subject: Telemarketing: The Guess Factor [print this page] Telemarketing agents have a fallacyTelemarketing agents have a fallacy. They assume that the caller that they are talking to knows nothing about the product/service. So the telemarketing calls are always full of pitches describing the salient features of the products/services. What the telemarketing services miss out is that the caller may not even realize that he/she needs that particular product/service!
Yes, that is the ground reality as found out from surveys conducted on telemarketing business practices. It's very similar in character to the advertising concept of creating a demand. The telemarketing company must focus on the caller's need to buy that product/service. The call center agent must pitch for sales in a way as if filling up this dormant need of the caller is the only aim of the call.
Telemarketing has come up quite a few notches since the time when a phone call would get the call center telemarketing leads. Simple phone calls don't qualify as telemarketing calls because they don't get you the sales anymore! There are more chances of the person slamming the phone down on the outbound call center agent's face. People have very little time for themselves.
There are no prizes for guessing, therefore, that people will be irritated should the BPO agents call them for services that they don't think they need. That is where you have to do some smart telemarketing business. Instead of telling them how good your product/service is, you can try telling them why they need it. When you tell them that, they will think about it. The lead generation mantra these days is to make the consumer feel important, not the company that you are representing.
Interpreting the data on your hands is another way of conducting a successful telemarketing campaign. The telemarketing company can get a lot of valuable insights into the income and buying patterns of the consumers. If the telemarketing services personnel take to analyzing the data empirically, they are more likely to find out more than they expected at face value. You can eradicate a whole chunk of numbers from the database.
Telemarketing calls to these numbers would have only drained the resources of the call center. For example, calling a person with a meager income and asking him to purchase spa tickets is nothing but wasting the very expensive resources of the BPO. Such ways of conducting telemarketing business would not be something that the client would approve as well.
Telemarketing in the modern sense is also making calculated guesses on consumer demographics. For example, if the telemarketing company is selling sports shoes, they can target the data that corresponds to the youth. Smart telemarketing business is about segregating the data according to the product/service before the campaign starts.
Telemarketing services is largely dependent on planning. Making sure that all the diverse factors are in control is important for the call center to prevent wastage. The idea is always to make telemarketing calls more fruitful and bring down the ratio of calls that don't yield results and calls that do.
