Up-to-date, accurate, and guaranteed high quality school calling lists

Our school calling list is a comprehensive and full database of head teachers within UK schools complete with the information you need to speak with them on the telephone.

Use our school contact list database to connect directly to the decision makers within schools with the greatest need for your products or services.

You have 12 months to use the data – 12 months to build awareness of your company and what it sells.

12 months to share the benefits of your products and services with schools and to demonstrate how they can help their students achieve the best outcomes.

And, during those 12 months, you’ll be supported by your More Than Words account manager, our technical team, and our advertising support service team.

On our school calling list database

Making direct, two-way contact by phone with head teachers and other decision makers within schools will generate a stream of new, high-quality, and closeable leads for your business.

While email marketing and postal marketing are effective, they’re just the opening of a conversation. You’re reliant on the message you send being powerful enough to stimulate a response for the decision makers you’re targeting to continue the conversation.

With telemarketing, you start dialogue with a potential new customer from the opening. You can build rapport and you can ask the questions to need to determine whether now is the optimal time to pitch your products and services to a particular school.

Although our school calling list is primarily designed for companies to pass on for use to their telemarketing team, we have a telemarketing team here within More Than Words.

If you want help formulating a telemarketing script, it’s part of our service as your data provider. Send us over the script, any objection handles you have, and the closing method you intend to use and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours with insight, feedback, and commentary.

You can use this service throughout the 12 months of your licence period during which support is also available from your account manager and the technical support team.

Why choose our school telemarketing database for your telesales teams?

You don’t have to buy our entire school calling list (part of our wider UK education database).

The most important thing in running any successful direct marketing campaign is to make sure that you only target the schools most likely to have an operational or financial need for your products and services.

Let us know more about you, your company, and what you sell. You’ll then work with your account manager to isolate from the database the schools with the strongest reasons to buy from you.

We also guarantee the telephone number data to an accuracy level of 92%.

If we miss our target, then we’ll refund you pro-rate or we’ll offer you replacement records – just let us know which option you’d prefer.

How to purchase school telemarketing lists for your company from More Than Words

Get in touch with us – we’d appreciate the opportunity to create a bespoke school calling list for your telemarketing team to give the greatest opportunity to find new business for your company.

We’re available on 0330 010 8300 or you can email our telemarketing database team by clicking here.

If you don’t have a telemarketing team but you’d be interested in exploring the option of working with an experienced outsourced telemarketing service to schools on your campaign, please ask your account manager when you call.

Winning more leads and sales with More Than Words’ school calling database

The primary objective of telemarketing to schools is to build profitable, mutually-beneficial, and long-lasting relationships between your business and the people who make the purchasing decisions within these institutions.

Your school calling list gives you access to a key decision makers within the education sector so your first step is creating a school telemarketing strategy is to select the schools most likely to need the products or services you’re offering.

We run telemarketing campaigns to schools for clients – below, we include advice for your company as it embarks on its own campaigns to the education sector on:

• making an appointment
• using your school calling list for market intelligence
• building brand awareness
• data cleansing
• steps to making a call
• testing your data
• what happens next?
• quick tips

Making an appointment

Selling to schools requires a little more groundwork than when selling to businesses because teachers and other school staff are often too busy to talk during traditional business hours.

Using your school calling list to arrange a face-to-face meeting with school decision makers offers the dual benefit of:

• opening a dialogue and introducing yourself to the relevant parties, and
• setting a future appointment to turn a cold lead into a warm lead.

Booking an appointment is a non-aggressive sales strategy.

It should disarm the contacts that you speak with and open up more opportunities than if you began with a more hard selling approach.

Using your school calling list for market intelligence

Perhaps you want to build a pipeline for sales over the coming year or two.

If this is the case, your school calling list is the ideal resource for carrying out market research and finding out more about the level of interest within the sector in your products and services.

Use telemarketing to find out more about each school on your list, who the main decision makers are, and the buying cycles for each institution.

You can ask about their current suppliers and when their current contract ends.

This will provide actionable intelligence for future targeted marketing campaigns.

Market research allows you to build up a picture of how the education sector works and how your business can fit into it.

Building brand awareness

At the most basic level, a telemarketing campaign targeted towards school decision makers offer your company the opportunity to introduce itself, your product or service, and to raise brand awareness.

Having access to and trust from the widest possible audience is the best way for you to secure profitable orders now and in the future from your marketing campaigns.

With effective brand awareness building, you should benefit from a substantial number of inbound marketing queries as future clients gather the information they need to plan their annual spending.

Data cleansing

More Than Words always provides accurate, up-to-date information on all of our databases.

This is of particular importance in the education sector – data decay rates are higher in schools than they are on general B2B lists.

Telemarketing campaigns help you to ensure that all of the information you have on your list is correct and update any relevant information for your business.

You can also use this time to add more information to your database on other decision makers within the school, their budgets, and their upcoming needs which you may be able to assist them with.

Steps to making a call

Each telemarketing campaign is different.

As part of our service, please send us the telesales script or ideas you intend to use on your campaign and our school telemarketing team manager will provide you with feedback and insight.

When you’re speaking with your account manager, you might also wish to ask about our telesales script writing service and whether we should work on that with you.

When planning your campaign to the schools sector, we would recommend taking the three following steps:

1. Choose your contacts carefully

Researching and segmenting your contact list should be the first step in every telemarketing campaign you do.

This way you can make sure that all of your messages are appropriate and targeted to specific audiences within your wider prospective user base.

More generic marketing approaches produce lower returns on investment meaning that, to generation the greatest possible return on your campaigns, planning is essential.

When segmenting your contact list you should consider:

• what product or service you are selling,
• what age range (or education stage) it is aimed at,
• what departments it is relevant to, and
• where you and your prospects are located.

Separating your contacts into groups according to these elements will help you to tailor your telemarketing script to each grouping making it feel more personal.

2. Using your time on the phone wisely

You will need a script for your telemarketers although they should be encouraged to be as open to conversation with prospects as possible.

You know the commercial and revenue goals you have for your campaign so every element of your script should focus on producing the outcomes you desire.

You don’t have to use your school calling list to make sales right away – you may just want to perform market research at this stage.

Nonetheless, the end goal of the conversation should be your objective when writing the script.

Think about the benefits which your business and its products or services offer to schools and make these benefits the focus of your script.

It never hurts to offer something for free encouraging them to convert without asking anything from them at this stage.

Research predicts that it will take up to 13 ‘marketing touches’ before a prospect converts to a buyer.

You have plenty of time to make a sale and, in between now and the time a purchase takes place, you can really sell your company’s credibility and the efficacy of your products and services.

Consider what you can offer them now that will engage them and tell them more about your brand – perhaps a whitepaper, eBook or other educational resource.

Testing your data

This means that the only way to be sure of the success of future telemarketing campaigns is to test a variety of different approaches before launching your full campaign.

Use your segmented school calling list to try out different versions of the same message.

Record the results of each campaign and compare their performance, making adjustments as you go.

Ideally, you would test everything from the overall message to the greeting or the order of what you say.

By doing this, you will be in the best place to judge the best-performing script and you will be able to roll that script out to staff to create the most successful campaigns.

What happens next?

A marketing campaign is only as good as the follow-ups you carry out.

Come up with a plan on which steps you’ll take after each call to say in touch with and follow up with contacts.

Your plan should include a step for every part of the sales funnel with back up plans for if one step does not perform as well as you had hoped.

In creating your plan you might think about:

• how to follow up your first call – will you make another call or send a follow-up email?
• different paths that your leads might take through your sales funnel as a result of being called – this about how you will communicate with them throughout, no matter which route they choose
• which content should you provide next – never contact a prospect without something of value to offer them.
• how to keep prospects in your sales funnel – you may also want to think how to re-engage those that drop out of your sales funnel during the process.

Once you are using a multi-channel approach, you can begin tracking key analytics such as email opens and clicks, sales, social media follows and shares and so on.

Combined with reports from your telemarketing campaign, this will give you a better insight into how your marketing messages are performing and what steps to take next.

6 quick school telemarketing tips

1. Use your marketing calls to find out when the contact has free time to chat rather than steaming ahead with your pitch especially during the school day.
2. Combine telephone and email marketing as early as possible to be respectful of your contacts’ time.
3. Update your school calling list regularly to make sure that you are sending the right messages to the right contacts.
4. Do not assume that before or after school hours will be a good time for a teacher to talk. They may have before or after-school responsibilities.
5. Keep calls and meetings short unless they are previously arranged appointments.

School callings list - FAQ

What is a school calling list?

Our school calling list is a database (in Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, or comma separated value file format) of telephone numbers and decision maker information within UK education establishments.

You can choose to buy the entire database containing every school we have records for or just select those schools which are most likely to benefit from the products or services you sell.

With your school calling list, you can either give the data to your own telemarketing team to use or you can outsource it to a telemarketing services company to do the work on your behalf.

More Than Words has an in-house telemarketing team whose staff have extensive experience in promoting clients’ products and services to the schools market – please ask your account manager for more information when you get in touch.

Which is better for selling to schools - telemarketing or telesales?

Telemarketing and telesales are often interchangeable however, at More Than Words, we define the two as:

• telemarketing – booking appointments, generating leads, inviting attendance to events you’re promoting at or hosting yourself, and gathering or market intelligence
• telesales – making the sale over the phone (where the decision maker agrees to buy and arrangements for payment are made).

When using our calling list to contact schools, we would strongly recommend using telemarketing – we’d actively dissuade clients from using telesales techniques.

If you want advice on how to approach schools by phone so that you give your company the best possible chance of making the greatest return on your investment in marketing, please speak with one of our account managers.

Which types of contacts do you have on your school calling lists databases?

In over 90% of cases, the contact on our school calling lists database is the head teacher. Where it is not, it will either be the deputy head teachers or, in some secondary schools, the school business manager.

Other decision makers in schools like heads of department and IT managers are not included on our school calling lists database.

If you wish to contact someone other than the head teacher within the school, we can provide you with this data. Please contact us and ask our account manager to run a count for you.

Can I append email marketing data onto my school calling database?

Yes – you can integrate a school email database into your calling list for a nominal fee.

Please note that we don’t have email addresses for every school on our calling database so, if you want the open to be able to email and call each school on your list, please let your account manager know when you speak with them.

We’re also able to offer a public school email list and teacher email lists – again, please contact us to speak to one of our account managers.

Can I append postal data to my school telephone list database?

Yes – you can add postal data to your school calling list for a nominal fee.

Please ask your account manager for more information when you get in touch.

Are your school telemarketing lists GDPR compliant?

Our school telemarketing lists are fully GDPR compliant on the following grounds:

• marketing is a “legitimate reason” under GDPR and our calling lists are intended for marketing purposes,
• the products and services you’re promoting are the for benefit of the school and not for the personal benefit of the decision makers you get in touch with, and
• you’ll be speaking with the school decision makers in their capacity as a representative of the school and not as a consumer.

We understand that many clients are keen to ensure that they act within the spirit and the letter of the guidance of GDPR.

We regularly update our GDPR policy – if you want to see a copy of it, please ask your account manager for one when you call or email.

What happens when my 12 months’ usage licence has expired?

When your 12 months’ usage licence expires, you must stop using the database. If you wish to continue marketing to schools using our database service, you’ll need to purchase a new 12 month usage licence.

There are three exceptions to this rule though. You may still continue to contact decision makers on your school calling list if, as a result of receiving a phone call from your company:

• the school became a customer and it purchased your products and services,
• you are negotiating with the school on a deal but that deal has not yet concluded, or
• the decision maker you have been speaking to has given you written confirmation that they wish to be included on your internal marketing database (please keep records of these written confirmations)

Buying a school calling list from More Than Words

Please call us, email us, or fill out the contact form and let us know about your company, what you sell, and the benefits your products and services deliver to the education sector.

We’ll then identify the schools most likely to purchase to you and we’ll support you as much as you need us to during the 12 months of your calling list database licence.

We’re open during office hours between Monday and Friday.

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can email our marketing databases team by clicking here.

We’re based in North Shields town centre if you want to come and visit us. There is plenty of free parking outside and we’re only three minutes’ walk from North Shields Metro station.