There are six main things you need to know before booking a telemarketing campaign and they are as follows:

  1. the four different types of telemarketing – appointment setting, lead generation, market research/market intelligence, and encouraging attendance at an exhibition or event you’re attending or hosting
  2. planning successful telemarketing campaigns – choosing your target audience and what results you want your telemarketing/telesales team to deliver for you
  3. your telemarketing campaign team – who will be working on your campaign from the telesales script writer to the manager to the telemarketers themselves.
  4. when your telemarketing campaign is underway – find out more on how you’ll be able to monitor progress, listen to telemarketing calls made on your behalf, and how you’ll be notified when we find quality leads which need immediate follow-up
  5. frequently-asked questions – what our account managers are asked the most about telemarketing and telesales
  6. how to book a telemarketing campaign with More Than Words

If you’re considering using telemarketing for the first time for your business or you’re looking for a new telemarketing company to take over the work you’re currently outsourcing, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or click here to email our telephone services team.

1. The four main types of telemarketing activities

Appointment setting

On these campaigns (sometimes called new business agency campaigns), a telemarketer will call the decision makers (DMs) on the list of numbers or database they’re working from with the goal of making face to face appointments with those DMs close to the point of buying the products and services they are promoting.

For example, a telephone services or communications provider might book a B2B telemarketing campaign to generate as many closeable appointments as possible within a short space of time for a new broadband product.

Lead generation telemarketing

With lead generation telemarketing (sometimes call agency lead generation campaigns), the goal is to establish the level of interest from a prospect or an existing customer in a company’s product and service. Leads are then generally passed on to a telesales representative or a field sales rep for closing.

More Than Words note – most appointment- and lead-focused campaigns use cold calling and, depending on the product or service, generate 1 lead for every 70-80 calls made

Market research and market intelligence

Want to know more about your existing and potential customers? A deeper knowledge of your target customers leads to better results and more business from future promotional campaigns. Let us know the information you want us to gather from them.

Exhibitions and shows

Exhibitions, trade shows, and self-hosted events are major sources of business for a great number of companies. We can invite existing and potential customers to your event for you – results are particularly impressive when carrying out telesales campaigns to harder-to-reach industries and sectors.

2. Planning successful telemarketing campaigns

When planning a campaign, you need to consider your target market and what results you want to achieve.

Target market

If you want to connect with target audiences new to your company and its products or services, you can either supply us with the data you have or we can build a cold calling list for the staff on your project from our:

More Than Words note – in addition to providing outsourced telesales campaigns to clients, we also supply and maintain a telemarketing database which we supply to companies with their own telemarketing and telesales teams. We’re able to supply B2B telemarketing data, a school calling list, and a public sector calling list. Our data includes decision maker name, email contact address, telephone number, and other business information on the potential customers you identify.

If you want us to conduct telemarketing to your own customer database, please send your files over. We’re happy to sign any NDAs.

Campaign results and outcomes

You and your telemarketing company will need to work out the following benchmarks to measure the performance of staff involved on your campaign:

  • telephone calls per hour – except during hours where a long conversation takes place, a telemarketing rep should make around 20 telephone calls per hour
  • appointments/leads – the average shift for a telephone marketer is four hours. How many appointments or leads should be generated within that time?
  • additional information – in addition to verifying budget holder name, email address, and other contact information, how much additional sales information did the rep get from the decision maker?
  • invitations – how many prospects and customers have been invited to the exhibition or event you’re hosting or attending and what proportion of promotional ads originally sent to a prospect’s email address have been followed up by a conversation?

3. Your telemarketing campaign team

There are at least three members of staff involved in a marketing campaign and they are:

Telemarketing campaigns manager

The telesales manager on your campaign has years of experience in training telesales reps on how to present and how to sell and they will manage them during live calls sharing their tips with their team on making sales, generating appointments, and gathering information.

Telesales script writer

Your telesales script writer creates the structure and approach needed to present best what it is you’re selling to DMs including how to open the call, how to achieve the outcome required when closing, how to handle the questions most likely to arise, how to home in on the benefits of your products/services, and other tips on how to make the conversation flow naturally.

Telemarketers

We choose the telemarketer(s) with the experience in selling your product or service or experience selling to the markets you’re targeting. Our staff are all UK-based with some working from home at the moment because of COVID-related restrictions.

4. When your telemarketing campaign is underway

Live campaign information

Use your standard Internet browser to watch the progress of your campaign online. See the notes they make next to each name and company during each call.

Listen to telemarketing calls made by our telesales team

You can listen to sales and marketing calls at any time you want via the GSuite spreadsheet in your browser.

Instant notification for follow-ups

If we think your sales team need to follow up on a call immediately, we’ll notify you straight away.

Telemarketing FAQ

Telemarketing is a type of direct marketing. With direct marketing, you choose the DMs or companies you wish to contact from marketing databases (or from your own customer base) and then you choose how you want to contact them. The most popular forms of direct marketing activities are email marketing campaigns, telemarketing, and postal marketing.

There are two main types of telemarketing – inbound and outbound. Inbound telemarketers receive calls from existing and potential customers whereas outbound telemarketers use cold calling to approach prospects and existing customers with a view to setting an face to face appointment for a sales rep, lead generation, or market research.

The main task of a telemarketer is to achieve the objectives of the campaigns they’re working on by contacting the prospects they’re given by telephone. Telemarketers generally work under the supervision of a marketing manager and receive training prior to a campaign. Training is focused on the DMs (understanding the people they’re getting in touch with), the approach to a call (the structure of the call and tips on how to answer questions), and their campaign targets (for example, the number of sales leads, the number of sales calls they have to make, and the value of new business they need to generate).

Telemarketing is a difficult job and, in our experience, around one in twenty people who try it can do it well. It is, by its nature, a very repetitive job in which you are told “no” by the DMs you’re trying to convince far more than you get a “yes” – the best telemarketing professionals have no fear of rejection. In addition, DMs are far more wary about giving information and other details across to third parties over the phone, especially if they are convinced that they’re speaking to a member of a sales team.

What is the most important ability of a telesales rep? There are three they need to have other than the ability to achieve their campaign objectives – on every call, they need to continue to improve their ability to persuade others, they need to look for a better way to make what they’re selling relevant to their DMs, and, whatever the result of a call, they need to leave the DMs with the impression that they’ve been dealing with a quality company.

The most successful telemarketers sounds as fresh, hungry, and as lively on all the calls they make – whether it’s the first call of the day and the last call of the day. The people they’re speaking to on the other end of the telephone will have no idea the number of calls they’ll have made today because there will be energy and enthusiasm in their voices.

A great telemarketer will take every objection head on and answer with honesty and enthusiasm. They’ll listen to the other person on the end of the phone and try to find a way that the product or service they’re marketing or selling relevant to them. At the same time, they’ll be very careful to make sure that the leads they pass through are quality leads where the company they’re working for has a chance of making sales from them – leads where there is a high level of interest from the prospective client in the product and service they’re promoting.

There are two official “do not call” lists in the UK – the Telephone Preference Service for consumers and the Corporate Telephone Preference Service for companies and non-consumers. The consumers, businesses, and organisations on these lists have withdrawn their consent for 3rd party businesses to contact them by phone.

Please note that under current UK marketing laws, no consent is required in advance for your company (or a telemarketing company working on your behalf) to contact consumers and businesses by phone.

There are dozens of established telemarketing agencies in the UK. Sometimes called telemarketing companies or telemarketing service providers, you can find plenty to choose from online while you’re searching for a quote.

Start planning your own telemarketing campaign to generate quality leads and appointments

More Than Words has provided telemarketing data and telemarketing agency services to hundreds of companies since our launch in 2016.

Let us know about your company, what you sell, who you sell it too, and your business growth goals for the coming 12-24 months and how you want telemarketing to play a part in that growth.

Then please call us on 0330 010 3495 or you email us by clicking here.

Book your next telemarketing campaign with More Than Words

To set our telemarketers to work for you, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email us, or fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.