Thankfully comedy duo Mel Smith & Griff Rhys-Jones, were engaged by Leagas Delaney to produce a series of radio commercials for Phillips Electronics. The result was a series of radio spots that changed radio advertising, and back in 1999 Campaign magazine named ”Phirrips” the Best Radio Spot of All Time (you can listen to it by visiting www.heywhipple.com).

How is this relevant to B2B telemarketing?

Well a telemarketing call is audio based, just like radio. So if you analyse a good radio commercial it can give clues on how to build interesting, engaging and memorable conversations.

For example, successful and creative radio adverts will normally include two voices, plus we all know that testimonials work well in marketing. Therefore, instead of reading a testimonial from a client you could play an audio recording of the client speaking. It adds an extra dimension to the call, makes it memorable and the testimonial more believable.

Beyond audio, in the B2B environment we can be reasonably confident the decision maker will be in front of a computer or have access to the internet via a smart phone or tablet. There are a range of presentation devices (from the simple SlideShare through to Empressr and the sophisticated Prezzi) can all help lift the conversation and ensure the sales agent keeps to an agreed structure.

B2B telemarketing does not have to be dull. Adding a dash of creativity will enhance the call, underline your proposition and make the conversation more memorable. To discuss how to add creativity and quality to your next campaign please talk to Graham Smith, Marketing Director on 020 8846 3950 or email gsmith@scisalesgroup.com

The problem is the caller is more interested in reading the script than listening to the potential customer. But we all know that listening is a big part of selling.

However, that does not mean the call should be without a framework. A list of key sales points and objectives should be agreed at the Workshop before the campaign begins. In addition, telemarketing experts always have a plan of what they want to achieve from the call before they pick up the phone. They’ve done their homework.

A telemarketing call is a conversation. There will be a number of questions back and forth, and questions are essentially about qualification; the telemarketer’s asking questions to qualify the prospect and the prospect is asking questions to understand if it’s of interest.

No amount of branches in a script will cover every twist and turn of a live conversation.

After a while (which could be a few hours or a few days) seasoned telemarketers gradually develop a ‘pitch’. But a pitch is not a script, it’s an approach the telemarketer has found works for them. Two telemarketers can have a completely different pitch and still get results.

A question was asked on LinkedIn recently about the value of a script in telemarketing. Here’s some of the responses:

“Never use a script – build a template. Get the prospects permission to talk and DON’T real off a list of features and benefits. Whatever you do don’t sound, act, behave like a traditionally trained sales person or cold caller. And never cold call for sale, only to get permission to set up a discussion.”
Jonathan Russell MBA FRSA , Managing Director, Sandler Training

“I hardly ever use a script as such. I prefer to use prompts and bullet points of key criteria. Listening is key to cold calling. When the person on the other end of the phone answers you that should give you enough information to ask another question. Reacting to the person’s answer shows them that you are paying attention to them not just reading out line after line of irrelevant nonsense.”
Matthew Dunnington-Wallace, New Business Executive, CHILLI UK

“I’ll add my vote for ‘outline yes, script no’. Every good caller we’ve ever hired built an outline of the key questions and points they needed to raise, but didn’t follow a set script. And I know when I’m on the receiving end of a caller using a script it’s absolutely painful. You can tell within seconds they’re reciting or reading and tune out immediately.”
Lisa Shepherd, President, The Mezzanine Group

All good telemarketing professionals instinctively know when they’ve got their pitch. Now burn that script, stop reading and start listening. It will improve the quality of your B2B conversations.

It contains 1.7 million commercial telephone numbers that have requested not to receive sales calls. The fine for making a sales call to a number on the CTPS list is currently £5,000; and is not payable by the telemarketing agency, but by the company that instigated the call. That’s you, the client.

However, the real harm is not the fine, it’s the damage it does to your brand and ROI.

Apart from the negative publicity that will be generated as a result of your company receiving a fine for breaking the law, there is the damage that’s done to your brand’s reputation.

So, when you call Smith & Sons for example, your company name will be remembered – but for all the wrong reasons. In all your future marketing to Smith & Sons, whether you send an email or mail shot, you’ll be remembered as the company that ignored their request not to be called.

In addition, there is little point in calling companies that do not want to be called. It’s a waste of time and telephone charges, both of which cost money and will have a negative impact on your campaign’s ROI.

To avoid damaging your brand and reducing your ROI you should ensure all your campaigns are checked against the CTPS file every 28 days.

This not only improves the quality of your marketing it’s also a legal duty under the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2004.

Relevance starts with data. Through market research and customer insight you can identify the target audience with the highest propensity to buy your product. But if your data does not accurately match this ‘profile’ then the conversation may become irrelevant.

We analysed a recent campaign targeting the tourism market. The same proposition was delivered to each of 3 data sources during the same time period. The results show the importance of relevant data and relevant conversations.

‘Unmatched Data’ is where the data only partially matched the profile developed by the client. ‘Matched Data’ is where the data matched the profile, and ‘Relevant Association’ is data that matched the profile and which was from a relevant trade association.

The figures speak for themselves, an improvement of 8 times where relevance is applied.

Relevance can also be added through the content of the call. Researching the decision makers LinkedIn profile and tracking them on the blogosphere can also improve the relevance of the call, enabling you to introduce relevant triggers into the conversation.

Email marketing and direct mail have understood the importance of relevance and the improvement it can bring to response; your telemarketing campaign needs to get up to speed.

The flip-side of this equation is that relevant data is normally more expensive.

Fortunately, data from SCi Sales Group’s CRM is included in our charges. It’s a goldmine of B2B names and addresses, updated minute-by-minute through constant calling and email contact. All clean and accurate with multiple data fields, enabling us to deliver prospects that meet your precise requirements.

There are several objectives of content marketing, including thought leadership, lead generation, direct sales and customer retention. It’s a technique that has proved very effective in email marketing and direct mail, often driving traffic to a website or increasing attendance at seminars/events.

We can examine the effectiveness of content marketing by looking at the average figure for recent email blasts conducted by SCi Sales Group. Each of 3 blasts were divided into groups according to the source of audience data. The sources were:

a) Rented list of decision makers
b) List compiled from business cards
c) List of people who had downloaded knowledge content

You might expect list b) to generate the best response, because having a business card indicates an executive must have met that person face-to-face. However, the results reveal a different picture.

Content-based emails are significantly better than both general rented lists and lists compiled from people you may have met. While creating the content is time-consuming, its pay-back is in our opinion worthwhile.

The same pay-back or ROI can be achieved by using the content marketing model in telemarketing. By inserting ‘knowledge’ into the conversation you position yourself as an expert and encourage the decision maker to continue the call.

Here’s two alternative telemarketing conversations:

Standard conversation
“I understand you are the person responsible for email marketing at ABC Corporation, I’d like tell you about our new email marketing software and …”

Content conversation
“I understand you are the person responsible for email marketing at ABC Corporation, our recent study shows that email response can be improved by x% simply by changing software. I’d like to send you a copy of the report and …”

The secret to successful content marketing is ‘tell, not sell’ – as a result it may not be appropriate for every campaign. But if you have a long sales cycle, or the immediate objective is to arranage a telephone call/appointment, then you may find content telemarketing produces better results.

Content conversations also increase the likelihood of signing-up the decision maker to your monthly newsletter or customer engagement programme at the end of the call.

You probably already have content available on your website, see how it could be applied to your next telemarketing campaign and if it fits with your objectives. For further advice please call Graham Smith, Marketing Director on 020 8846 3950.

It will always depend on a variety of factors; time of year, the product and proposition, the target audience, etc. But we analysed over 295,000 calls between June-December 2011 – that’s nearly 300 days of continuous calling – and arrived at some averages that may prove useful.

You need to make 80 calls to get an opportunity, and normally spend about 2 hours on the phone (to be precise, it’s 78.45 calls and 1 hour 53 minutes).

The definition of an opportunity can vary from agreement to receive a telephone call from a senior sales executive on a specified day, to a face-to-face ‘BANT qualified’ meeting with a C-level decision maker.

These averages will naturally vary from campaign to campaign, and to give you a better indication of the variance, here’s some detail on six recent telemarketing projects.

We have grouped the campaigns by type to give a fair comparison. The red campaigns are targeting C-level executives in the FTSE 250 companies. In this case it was Chief Finance Officers and Marketing Directors/Managers.

The light grey campaigns targeted HR Managers and IT/Telecoms Managers at large organisations (employing 500+ people). The dark grey projects were aimed at SMEs, in many cases employing less than 100 staff, and the job titles were typically Operations/Procurement Manager, Webmaster or CEO.

As you can see the variation is huge, in some cases over 200%; yet all these campaigns were conducted over the same 4 month period, so seasonality is a limited factor.

The metric of 80 calls and 2 hours per Opportunity is a useful guide, but it is only a guide. To get a much better indication of the results you should be achieving on your telemarketing project please call us on 020 8846 3950 or email info@scisalesgroup.com

1. Is the Regulation retrospective?
Will data captured legally and in good faith need to be ‘dumped’ when the Regulation is enforced?

2. Define ‘explicit consent’
‘Explicit consent’ to store a persons details on a database is open to interpretation. You could collect data believing you have explicit consent, but the data regulator may disagree. Result? The data gets dumped and £thousands is wasted, possibly crippling some companies.

In addition, the UK interpretation of explicit consent may vary from the German and French. So where is the uniformity in European data protection we all desire? The phrase is too vague and companies are being set up to fail.

3. Right to be forgotten and removing ‘unsubscribes’
If a person requests to be ‘forgotten’ how can anyone ensure they are removed from all future databases bought legitimately from other companies?

A customer may choose to be ‘forgotten’ by British Gas, then a year later request to receive information from all gas suppliers. You can’t remove them from any British Gas marketing if you don’t have their details.

4. Marketing to multi-national companies will go outside the EU
Example: Acme UK Limited have a new product they want to sell to Coca-Cola. They cannot get the names of the appropriate Managers/Directors at Coca-Cola in the UK, or contact them without their consent. But they can get the names of Coca-Cola Directors in USA, Argentina, India, etc.

So they appoint a marketing agency outside of the EU and make contact with Coca-Cola USA. The USA division love the product and tell their colleagues in the UK. Result? B2B Marketing agencies in the UK loose a chunk of business.

5. Impractical to prosecute companies beyond the EU
The global economy is moving faster than ever before. Gaining an advantage over your competitors for just a few months can make £millions. A company outside the EU may be prepared to risk breaking the Regulation in order to gain an advantage in the UK market, and UK companies would be unable to respond.

Policing the Regulation within Europe will be difficult, doing it world-wide will be impossible. Even if a company is identified as breaking the Regulation it may take years before they are prosecuted, and during that time UK companies – unable to compete – will go into liquidation.

A copy of the draft Regulation (all 119 pages!) is available by clicking EU Data Protection Regulation.

Most leads have just Authority and Need, but on long sales cycles it may take months or even years before Budget and Timescale are in place – and can we even be sure BANT is the best way to qualify leads?

The failure to qualify leads correctly can mean the best leads are not identified, and lack of engagement means they fall into the Sales Gap.

The answer is to find a way of correctly identifying the most promising leads, and ensure they are nurtured by the marketing department until ‘sales ready’.

Lead scoring is one solution, and there are many sophisticated models for lead scoring available. But sophisticated does not necessarily mean best.

A simple but effective method of lead scoring is a combination of BANT, Activity and Demographics (BAD).

You can award points to a sales lead is it has any of the BANT criteria, for example 5 points if the person has authority and 5 points if they have need. Total so far, 10 points.

Then you award points based of their activity. For example 5 points if they downloaded a white paper from your website, but only 1 point if they opened an email newsletter without clicking a link. That’s 6 points, making a new total of 16.

Finally, demographics. This can be split by individual and company. Is the individual a decision maker (5 points) or an influencer (2 points)? Does the company have the ideal turnover (4 points) and are they in the right industry (3 points)? For a decision maker this could bring the total to 28 points, but for an influencer the figure is 25 points.

This type of lead scoring makes it easier to target your nurturing and limited budget on areas where you are most likely to get a return on investment. This is particularly true on long sales cycles, where the marketing department need to keep the right people engaged over a period of time without wasting budget.

To add oil to the fire, research by B2B Marketing magazine shows that 65% of companies have no formal process for managing sales leads. This can result in two problems…

1) Confusion over who controls the leads
Who controls each stage of the sales process, sales or marketing? Control of the various stages will vary from company to company, but in most cases there is uncertainty about who controls sales leads.

Lack of control means the leads can easily fall into the Sales Gap and be picked up by one of your competitors.

2) Inability to manage change
A change in budget or timescale, a change in decision maker or even a change in sales person at your company. All these changes can impact on the sales lead.

The consequence of this confusion and inability is a ‘blame culture’. We often see arguments between sales and marketing on the qualification of sales leads. Sales will argue the lead is not sufficiently well qualified, and marketing may argue they have completed the nurturing and can do no more.

The solution? Clearly defined management.

The first step is to introduce lead scoring that defines when a lead becomes an opportunity and is handed to the sales department. According to our research on LinkedIn, the best person to decide on the criteria is the CEO/Managing Director.

The next step is to outsource your lead nurturing. A company independent of both your sales and marketing function is more likely to be impartial about the lead scoring process. This may also negate the need for your company to invest in expensive marketing automation software.

These two steps will alleviate tension between sales and marketing, ensure only the most promising leads are passed to sales and provide a safety net when unexpected change occurs.