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This article is part two of the three-part series "How to Win Leads and Influence Sales." Read part one here.
In part one of this series, I talked about how the phone is an essential tool for today’s business-to-business (B2B) marketing and covered how you can use it to develop leads, lists, and even channels. There are many additional areas telesales can benefit and support your company's sales force as well.
Here are three of them:
Leads require a whole lot of care and grooming. Those that come in through trade shows, websites or direct mail need to be qualified before being paired with your best producing channel partners or handed off to field sales people. That’s a job for phone sales specialists who are dedicated to your account and function like extensions of your company and your salesforce.
A follow-up phone call brings the human touch early in the sales process, keeping hot leads warm and toasty until your sales reps or partners need to contact them, all of which boosts response rates. They determine prospects’ readiness to buy, identify their issues, and answer many of their initial questions and objections. When you qualify leads, it enables sales people and channel partners to move forward with the confidence that they are contacting prospects with a strong potential to close.
Additional follow-up calls every few weeks or months to touch base, update prospects about new products and services, and pass along pricing opportunities provide the personalized attention that emails and direct mail alone cannot. They do the jobs your frontline sales people don’t always have time to do. You may find that keeping existing leads interested and moving forward through a long B2B sales cycle is more productive than launching never-ending and exhaustive searches for new leads.
If you want to book your salespeople’s calendars solid with your next sales campaign, use telesales agents to find the best opportunities. In the process of filling your salespeople’s schedules, they will introduce your company, products, and solutions, identify pain points and needs, as well as gain an understanding into the decision-making process. This will provide your sales team with the necessary information, empowering them to create and give the best possible presentation during the appointment.
Trade shows and special events are among the most expensive aspects of marketing. With the costs of booth design, travel, brochure development, not to mention taking top salespeople out of the field for days at a time, you need a big return on your investment to make shows worthwhile. One way to improve the outcome is to invite a targeted set of decision makers to your events and show booths.
But salespeople are too busy preparing presentations and handling their day-to-day sales calls to send invitations and make phone calls in advance of an event. Telesales agents working as event managers can begin to build a relationship with decision makers long before the show. Their follow-up calls help ensure that key people see the invitation and give it their full consideration. They can even schedule appointments for your guests to speak with just the right sales person or channel partner at the event.
One of the weakest links in trade show lead generation happens after the event when days, weeks and, dare we admit it, months can go by before your field sales people get around to making their follow-up calls. A hot lead can be ice cold by then, or even already committed to go with your competition. Research shows that as many as 50% of sales go to the company that responds first. Put your telesales specialists to work following up with everyone that attended and even the no-shows.
About the author
Jeff Kalter is CEO of 3D2B, a global business-to-business telemarketing company that bridges the divide between marketing and sales. He leads customer acquisition programs for Fortune 500 companies, and is passionate about building strong business relationships through professional phone conversations.
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