B2B telemarketing is an essential process for any firm to get business partnerships. It serves as the first point of contact to introduce your service to others. However, setting up your telemarketing is not a one and done procedure. There are several things that you need to consider before even starting making outbound calls.
For starters, you need to identify where your leads are coming from. We know that there is no such thing as a general approach when it comes to B2B telemarketing campaigns. You need to specify the leads that you want to focus on so can save time and money. Going for generic leads will cause you more harm than benefits.
As an example, you don’t want to offer automotive products to people that have no interest in cars. It will just be a lost cause on your part and a wasted opportunity to look for better leads. That is why it is important to determine which lead source works for you.
Determining the best lead source for your B2B telemarketing also gives you more control over your budget. It allows you to maneuver your marketing fund. You can direct it to the most effective telemarketing program.
With this in mind, let us take a look at some of the most common lead sources. We will also discuss how effective it is for your marketing strategy.
Social media is the most popular lead source used by businesses. 97% of telemarketers use social media to advertise their products. Many people are more active in social media than any other communication platform. Meaning it is easier to connect with them and introduce your product.
Furthermore, businesses are also looking for recommendations in social media. It is easier to access any comments about your brand and they can also leave their own suggestions. Additionally, you can also target specific audiences that might have interest in your product.
However, easy engagement can be a disadvantage for businesses as well. This is mostly applicable for start-up business. It is easier to tarnish your branding when people leave negative comments about your product. Social media is also heavily dependent on ads. Which is also a setback for small companies.
You must look for another platform first before using this as your main lead source. Unless you’re ready to spend tons of money for advertisement.
There are speculations that email marketing is not that powerful because of the presence of social media. But, you can utilize the advantages of email if you know how to manage the content of your messages. After all, 92% of internet users have their own email accounts. This is much higher compared to 83.36% internet users with social media accounts.
Furthermore, email marketing is more efficient compared to social media. It is because people will proactively subscribe to your email newsletter if they are already interested in your product. It is easier to create marketing campaigns about brand loyalty. Meanwhile in social media, you still need to target a very specific audience and it’s not a guarantee that you will reach everyone.
Here are some of the campaigns you can do for email newsletters:
There are a lot of strategies that you can do in email telemarketing. Besides that, it is more personalized and formal which is great for B2B transactions.
However, too much usage of email newsletters can cause you a lot of trouble. 78% of recipients canceled their email subscription after they received too many newsletters from companies. So, it is critical to minimize your emails and only include necessary details like the information of your service.
Cold calling B2B telemarketing is one of the best strategies to gain more leads for your company. Unlike other marketing campaigns, it puts you into direct contact with your customer. It is important to talk directly to your customer as you can have a more flexible pitching strategy. There is a higher chance that your recipient can clearly get the message than just sending them emails.
However, cold calling also has disadvantages. For example, you might not be able to talk to the “decision-makers” in the company if you called their company hotline. It is hard to pitch something to secretaries and business owners will only have third-hand information from them.
Another downside is cold calling may eat up a lot of time for your prospect customers. We know that everyone is busy with their lives. Therefore, they don’t want to spend too much time on the phone listening to your service. Good thing there are remedies for these problems like creating a script.
A great script will allow you to maximize the phone time. You can give all the information and control the conversation at the same time. Additionally, you can create scripts whenever a secretary answers the phone call for their boss. Just tell them how important it is that you should talk to the owner. Maybe you put a script to just set a schedule with their boss instead of talking to them.
All in all cold calling B2B telemarketing is an effective way to generate leads. It will surely bring you more benefits if you know how to use it properly.
Whitepaper and eBooks consists of in-depth information about your product. It is perfect if you want to elaborate your service in a clear and concise voice. The goal of this strategy is to solve business problems using your product. At same time, strengthening the reliability of your service as you provide facts and company accolades.
This strategy is not about setting trends or creating buzz about your product. You must consider other lead sources if you wish to gain more popularity. Whitepaper and eBooks are all about being efficient and stating all the necessary details. You will definitely get more B2B clients if you have an excellent content in your papers.
For it to happen, you need to follow this guidelines on how to make make you whitepaper and eBooks interesting:
Whitepaper and eBooks lead sources is a really effective tool for B2B telemarketing. All you need to do is to plan it properly and create a logical marketing approach.
This is one of the most overlooked lead sources available. Referral lead sources require no financial investment. Yet, it brings in a very valuable number of warm leads. That is why B2B telemarketing should use this method more often than other telemarketing campaigns.
However, not everyone knows how to maximize getting leads from referrals. There are two types of referral that you can get. First is referral within the same industry. When they refer you to the same industry then it means they have the same problem. This allows you to use the same strategy that you use in closing the prior prospects.
The second is referral to a customer’s friend. Now this seems to be more of a B2C transaction however, the friend might be working for another company. Which can lead to another B2B deal if they refer you to their managers too. That’s why it is important to get as many referrals as possible.
78% of telemarketers said that referrals give them tons of excellent leads. It’s a high number considering that all they need to do is ask their customers for someone they know that could use their service.
So, how can you maximize the use of referrals? First, you should proactively ask your customers for it. They will not voluntarily tell you referrals unless you ask them too. Also, you should include a referral template in your email. Make it easy for your customers to forward your message to others. Let them know that they are helping you a lot in getting more prospect clients.
Referrals should be part of your standard operating procedure. Once you master this, you can see tremendous improvement from lead generation. On top of that, you’ll build a better customer relationship that you can use for a brand loyalty campaign.
Webinar marketing involves doing an online seminar to promote your product. This lead source is an effective way to provide information about your product to a wider set of audience. Besides that, you can do it for free. Which adds more value to the webinars since you can get high quality leads without spending a single penny.
Webinars are an improved version of whitepaper and eBooks. It usually has a question and answer portion at the end. This is a perfect way to connect with interested participants. Most people can get the essence faster than just reading it.
According to ReadyTalk, you can convert almost 40% of webinar attendees. That is a lot of B2B transactions if you are able to convert all of them to customers. On top of that, there are already 5% of attendees who will buy something after the webinar. It means there is a guaranteed result when you do a webinar marketing.
Be as it may, it is hard to create an interesting topic for a webinar series. That’s why many businesses are not using this often. In conceptualizing topics, you need to ask your existing consumers about what topic they want you to discuss.
You can check your social media for recommendations too. Besides that, you can go back to your previous webinars and check some interesting questions. You can elaborate these questions and use it as a webinar topic.
There are a lot of ways to get your B2B leads. So, it might be confusing to choose which one is the right method for your business. It is risky as you don’t want to make a mistake in investing your money for a marketing campaign. But among these lead sources, we’d say the most effective is doing cold calling lists.
For starters, we already mentioned how this is the only lead source where you can directly talk to prospects. Sure there’s webinars where you can interact with viewers through Q&A. However, it is not as intimate as talking with them over the phone. You can explicitly relay all the messages you want to forward to your customer.
Phone conversation is also more personalized compared to other lead sources. You can have a formal or informal conversation with your prospect depending on what they prefer. The result is also much faster as you can have the answer immediately after your conversation. If not, you can always set another schedule to provide further information about your service.
After successfully connecting with your prospect using lead sources, you need to go over your telesales strategy. As mentioned, lead generation B2B telemarketing’s goal is to introduce your product or service. Whereas in telesales, you need to persuade them into buying it. Here is a comparison of telemarketing and telesales’ goal:
Telemarketing | Telesales |
Provide information to customer about the company | Convert leads into sales using data from telemarketing |
Qualify and identify potential sales lead | Process customers’ orders |
Promoting new offers to existing customers | Convert difficult leads into customers |
Converting inquiries into sales opportunities | After-sales support |
The common ground for these two functions is both can generate leads. They can do cold calling to prospect clients from the lead sources.
The Philippines is home for a lot of BPO companies specializing in outbound call centers. However, most of them are focused on large companies and Fortune 500. Usually, they have a minimum required number of people to work for your company. Very few are doing partnership with SMEs.
If you are an SME looking to outsource your telemarketing service then go to Magellan Solutions. We have 17+ years of BPO experience with more than 100 clients all over the world.
Here are some outbound telemarketing services that we have:
Our Business Developers can help you in setting up your key performance indicators (KPI). KPIs will guide you and monitor the progress of your business with us.
We also offer guaranteed flexible pricing options based. Magellan Solutions understands that start-up business need has limited funds in outsourcing services.
Our security is also world class because of different standard certifications. Magellan Solutions also has an ISO/IEC 27001:2013 Certification. It ensures your company’s sensitive data is safe in our system. Our expert team provides security measures against phishing and data breach.
Contact us today and get a free 60-minute business consultation. Please fill out the contact form below.
Contact us today for more information.
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