Month: January 2019

If done right, telemarketing is a great way to provide an interactive and personal sales experience to your prospects. With a good telemarketing team, like TeamAir, behind your sales activity you can create immediate rapport with your prospects and, in turn, be able to gauge their interest in your product or service.

By using an outsourced telemarketing team, these rewards are further by freeing up your internal sales team to do what they do best – making sales!

However, a telemarketing campaign is not free and before you start you want to ensure that your new team know what they’re doing. So, what should you consider before beginning a telemarketing campaign?

1. Target Market

Of course, the first thing to consider when making any sale is the people you are selling to.  Who are they? What kind of profile do they fit into? At Air, we sit down with our clients to analyse who their target market is, what type of industry they want us to target and what level of decision maker they want us to speak to. For us, the most important aspects are who and why. We don’t make any calls before we have created an in-depth company and prospect profile.

2. The Script

We need to establish what it is you are selling and what we are going to be pitching. From Fintechs to Soft Drinks Companies, we have worked with a variety of businesses and so we understand the importance of a perfectly tailored script. When TeamAir are dialling, they will know your offering, its USPs, why a company should use you and not your competitor and how they should engage with a prospect. Engagement is key, so we establish the best route to success by implementing a two-way, consultative, permission-based conversation.

3. Data

Strong data is key to strong sales. Whether you have your own data, or we need to source it for you, we offer a data cleansing service to ensure that you’re hitting exactly the target market that you want to hit. If we are sourcing data for you, we want to have a clear understanding of the data profile you need, from there we look to our UK data providers. Any data that we source belongs to you, this is why we are more than happy to build relationships between our providers and our clients, this allows you to get the best out of your time working with us.

4. Objections

For telemarketers, objection handling is a fact of life – it’ll never go away. However, at Air, we make sure that our diallers are as knowledgeable as possible with regards to your product and ensure that they are armed with information to handle the relevant objections that arise. We also follow the diffuse > statement > question formula. By diffusing any negative pressure, TeamAir are able to make statements which switch the focus of the conversation and ask open questions which allow it to flow once more.

5. Engagement process

Once a prospect is engaged, what are you looking to do with them, book a phone call or a face to face appointment? But more importantly, what does is take to qualify a lead? These questions are at the forefront of our campaign strategy as is it essential that we know your end goal. If booking appointments is something you would like us to help with then we ask for access to your calendars, this allows us to efficiently provide you with any details which you’ll need to know for appointments booked for you. With regards to lead qualification, that’s all down to you, you set the criteria and we follow, making sure to engage with the prospects who matter to you.

 

If you feel that your sales team could benefit from the support of an expert outsourced telemarketing team, then get in touch today – TeamAir are always on hand to help. Call: 0345 2413038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk

In the era of GDPR, unwarranted contact should be a distant memory. To be truly business savvy is now, and always should have been, demonstrated by a company’s ability to target customers based on their wants and needs, not your own. Sales are increasingly determined by the trust that a customer has for a brand, if you are honest and transparent with them upfront they are more likely to buy into you as a brand. People value a brand they can trust.

A simple and effective way to build a trustworthy brand is by implementing a segmentation strategy – it shows that you have taken the time to understand the various groups within your target market. We’ve created the infographic below to highlight 5 key reasons to segment your data and customers:

But many businesses are still failing to hit the mark, with 20% of respondents to an Avention survey feeling that segmentation was one of the biggest challenges facing their organisation. Segmentation is a tried and tested means of delivering results to your customers. We only have to look to email campaigns, where Mailchimp showed that clicks are 74.53% higher than non-segmented campaigns, to see these results.

By taking the time to highlight the different needs and barriers that may be important to your potential clients, you will be better able to sell to them. Not only will it allow you to understand them, but it will allow you to forge personal relationships with them through meaningful interactions – which is essential in the telemarketing industry in particular. So, how can you segment your customers?

However, it is important to remember the earlier point about customer trust. With increasingly personalised sales and marketing materials out there it isn’t enough to take your data and simply spilt everyone into superficial segments. You need to gain insight into the people behind the numbers, otherwise your will simply be working from conjecture.

To gain insight and create genuine, informed personas for these groups, it is vital that you demonstrate a desire to know more when in conversation with your prospects. It is with this in mind that the scripts used by TeamAir are only there as prompts, we encourage our BDEs to engage in meaningful, personal conversations when on the phone. This helps us to nurture a sense of human connection whilst carrying out the vital research that is needed to lead a successful campaign and enrich the data that is held.

If you feel that you could benefit from working with a reputable, award winning telemarketing company, who work with a customer-centric focus, get in touch. You can call us: 0345 241 3038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Photo by Javi Lorbada on Unsplash

However your sales team operates, there’s a place in their work for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. A properly constructed PPC account will act like a pack of automated hunters, sniffing out potential leads from every search anyone does on the internet, and chasing them into your website. The trick is to train these hunters to bring those potential leads into your existing pipeline as seamlessly as possible.

Singling searchers out to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time involves planning your strategy in advance and then adapting it to the data you acquire. Too many PPC accounts simply show the same message to everyone who searches for a vaguely relevant keyword (or an overly specific keyword). You need to understand the mindset of a potential lead and learn how to recognise their intent from what they type into that search engine. Once you’ve learned this, you can herd them into your existing sales pipeline at the point it matches their decision-making process and significantly increase your chance of converting a lead into a sale.

Fitting Leads into Your Pipeline

If you sell office equipment and someone types, “office equipment,” into Google’s search box, then you can be fairly certain they’re close to the beginning of pipeline. They know they want office furniture and they’re seeing what’s out there. These are the people you can flag your services to, let them become aware of what you have to offer. If you’re in a complex industry where public perception is lacking, you can use this opportunity to become the voice of authority to them, increasing the chances they will come back to you when they are closer to making a final decision. These people are those you fit into the top of your pipeline.

Longer, more specific searches tend to come after someone has been thinking for a while or has a definite and often immediate need. If someone types in, “adjustable height computer monitor bracket,” it’s fairly likely that they need an adjustable height computer monitor bracket and they need it soon. These people come in around the middle of your pipeline.

The longest tail keywords are from those searchers who need to be herded towards the bottom of the pipeline. “Brand-X Model-Y monitor bracket next day delivery,” is about as specific as it’s possible to get. You know this person has made the decision of what they are getting, they are just looking for where to get it from. They’ve even included a handy USP that you can hook; “Next Day Delivery.” These are the people who you can drop exactly what they want into their lap.

Getting the right message to these people requires having your PPC account structured correctly. For the broader searches you have to use broader messages. As the user intent becomes more specific with longer tail search queries, you can narrow down the message you convey (both in the ad copy and on the landing page the user is directed to). At every stage it doesn’t hurt to have the user get in touch; a simple call back form is ideal, the shorter the better, just a name and a phone number is all you need – once you have those you have far more control in the sales process.

Matching Tactics to Intent

Unfortunately, it’s not always this simple to slot searchers into their correct slot on the funnel. Although it’s safer to assume that they’re higher in the funnel, the broader search terms make it harder to infer the true intent of the person typing it. The best you can do is give them options: Sitelinks on your ad allows you to link people through to other pages which might be of interest. These sitelinks give the user the opportunity to find their own place in your sales pipeline.

For example: If someone searches for, “office equipment,” you can show them a link to your home page, which is broad enough to have something of relevance to them on it. But on top of that you can have links to your products catalogue, to your most popular lines, and to your services/FAQ page which explains that you offer not only next-day delivery but a free installation service as well. And again, give a quick and simple means for them to give you their contact info at every step.

The Remarkable Power of Remarketing

Another tool in populating your sales pipeline from PPC is remarketing. Targeting specific ads to people who have already seen your website, or a specific page on your website, or performed certain actions means you can recapture their attention. This is a balancing act, you have to have an audience of sufficient size to guarantee anonymity.

Typically, the best way to accomplish this you need a single list of everyone who has visited your website, which you can then break down into progressively smaller groups based on the user action – the first tier may be all those who have visited any page in a particular category, and then those who have looked at more than one product. By creating progressively more targeted audiences you always have a working audience to work with, but if you have sufficient traffic for the smaller audiences you can use more carefully constructed messages. More carefully targeted messages always perform stronger.

 

Exactly how you integrate PPC into your existing sales pipeline does depend greatly on your own procedures, but the potential value is universal. The real knack lies in picking the best targets out of the herd of online searchers and potential customers. Only a small segment will match as a lead, and sorting these out to determine their place in your sales pipeline can be tricky, but very rewarding. Get it right and you’ll fuel your sales pipeline with a regular stream of leads across all stages – that’s enough to keep any sales team happy!

 

Guest Blog written for Air by Aquamarine Search and Social Agency