Category Archives: Telemarketing

Every time you connect with a potential client on the phone, you share a dialog that you hope will lead to a meaningful relationship. Sometimes it happens quickly. Other times it can take months or even years. Person after person you’re building the promise of tomorrow’s success, not unlike the purpose of telesales companies. So having had these great calls, your database notes must be artfully illustrative of each unique discussion, or you could end up with an assemblage of faceless names.

B2B relationships

B2B sales usually involves some kind of relationship, so potentially the buyer, once won, stays with you as a client for a long time. Telesales companies will be crafting these interactions one by one, day after day and the sheer number of calling records in their databases will need to be illustrative of the value created by this process of iterative calling. Where the value isn’t clear, the effort is wasted. Because when you come round to that record again, in weeks or months to come, the magic of the discussion is lost and you end up with your faceless faces again.

Shared databases

Making sure your database notes reflect the conversations you’ve had is even more important in the case of shared company databases. If only you understand, or remember, that fantastic enthusiasm you generated with a buyer weeks ago, anyone following up that record will pass it by, and the lead could be lost forever. For telesales companies, this failure could result in the haemorrhaging of projects, and inevitably clients.

How medics move notes

At Blue Donkey, we found a way to produce notes in superfast time, but which contain precious detail that is easily understood and passed around. Telesales companies are generally the first in a chain that goes from caller to client marketing, to client sales and client front line user. The nature and detail of discussions must be robust so they can be interpreted with exactly the same meaning from one person to another. So we looked at the medical industry where it’s critical for information to move between multidisciplinary functions from GP to Consultant, to nurse and so on.

Pass the  S – O – A – P

The SOAP note originated from the Problem Oriented Medical Record by Dr Lawrence Weed. Dr Weed was a professor of medicine and pharmacology at Yale, where he spent most of his time doing research on microbial genetics. On occasion though, he would accompany students on their hospital rounds and watch as they struggled to interpret the often chaotic patient notes left by doctors.

Dr Weed designed SOAP as a means of moving information from one person to another with absolute accuracy. Blue Donkey adapted SOAP tool with the remit of telesales companies in mind. Blue Donkey notes follow the format below

S        Subjective. This is the personal, particular or individual information the buyer gave us. What they say they like or dislike. What they said they want and why. Their personal opinions, feelings or values expressed

O       Objective. This is the factual, information uncovered such as turnover, number of sites, or staff. What they say they need, use or currently do. What they said about sector or business requirements.

A        Assessment. Information about how they could be supported or their needs met. What services were suggested? What we discussed for meeting their needs. What particular things were of interest.

P        Plan. The outcome, next steps or what they understand will happen next.

So next time you’re writing up a call note, use SOAP to clean up your act. Over time you’ll help build the company database into your best business asset yet.

Hands up anyone who thought 2020 can just go and do one! Well, it has now. So many big changes are promised over the coming few weeks and months. It’s hardly possible to contain our excitement. Hang in there, January and February will be over before we know it. As perky yellow daffodils rise from the cold ground, so will the sun sparkle, and the wheels of industry collect momentum with more gusto than they have for a long while. Hopefully by Easter new habits and routines will have formed, maybe even the end of enforced homeworking, so once again we can go out, meet new clients and old friends alike.

The telephone has always been important to business, but during the past year, its role has been bigger than ever. So how better to fill the cold space between now and Spring but to get those index fingers working to fill our diaries with sales leads that help lay the foundations for an absolutely MAHOOSIVE 2021.

Happy New Sales Lead

A good place to start is with your data. Eyeball your list of prospect companies in helicopter view and pick 3 or 4 sectors that you feel especially excited by right now. Ask yourself, where do you want to see more sales leads, why are those companies attractive, what can you do to help them reach their goals. Make a list of the reasons why those targets are worthwhile and don’t stop until you feel genuinely motivated to get your business in front of the decision makers of those organisations.

Give your sales pitch a workout

With the best will in the world, most of us come back from the Christmas break feeling a little rusty. January is a great time to give our brains as well as our bodies a workout, especially if we need to build a good pipeline of sales leads. Go to your company website and find 10 things you haven’t spoken about for a while, and build them into your repertoire. List out 10 features of your products or services and use the words ‘which means’ to link the benefit buyers get from using them. Take a look at some competitor websites and list 10 things your business does better. Like all muscle workouts, the more it hurts the better works.

Stick with the regime

Consistent sales lead generation takes systematic routines. That sounds more onerous than it is. Basically call 6 people every day, or 4, or 2 whatever the number, set yourself a target that you’re happy with and keep dialling until you reach the goal. When you get through, make sure you have a proper two-way conversation that is guided by what your prospect tells you. In other words, ask a relevant open question and listen to their response. The better your question, the more they’ll talk. The substance of that talk should tell you what you must put on the table next in order to keep their interest, and eventually generate your sales lead. Do this over and over again until you reach your daily target throughout January and February. That’s going to take some discipline but we absolutely promise it’s worth the pain.

If motivation is your issue, productivity coach Karen Eyre-White has some rational advice for finding your motivation and being productive while working from home. She explains that while there’s not a one size fits all method to staying on track, people generally fall into two work from home categories: the introvert, and the extroverts, and knowing which one you are could help your productivity. She tells Cosmopolitan magazine, “If you’re an extrovert, Karen recommends pairing up with a colleague and having a short phone call at the beginning of each day. Tell each other what you’re aiming to do that day, and then have another short call at the end of the day. Not only will this give you social connection, which is important, but keeping commitments you’ve made to someone else will also keep you accountable.” She recommends that introverts do the same using messenger based chats, or phone, regularly checking in with people but not having extended conversations if that works better for you.

Pants on fire! We’ve heard some nonsense about the relevance of B2B telemarketing for today’s marketing mix. From robocalling to off-shoring, B2B telemarketing has suffered a reputational pounding over the past few years. But are marketers who choose to avoid it missing a trick?

What happens when something good comes along – you want to tell someone. What happens when you get a great idea – you’re eager to speak to people about it. What happens when you’re really excited about the awesome things your business can do – you want to reach new people with your thoughts. That’s basically B2B telemarketing, harnessing the power of the spoken word.

Lie 1 – Not something nice companies should do

Most organisations can trackback to the original connections made with their major customers. A large number of those big relationships would inevitably come from a phone call. Yet many will actively avoid B2B telemarketing because of a fear of failure. There’s even a medical term for this kind of fear. Atychiphobia is an irrational and persistent fear of failing at a particular thing. It causes anxiety, panic, and feelings of helplessness, and triggers the flight fight response. Hence a self-fulfilling prophecy. According to experts writing for the Harvard Business Review, these reactions mean you’re ready to fight — not think. The fear of failure causes the blood flow to diminish your cognitive ability, which in turn limits your ability to think and respond quickly, which in turn hurts your lead-generating results. The negative cycle is reinforced when a sales professional confirms the expectation by saying, “I hate cold-calling. I’m lousy at it!” The key to getting better at cold-calling is to simply get more accustomed to it, so your body does not perceive fear.

Lie 2 – You should always use a script

One way some companies attempt to remove the fear element has been the adoption of scripts. So you don’t get tongue-tied, and you do remember your own name.

At Blue Donkey, we’ve been making outbound B2B telemarketing calls for our family of clients for over 23 years. We have never used scripts and definitely never advocate the use of them.

The best way to get over the fear of cold calling is to develop the skills to engage and interest buyers quickly and effectively. Use open questioning technique to ask a relevant question, and get buyers talking. Once they’re contributing, two things happen: firstly you make a connection with them (people like people who get them talking – don’t ask us why, it’s simply a universal truth we accept) and you begin building that precious relationship. Secondly, you’re getting information about their needs as a business, so you’re ready to start showing how you meet those needs. Question – listen – meet need…. Rinse and repeat.

Lie 3 – B2B Telemarketing is a numbers game

Wrong – and dangerous! When something is described as a numbers game, it means an increase in a certain action will lead to a greater chance of a particular outcome. So more calls to get more leads. This idea is totally flawed. Focussing on the number of calls made will only serve to burn through scarce data resources. It carries a number of pernicious risks. One of them is the damage caused to brands of making dial after dial – one of the reasons telemarketing suffered a fall from grace a decade or so ago. The second risk is the numbers of people who will opt-out of future calls. Sales is a tough gig if you don’t feel passionate about the business you work for. This is especially the case in B2B telemarketing as client spend is usually associated with relationships.

If there is a single element that will always improve B2B telemarketing, it’s quality. So it’s not a ‘numbers game’ it’s a ‘quality game’, not as poetic, but definitely more success inducing.

Get cuddly with your features and benefits, know your place in the competitive environment – believe in what you’re doing, and the rest will happen, as if by magic.

Phone based marketing is not something most people enjoy. At Blue Donkey, we’ve made the concept of intelligent telemarketing our own for over 23 years now. We do this mainly by building some, then we share them with each other. It’s like anything, the better you get the more you achieve, and the more you achieve the greater the love.

Human contact is a key ingredient to making this love happen. Studies have shown that voice communication will create much stronger bonds than text. A person’s voice reveals qualities of warmth and other emotional experience that you can’t get through text according to Amit Kumar, PhD writing for the Journal of Experimental Psychology. It’s also useful to know that while a global pandemic stops us meeting face to face, what we’re missing out on in terms of the power of human connection is apparently, not as much as you might think. “Being able to see another person does not make people feel any more connected than if they simply talked with them. A person’s voice is really the signal that creates understanding and connection.”

Type less, talk more

Kumar’s research concluded that participants felt more connected to the person they spoke with, even strangers. They added “People tend to undervalue the positive relational consequences of using voice relative to text alone, leading them to favour typing rather than talking. But that’s a potentially unwise preference. The takeaway message here is: Type less, talk more”.

If you’re tempted to email instead of call, remind yourself that it’s hard to make an impact, never mind a positive one, with a cold email. But an email sent as a follow up to your call will serve to reiterate your purpose and business strengths.

Expect good things to happen

One way of learning to like phone based marketing more is to shift your frame of reference. If you expect the task of cold calling to be hostile, chances are it will prove you right. The science of psychology has told us for years now that you get what you focus on. If you focus on getting more positive interactions, you will. And then, like the Blue Donkey team, the more you achieve, the more you’ll associate your phone based marketing work with warm feelings. Then make a point of remembering the good stuff. Surround yourself with reminders of the positive things that have happened and gently allow your focus to drift there as you’re working.

Have a gratitude attitude

People don’t have to speak to us. They have their own priorities and problems. It’s exhausting and frustrating to get blocked in the task of lead generation, market research or any form of phone based marketing. Therein lies the rub. You need to speak to people, people are too busy to speak with you. So what to do?

Understanding that it’s not personal, it’s not unusual, and it’s not permanent is a great way to view the issue. Hence you can’t do much other than improve your technique, but even that doesn’t guarantee everyone will be available or able to speak with you. It can take roughly 15 dials for each decision maker reached on a newish project and 8 on an established one. That’s pretty standard even to expert communicators like those at Blue Donkey. The best thing to do is celebrate the conversations you do have, treat them as special and focus on having them. At Blue Donkey we call this having a Gratitude Attitude. Being grateful when we do get through, rather than frustrated when we don’t. That’s also an excellent mindset when you do reach someone, as you’re already mentally positioned to get the most from the human connections you do make. And so, they get more from you.

Telemarketing experts are great at taking a business, breaking down its attributes and creating a pitch that blends and flows beautifully. They have to be, or their projects simply won’t retain. But how do you get a knack for seeming passionate and well informed across a wide-ranging product set from financial services to combinatorial chemistry systems. Blue Donkey Intelligent Telemarketing is about doing just that, all day every day. So, what’s our magic formula?… We’re glad you asked!

More open questions please

Open questions are important tools for telemarketing experts. They pave the way for expansive, detailed discussions about what’s important to a prospect when making specification decisions. They are what the telemarketing expert, or seller, uses to understand what the buyer needs. However, they have an exciting dual function. Open questions are also important when building your pitch. They are effectively what you think your buyer will want to know about you. So we can use them to craft our sales pitch.

Who, what, when, why, how

Getting across who you are and why you’re special isn’t always an easy thing to do. Yet do it you must. In a few short sentences to begin with. Telemarketing experts refer to this as the Call Opening where you simply tell the buyer who you are – first and last name, your company, what you do, and the reason you’re calling. Then you draw your buyer into a conversation, during which you’ll use a combination of open questions to help you understand your buyer’s needs, and sales messaging designed to show how you meet those needs.

One way telemarketing experts build a story, or pitch is to start with open questions. Who are you (your organisation)? What do you do? How do you differentiate? What’ are the special features? How do buyers benefit from those features? Who are you working with? Where do you specialise? How do you compare with others? What need or opportunity are you meeting with your product? What are your unique properties? Where are your strengths? The list could go on.

Build a story

When you’ve asked and answered the open questions, roll it all together into a narrative that feels comfortable. Prioritise what you say in favour of what the buyer needs from you. It’s essentially storytelling. Storytelling has become a popular method telemarketing experts use for engaging new audiences about the specialness of a business. It’s a powerful technique for inserting your business in the mind of buyers in a way that feels authentic to the teller and memorable to the buyer. Communication trainers at consulting firm The Story Mill say “Branding is about creating a unique identity and landing a memorable message that moves people into action. Communication, flashy imagery and catchy taglines have long been the tools of the branding trade but, they don’t engage or inspire action nearly as powerfully as an expertly crafted and well-told story”.

Magic pennies

When telemarketing experts are pitching to a potential client, their narrative is used very sparingly. If the story is blurted out without taking a breath, it’s uninteresting, and comes out like a machine gun fashion. Instead, it should be peppered onto the call as a response to what the potential buyer tells you. Hence, you ask a good open question, they answer, you cascade the elements of your narrative according to which parts of the story fit their needs. If you’re doing this correctly, your moments speaking will be used like magic pennies; if used wisely they buy you more talk time. If you blurt everything out, your time runs out and opps… dead call.

At Blue Donkey, we’re telemarketing experts who’ve developed some powerful routines that help us maximise the return on telemarketing investment. At the same time, we’re making sure each contact made has a magic of its own, even when it’s not generating a lead for the short term. By building an army of advocates in this way, one by one the propensity of your prospects to become committed, and high spending clients profoundly increases with each week’s work.

It’s true, telemarketers have to deal with rejection all day. Depressing? No actually – its water off a ducks back, provided you have some good ways of dealing with people saying they don’t want what you’re offering.

Like anyone working in business currently, telemarketers are working under weird conditions. The global pandemic has meant normal office work has become almost obsolete, for the time being at least. So catching someone at a desk is less achievable now than it was, only the most intelligent calls will get through. And then when you’ve managed to make contact, the pressure to produce a positive outcome is greater than ever. It’s easy to suppose anyone who didn’t say YES, is saying NO. As telemarketers with 23 years’ experience, the team at Blue Donkey have a healthy respect for what NO means.

NO doesn’t always mean NO

A straight NO is painful, even to experienced telemarketers. However, if your call is targeted – in other words, you’re calling a well profiled dataset that has the propensity to need what you offer, then you simply won’t get many no’s. You’ll get some not-now’s, some I already haves, and a smattering of I’m happy with my suppliers. They’re not NO. It’s really important to make that distinction because the not-NOs are not painful, they don’t register as rejection, so you don’t go home at the end of each day yearning a career change. By recognising that the NO can be a myriad of things other than Go Away, you can optimise your targeting, and retain your happy, motivated spirit.

NO – in a YES voice

Importantly, these not-NOs do play a critical role in long term success. If your call is good enough to probe when the decision maker might be in the market, and what’s important to them, you’ll help build a picture for how you can meet their needs in the future. Telemarketers who focus on building trust, and rapport will make calls that stand out from the competition. A good call, irrespective of whether you convert, will help build a relationship. By doing so you’ll gain permission to speak again at the point when they are reviewing. You also cope with the NO outcome better by changing it from NO, to YES let’s speak again.

Expect Positive Outcomes

If you truly believe in your product or service, it will come through in your voice and your words. This conviction will also fuel your positivity, so you expect decision makers will be interested, even if they’re not ready to transact with you right now.

Buyers across all company functions will receive call after call competing for their business. The ones that come across as positive, well informed and intelligent will capture interest and attention; mundane, scripted or repetitive ones won’t. Ensuring your calls resonate in the best possible way is the single most successful way of avoiding a NO. However, if you do get one, gently probe as to why. Often a rejection causes telemarketers to turn tail and flee. By examining the reason, they can either overcome an objection or gather the information that will be helpful for other calls.

Expecting positive outcomes is a powerful technique for seeing our work through the filters of positivity. This isn’t about rose-tinted glasses, it’s about setting goals and not allowing the negatives to dominate thinking. This is a growing area of interest in psychology today. Psychology and wellbeing experts at the Langley Institute explain ‘flexible, realistic optimism is about seeing the rocks in the road as well as a path through them. Optimism is closely linked with hope theory, which comprises three cognitive components: goals, agency thinking (“I can do this”), and pathways thinking (“I am capable of finding a route to achieve this goal”). More hopeful people who have a goal will be able to see various pathways to achieving their goal (“I will find a way”) as well as being able to keep motivated.’

If your NO really is a NO, and you suspect you’re getting more than your fair share, change something. If you are using a script, bin it. Now. You don’t need a script, your brain is easily capable of having a grown-up conversation without being prompted. A script is often the reason why telemarketers are blocked or generate NO responses. They cause the call to sound robotic, and we’re not ready to build relationships with robots.

To survive in competitive B2B marketing environments, organisations need to keep adding a steady flow of new leads and opportunities to their sales cycle. However, too much emphasis on closing leads can be damaging to a brand. It places a priority on ‘getting the lead’ rather than identifying and meeting genuine customer needs. Anyone who has ever worked in a 1980’s sales office will remember the hard closes, the boozy lunches, and the old sweats who broke sales records but managed to wreak havoc misselling. No one wants a return to those pushy days, but how can you maintain a growth trajectory without ….well, pushing?

Be your own B2B marketing outsourcer

In-house operations can take a lot from the way B2B marketing outsourcers work. By measuring output and looking for continuous improvement, each call placed to a decision maker will benefit from enthusiastic learning and solid data about what buyers want and how best to meet their specific need.

The best teams will be the ones that focus not on the leads, but on creating a deep and meaningful interaction with buyers instead. The basis here is twofold; you’ll only ever get an enduring lead in B2B marketing where the buyer has a relevant need. If there’s no need, there’s no lead. And persuading someone to have a quote or meeting is unlikely to change that, so why not nurture the best quality interaction until the buyer is truly ready to come to the table.

Objective Setting

Creating clear objectives and goals is the single best way of ensuring your team is working together, with a shared, long term mission in mind. Set milestones and benchmarks to measure achievement against. Catch people doing a good job and set some systems in place to continually plan, act and review progress. Make sure the objectives you set are tested for achievability so they are the right goals, not easy, but not backbreaking either.

By setting goals unrealistically high, managers will get instances of ‘overachievement’ but they’ll be unreliable. More importantly, when sales teams are pushed too hard to get sales, their hunger can annoy potential customers, often causing them to avoid working with a business. Professional, career B2B marketing folk don’t tend to stay with organisations that propagate these kinds of over-goal-seeking behaviours, as the adrenaline eventually causes burnout. It’s important to identify aspects of the company culture that promote these behaviours and take steps to ensure they are removed or at least tempered by changing bonus structures perhaps. Experts at events company Lincoln West explain that burnout is a state of emotional and mental distress caused by high-pressure, prolonged stress. They add that it’s a much more common occurrence than you might think.

Mindshare

With every dial, we want to get a lead, or a sale, market share in other words. However this will not happen, it’s simply unrealistic, so we settle for something that offers us some potential instead. We call this mindshare, when someone thinks about your business in a positive way, but doesn’t buy. Market share can only really be gained by winning mindshare, efficiently and regularly. Every time your team pick up the phone to a potential buyer, your communication should aim to build positivity in the mind of a buyer, so that yours is the brand that comes to mind when they are thinking about purchasing a particular product or service. The trick here is to be polished and timely in your communication. Ask about a potential review and the best time to speak again. Listen carefully to their response to your open questions, and maintain your database histories well. So every record is a work in progress.

At Blue Donkey, we’ve developed some powerful routines that help us maximise the number of B2B marketing leads we produce. At the same time, we’re making sure each contact made has a magic of its own, even when it’s not generating a lead for the short term. By building an army of advocates in this way, one by one the propensity of your prospects to become committed, and high spending clients profoundly increases with each week’s work. Not a hard-close in sight!