Lead generation companies know only too well that when telemarketers are nervous or procrastinating, research can suddenly seem like the most important thing in the world to them. Putting off calls can often begin with trawling a website, carefully looking up their products, services, and history, or mentally preparing for the dialogue they are expecting to have on a call. Though this sounds like a sensible and thorough way to prepare for a call – and there’s no denying that a bit of research can make a difference to the quality of your communication – spending time researching a company every time you make a dial is impractical and inefficient. Even just 5 or 10 minutes a call will add up to a lot of wastage over time. Not only is it unnecessary to the quality or the output of a call, research is time consuming so it will negatively impact your productivity and can prevent an organisation from getting the results it needs from its telemarketing campaign.
Productivity
Reaching key decision makers within an organisation takes lead generation companies on average between eight to twelve dial attempts. If a telemarketer spends minutes researching a company before picking up the phone for every dial their productivity will be severely reduced and it will take much longer to achieve their business objectives. At Blue Donkey, we’re used to making the most of every moment we’re working on a project so to give our clients maximum value, we’ve developed some methods for making our research more efficient and our call rate more productive. According to James Clear, author of the international bestselling book, Atomic Habits, productivity is a measure of efficiency of a person completing a task. We often assume that productivity means getting more things done each day. Wrong. Productivity is getting important things done consistently. And no matter what you are working on, there are only a few things that are truly important. Being productive is about maintaining a steady, average speed on a few things, not maximum speed on everything.
Research
Instead of looking through a company’s website before we pick up the phone, we begin dialling while simultaneously logging onto their homepage. This gives us the time we need to have a quick look through the products and services and to get a sense of who the company are and what they do. This is usually enough to provide lead generation companies the information needed to ask insightful open questions and get the person we’re calling talking. As well as boosting productivity, this mini research technique ensures our teams don’t develop unhelpful preconceptions about a business or how they’ll react. By avoiding assumptions, we can ensure we approach each call on its own merits and get more out of our interactions with key decision makers.
Benchmarking
Lead generation companies are usually outsourced providers hence everything we do at Blue Donkey needs to be benchmarked, measurable and based on best practice. Our time has to be deployed effectively on the phone, not desk researching. To help us to achieve time sensitive goals, we’ve developed a basic toolbox of telemarketing techniques including open questioning techniques designed to engage decision makers deeply and expansively about the things that are important to them. These tools give us the ability to gain a clear and compelling understanding of the products or services we’re representing. By using them in our working practices, we’re able to take on the voice of our clients and understand what it is they do, what makes them special, the industry they operate in and how the products or services we’re representing can help the decision makers we’re speaking to.
By turning research into a fine art and carefully honing our telemarketing techniques, we’re able to get some of the best results lead generation companies can offer, quickly and efficiently. To find out more, take a look around our site or contact a member of the Blue Donkey team.
