access, copier, fax machine, etc.

Companies can focus more on their core competencies or core business with all of these out of the way.

The first step, however, is to choose an appointment setting BPO that can offer the right combination of appointment setting and lead generations campaign. The BPO assigns a specific department to do highly specialized work such as appointment setting and lead generation.

Appointment setting companies assist you by cold calling and pre-screening prospective clients then choosing only the most qualified prospects. It will help you assess if they would be a good market for your products or services. After the highly qualified prospects are screened, a face-to-face meeting will be scheduled so that your representative can focus more on presenting the core proposition of the business. In this way, the representative would be able to clear all doubts by giving a timely response a prospective client may have about the products or services that they are offering. In a period of time, you can have the decision maker's complete attention, and eventually close the deal with a sale.