Three Proven Scenarios for Productive Outbound Calls
"Cold Calling just doesn't work." We hear that a lot. Is that what you think? Or what your salespeople think? Actually, we think that too. If you're defining cold calling in the following way:
Cold Calling. The process of approaching a potential customer without any previous introduction or contact with a view of selling to them. (The Zarywacz Business & Information Technology Glossary)
It's the "with a view of selling to them" that causes the problem. Sales calls that are made to someone who does not know you with the expectation they will buy from you during that call are foolhardy at best and a tremendous waste of time at worst. STILL, that doesn't mean call-down campaigns do not have a place in the sales and marketing engine. In fact, we have found at least three scenarios where an outbound call campaign makes a great deal
of sense:
1. MARKET OR CUSTOMER RESEARCH. When you need certain information from your prospect pool about buying behaviors, pain points, or other psychographic data points not easily obtained by a list purchase, the outbound call campaign is a great tool. Another scenario that can be quite valuable for research is using an outbound campaign to gain feedback about the customer's experience with your sales team and/or website.
2. CLEAN A LIST AND IDENTIFY THE BEST PROSPECTS FOR MARKETING EFFORTS. We have found that purchased lists do not often have the right decision maker for the products or services our client's are marketing— despite the effort to pull the list by title. And, house lists are often not updated frequently enough to maintain accurate information. For this reason, we always recommend a call-down campaign of a list (in-house or purchased) prior to launching a direct marketing effort using that data. In the end, your pull result will be exponentially higher when the piece gets to the right person, at the right address, with the right offer!
3. QUALIFY PROSPECTS FOR SALES TEAMS. Salespeople tell us all the time that they just don't have enough time in the day to do all they need to do in the area of prospecting. A call-down campaign can helps support your sales team by qualifying the prospects they should focus on first, by determining the level of need and interest of a prospect before sales is engaged. Call-downs of this type need to focus on no more than three key qualifying questions that would indicate a sales person should be engaged. Until those three criterion are met, the prospect remains a prospect to be marketed to and not a lead entered into the sales pipeline.
As you can see from the scenarios above, that while call campaign efforts are not the be-all, end-all to booking a sale, they are essential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness for both sales and marketing efforts. Despite which of the above approaches you take, the key to success is pre-planning. So, be sure to create a script, but don't read from it! A call script is a tool, not a crutch!
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