Designing a great telemarketing campaign doesn’t need to be complicated or difficult. The main ingredients of a campaign that will fulfil all objectives can be broken down to the following components:
- Understanding the client
- The unique selling proposition on offer
- The competition
- A great call guide
- Choosing the correct agent
- Setting realistic goals and client expectations
- Closely monitoring the campaign
- Feedback to client and reporting
- Ongoing dialogue
Understanding the client
No matter what industry a client works within, they will all have their own culture, ways of working and the things that make them unique as a group of people who work together and steer their company. It is important for Phonetic to understand all of the non-tangible elements surrounding a company so that we can design our campaigns to fit those elements and use the agents that fit their culture.
How do we do this? We spend time at the offices of our clients, ask them questions about their business and how it has grown and evolved. Over time we understand more about how our clients run their business and this is important to form a strong outsource partnership with a long lifespan.
The unique selling proposition on offer
Whatever industry we are working within, each company has a service or product that has something unique and attractive to its target market. It’s the job of Phonetic to discover what these elements are and make sure they are focussed upon heavily in our call guides.
The competition
All clients have competitors and our policy is never to cast any disparaging remarks about them. What we can do though is to learn them and their services to understand what they don’t offer so we can know where our client can fill gaps in their service. We can then tactfully suggest services that we know our prospects don’t have with their present supplier.
A great call guide
A call guide isn’t a script. Scripts tend to be fixed and difficult to negotiate. Call guides on the other hand give the call structure, promote two way conversations, allow for intelligent questions and open dialogue with a prospect to drive towards an objective in a pleasant conversational way. Open and closed questioning is an old technique that was used with scripts. A great call guide will tailor the questions intelligently to the prospect so he or she has food for thought and the conversation becomes interesting and useful so leading to the desired outcomes.
Choosing the correct agent
The correct agent is crucial to an outbound B2B sales campaign. Some agents prefer to work on campaigns where listening skills and a consultative approach is necessary, whilst others like more volume and a faster outcome. It’s important to know your agents well and know who will work better on what campaign.
Setting realistic goals and client expectations
If a campaign is new then it won’t always be possible to set goals that are realistic from day 1. By around the 3rd day however, there should be a real feel of what can be achieved and then a realistic expectation can be agreed with the client.
Closely monitoring the campaign
I always compare a new telemarketing campaign with passing a driving test – you don’t really know what will happen until you start for real!
Diagnosing if a campaign is going well means checking;
- DM contact level
- Overall call rate
- Quality of conversations (through call recordings and side by side)
- End results, are expectations being met?
It is important to diagnose if the campaign is not going well and change the things that need changing fast.
Feedback to client and reporting
Clients should know all about what is happening on their campaign by the end of the first day. This should be in the form of the actual results, plus any queries that need addressing – together with how improvements can be made if necessary.
By now a client should be aware of how often they will get reports, data dumps, and any other information they have asked for.
Ongoing dialogue
The account manager of the campaign should be on hand at any time, preferably by mobile phone to answer any questions a client may have. Often a monthly meeting with a client face to face and telephone calls every few days are adequate to keep the outsource relationship working well.
