B2B Telemarketing has been an effective marketing strategy for every company in the past couple of decades. They take advantage of the fact that all of their potential customers use cellphones on a daily basis. In fact, 95% of Americans own at least one mobile device.
This feature is also a great tool to reach out and introduce your product. Your telemarketers can call your leads and talk about the services you’re offering. Customers prefer to talk with someone first before trusting any brand. It shows the dedication of the company to connect with them as their consumers.
However, you can’t achieve success if you don’t know what to measure. Running a business blindly is a very fatal mistake for any owner. Having no numbers to run by will result in a series of failures. This is due to the fact that you can’t see what’s going on with your operations.
Before we start, please take these symbols into account to make it easier when we’re computing numbers.
TR |
Telemarketer’s Rate |
AHT |
Average Handling Time |
V |
Telemarketers’ Desired Annual Sales Volume |
R |
Profit Per Closed Sale |
CR% |
Appointment’s Closure Rate |
CC |
Cold Calls Per Day |
AR% |
Rate of Cold Calls Turn Into Appointment |
D |
Number of Operational Days in a Year |
With this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the things you should monitor in B2B Telemarketing.
Average Handling Time (AHT) is the rate your telemarketers talk to each customer. Monitoring the AHT is important as it will determine how much information you can squeeze into an outgoing call script.
The normal attention span of a customer in an outbound telemarketing is 8 seconds. Within this short period of time, you have to convince them that you’re pitching an interesting product. If you somehow pique their interest, then here are some ideal time frames while speaking with them.
When you’re doing B2B Telemarketing, you can’t always land at the decision-maker during first contact. Usually, you have to wait in a long call queue to get in touch with someone from the business. In some other cases, you’ll have to go to their interactive voice response system to specify your intent.
Now, if you manage to reach someone, it could be the secretary or the receptionist. At that point, you still need to wait a bit longer to get transferred to someone in authority. This is not always the case as some prefer a call back from their CEO or managers. But normally, it will take you 3 minutes if you’ve gone through this process.
After you reach someone who can purchase your goods, you need to make a short but informational pitch. You need to state as many good qualities as you can about the product. Conversation might take longer if the prospect likes your product. But your average product presentation should only be 1.5 minutes.
You can use the first 30 seconds of the pitching to introduce the product. If you’re so good at communicating, then you can do some probing questions to relate with your customers. Most importantly, you have to mention the advantages of using your product and how it will help their business.
This is where you will determine whether or not your pitch is successful. The customer will decide if they need your product or will just “consider” you in the future. While the ball is already on the customer’s side now, you can still provide some options.
You can offer to have an installment payment or a free trial to entice them on using your service. Furthermore, you have to establish that your product is a necessity for their business. This will boost the urge to have what you’re offering. All in all the average time of laying down their options will take more or less a minute to execute.
After you successfully land a B2B sales, then you have to get their information to set-up a meeting. The purpose of the meeting could differ from contract signing, another sales presentation, or purchasing date. It all depends on how successful the engagement is.
When getting their details, you should not sound hasty and in-rush. You already have their trust and you don’t want to make them feel that you need to move on to other prospects. You need to make them feel special since they’re already one of your customers. So, try to spend a couple of minutes talking with them casually while getting their information.
If you compute all the time frames per telemarketing phase, then you will get an average of 7.5 minutes per call. The AHT could go lower if you were able to reach the decision-maker immediately. Otherwise, you’ll have to be patient when dealing with B2B telemarketing.
Ideally, if your AHT is 7.5 minutes then you should have 8 successful B2B cold calls per hour. However, there are other factors that make telemarketing challenging for some businesses.
For starters, there are phone numbers that refuse a call from telemarketers. Some installed features that will filter unwanted calls from their messages. Others will directly route you to voicemail if they don’t recognize your number.
On an average day, you have to make 18 calls to reach a potential B2B buyer. This might be a case-to-case basis per industry but you definitely need more than one call to land a buyer. So, it is important to monitor the number of quality leads you can have per day.
One thing that you can do to improve the quality of your B2B Telemarketing leads is by having a local phone number. Some businesses find it suspicious if someone is calling them using a 1-800 number or an area code far from their location. BPO companies can provide you multiple phone numbers depending on the location of your target market.
So, how can you determine the average calls per day for your business? You really can’t measure it from day-to-day data but rather from your annual figures.
To compute your calls per day (CC), you need first to set a target annual revenue for your telemarketers (V). Then divide it to the product of appointment rate (AR%), appointment close rate (CR%), revenue per closed sales (R), and operational days per year (D).
Or simply:
CC = V / (D x AR% x CR% x R)
As an example, if your business has a target annual sales of $500,000 per telemarketer, and there’s a 10% chance to schedule an appointment for each of your cold calls. Out of those appointments, you can close 50% of them. The average revenue per closed B2B sales is $1,000. Finally, there are 261 working days in a year.
So:
CC = $500,000 / (261 x 10% x 50% x $1,000)
CC = 39 calls per day
Therefore, you need to do 39 calls per day in order to achieve a $500,000 annual revenue for each of your telemarketers. This looks like a lot of cold calls for small businesses.
However, outsourcing your B2B Telemarketing campaign will alleviate this volume of phone calls. BPO contact centers have a systematic way to perform outgoing calls to your potential clients. Thus, giving you a higher chance to hit your target profit.
You still need to know how much each telemarketer contributes to your annual revenue. It is an important thing to measure as it will not only show your profit but your agent’s performance. Of course, you don’t want to have a negative result for any of your people.
In order to compute it, you reverse the role of some variables. We will still use the same figures above. But this time, you must have the average number of agent’s’ calls per day which in this case is 20 calls. Then you need to multiply it with other factors. After that, you need to subtract it to the product of telemarketer’s rate (TR) and number of working days per year.
So for this example, we will use the hourly rate for American telemarketers which is $13.61 or $109 a day for an 8-hour shift (HS).
To put it simply:
V = (CC x D x AR% x CR% x R) – (TR x D)
V = (20 x 261 x 10% x 50% x 1000) – (109 x 261) = $232, 551
So, one of your agents contributes more or less 230,000 per year given the data we have.
You can still improve this annual revenue if you outsource to an offshore BPO company. Since we used an American rate here, you still haven’t reached the max potential of your business. The call center companies in Asia have a more affordable rate for outbound services.
As mentioned, B2B Telemarketing is a great help for companies planning to widen their target customers. Furthermore, it also helps them to improve the closure rate for their telesales service.
B2B Telemarketing helps in researching what your competitors do. By the time sales agents call up the leads, they already have an idea how to approach them. It is because they can refer to the insights you have from when you talk to them initially.
This service also helps in segregating the good and bad leads. It will be a waste of time and energy for sales agents to determine which leads will guide them to successful B2B transactions.
By outsourcing this service, you could have more time strategizing on how to approach your potential buyers and eventually increase the potential of your business.
There are a lot of ways to improve your lead generation telesales. But for the purpose of this short article, we’ll give the top 5 ways to up your telemarketing level:
The Philippines is home for a lot of BPO companies specializing in telemarketing 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 on several factors like service and number of agents you need. Magellan Solutions understands that start-up businesses have 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.
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