Tag Archives: teleprospecting

Online Marketing and Sales Complement Direct Marketing, Teleprospecting Campaigns

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It is essential that innovative technology businesses maintain control over the prominence of a business in all marketing venues including, but not limited to:

  • Online
  • Social Media and
  • Brick and Motor

Naturally the decision may well make sense to limit public visibility in one of these three venues or, for very early stage businesses, even all three. Nevertheless, whatever programs are architected and executed must have components that address all three marketplaces.

In fact, typical characteristics of online marketing and sales interaction complement matching characteristics of brick and motor interaction. We have spent lots of time talking up teleprospecting as an excellent tactical tool for driving lead generation with brick and mortar venues. The facts are that the task of achieving online visibility in very competitive search engine markets can take, literally, months to produce benefits and, most importantly, credible leads to business opportunities.

In contrast, teleprospecting is an “instant on” tool activated simply by picking up the telephone, contacting likely prospects and engaging them in conversation. Of course, it is best not to broadly implement this direct marketing tool prior to verifying that required marketing communications collateral is ready for dissemination to the public either in hard copy form, or at least with carefully crafted references to business success stories, industry affiliations, certifications, etc to substantiate the position of the business as an authority in a market worth contacting and engaging in meaningful conversation.

We must note that the length of the sales cycle for leads produced through teleprospecting is substantially longer than is the case for online sales resulting from online marketing. Once online visibility has been achieved, meaning the right type of visibility that establishes a business in a targeted niche, sales cycles are dramatically shorter. Further, sales are often facilitated without significant demand on sales staff, who remain free to attend to direct marketing efforts.

With regard to social media, we think that social media makes sense as a method of establishing marketplace authority. Groups of industry affiliates and other participants who can be convinced to accept a business as a viable vendor for targeted needs can go a long way to provide the stamp of approval that emerging businesses often need.

We have substantial recent experience, gained over the last year, coordinating teleprospecting with online marketing and social media. We welcome opportunities to elaborate on our experience, not to mention to learn further about your objectives. Please call Ira Michael Blonder, IMB Enterprises, Inc at +1 631-673-2929 to further a discussion.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2012 All Rights Reserved

Look to Teleprospecting for a Superior Business to Business Lead Generation Program

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Useful Sales leads are food for any business, nutrient rich supplements that promise to enrich cash flow and sales staff alike.

But what constitutes “useful” with regard to leads?

Leads are useful when they include information that can be used to forge successful sales campaigns with appropriate prospects. There is no better way that I know of to accumulate this type of information for innovative technology providers targeting global business and other large organizations than teleprospecting, meaning an outbound telemarketing effort that eschews hard selling for information gathering. Business to business lead generation requires a “hands off” attitude on the part of the teleprospector. Further, top teleprospecting talent will communicate a genuine interest to contacts in the subject of discussion, thereby encouraging a free exchange of information that typically leads to collection of useful sales information.

I do not believe in the value of buying contact lists. The task of identifying companies that constitute realistic targets for products and services is very useful endeavor that will help train a teleprospecting team to qualify contacts; therefore, why hand the team a set of businesses from a purchased contact list? If sales has participated in the business from inception (as I have advocated elsewhere in this blog) then there ought to be plenty of time to canvas the marketplace slowly and carefully to identify businesses that ought to be contacted once selling efforts begin. With regard to contacts within the prospect businesses that pre sales efforts identify, once again, researching contacts online, through address books, etc. and, generally, through sales team collaboration is superior route. Once again, the process of working to identify these contacts helps sales to refine the qualification process that will have to be in place to land the business. It is safe to say that the process of qualifying leads cannot be too precise an activity. The finer the grain the better as far as leads are concerned.

Once a lead list has been assembled, then a teleprospecting program can be successfully implemented to deliver very high quality selling opportunities. There is no error in combining this type of direct marketing effort with online product promotion. With recent improvements in online marketing communications opportunities, as well as with a tendency of today’s prospects to research just about everything they need to know about a product or service by themselves, with little to no hand holding from sales, online promotion can be successfully crafted to support the sale of complex products to global business.

I am wholly engaged with clients who are implementing teleprospecting programs with web 2.0 online marketing. I welcome opportunities to discuss specific needs that may be at hand for your business or your business plans. Please call me at +1 631-673-2929 to further a discussion.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2012 All Rights Reserved

Use Teleprospecting to survey customers

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Sell what they buy.

Building a product marketing strategy that pulls 20% of efforts from technical innovation (internally generated) and 80% of efforts from listening, analyzing, and summarizing what customers within a market segment need and look for from products and services (externally generated) makes sense. In my experience there is a significant opportunity for success for products crafted to match what customers are buying. Further, accomplished marketers like Peppers & Rogers Group (http://www NULL.peppersandrogersgroup NULL.com), and George S. Day (http://marketing NULL.wharton NULL.upenn NULL.edu/people/faculty NULL.cfm?id=186) emphasize the importance of surveying customers to determine what:

  1. value means
  2. solutions they are purchasing to deliver value
  3. and, finally over time, whether they got the value they were after when they purchased and implemented solutions

Teleprospecting provides an effective means of collecting information from customers and prospects. Put the information you capture from teleprospecting interviews or surveys into a picture of a market from the perspective of customers and prospects. Of course, with regards to determining a useful answer to objective (1), above, keep in mind that the question is very broad; therefore, the answers received will be useful as you assemble a broad value proposition for the market, but not especially useful on a case by case basis. Nevertheless, simply putting together an broad, but accurate, value statement for a market segment will be a very worthwhile endeavor. Further, by obtaining answers to objective (3), above, whether or not solutions, once implemented, deliver the value that they promised, you will have another gold nugget to enrichen the products that you, subsequently, decide to build or, perhaps renovate.

It’s best if the teleprospecting effort can be made by independent parties, but for a business operating under the radar with few sales, and limited means, the slate is still clean enough to permit internal staff to undertake the teleprospecting effort. Anyways, if your best prospect is larger business, then engaging in lead generation from a teleprospecting effort makes the most sense. After all, larger businesses pose longer sales cycles complete with complex systems for making buying decisions.

One last point on value: As I’ve written in earlier posts, if your product or service is complex, then you must dig as deep as possible through sales qualification steps (that you have carefully designed for a specific prospect opportunity) to determine the specific value that the prospect at hand is after. I emphasize that this value statement must be framed in terms of cost savings if it is to be truly persuasive and convincing. Further, the greatest reward (in terms of the magnitude of revenue to be received from an order) will be greatest where the prospect understands that by purchasing your solution she/he will save the most money with regards to ongoing operations.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

A Teleprospector Carries an Audible Sandwich Board Directly to the Ears of Prime Prospects

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I learned early on within my experience with teleprospecting that the opening message to prospects, delivered through this powerful telemarketing technique, was much like an audible sandwich board, comprised of front and back key phrases delivered directly to one set of hand picked ears to stimulate a conversation that would deliver lots of useful information. The teleprospector is merely responsible for delivering the message. The real payload lies in the phrases themselves, which must be carefully chosen to catch the interest of the listener on the other end of the telephone call.

A client grudgingly noted that the phrases, which must be delivered early in the conversation and in an interval comprised of no more than five seconds of the complete telephone call, should place his product at the very top of commodities in his market. He would have rather had the call occasioned by survey taking, or on the premise of a prospect interview on a topic germaine to his product, but he correctly surmised that framing the conversation that far away from an actual sales call would leave the prospect with a less than sanguine opinion of the client’s business should subsequent conversations follow where the true nature of the call (as a door opener for a sale somewhere in the future) be made known to all parties. I present this recollection to illustrate the very subtle positioning required of the teleprospecting call, which must be carefully, but comfortably, placed between a sales call and a research study to deliver the most productive effect.

The most productive effect will be to unearth a substantial amount of information, at once credible and descriptive of a prospect’s role with regard to a product or service within a business. Once this information is digested, categorized and stored within the sales effort a foundation of understanding will be in place, upon which additional information can be layered and positioned, as appropriate, to determine interest, decision makers, etc.

Teleprospecting should be included as a tactic within any sales plan for a product or service targeted to enterprise customers. There is no other sales tool that will produce information of comparable quality. As well, no other sales tool makes so little a mark on the market with so little notoriety. Curious to think that these audible sandwich boards could produce so elegant a result. No wonder that effective teleprospecting skills are so hard to come by.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Unique Dynamics of “Cold Call” Prospecting Telephone Sales Calls

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Most sales people have a pavlovian reaction to “cold call” telephone sales — quick glances from left to right (anywhere but straight eye to eye contact) and a determined effort to vacate the premises. The fact is that “cold call” telemarketing tasks are uncomfortable and far removed from the type of ego inflating activity that most sales people require to gin themselves up to the task of hitting their numbers on a month in/month out basis.

But the truth is that “cold call” telephone sales provides a highly targeted, controllable method of expanding market visibility with precision. In fact, if properly managed and executed, cold calls can be utilized to increase market awareness of a product precisely as planned. Therefore, I regard this method of prospecting as the most precise and efficient method available to any type of business marketing any type of product or service. While the number of prospects contacted depends entirely on the number of telemarketers at work (I eschew any mention of “robo dialers”, which dialers I consider to be entirely useless and a waste of precious funds that could be better spent on buying a telemarketers time), the contact, itself, is highly effective.

In contrast, advertising (even inclusive of online, context-sensitive display ads) is inherently a broad market passive technique of juxtaposing text, photos, suggestions, etc (which may all have the very same forward, presumptuous characteristics of a cold call) alongside subject matter that attracts prospect interest but, nonetheless, irrelevant to the ads themselves. The return on investment for advertising, I argue, is far less and certainly not appropriate for tight lipped businesses with leading edge technology that need to operate under the radar.

Usually sales people break out into one of two character types–so-called “farmers” and so-called “hunters”. I like to refer to farmers as the guys with the address books, the nice guys who are well liked by their contacts who have usually bought different products from the same sales person (my nice guy) over several sales “lives”. “Farmers” do not like cold calls. It’s the “hunters” who can be taught to use cold call telemarketing techniques. These sales people are generally in sales not only for the money, but also to satisfy a need for competition and achievement.

“Hunters” may not do a good job of maintaining business friendships, but they certainly can be trained in “cold call” telemarketing for prospecting. With a new technique like cold calling firmly ensconced in their quiver of sales methods, “hunters” can relied upon to not only deliver the orders, but to open the market precisely as planned for a controlled, yet covert, expansion of business.

Don’t pass up on cold call prospecting.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Use Just a Pinch of Commodity Sell to Rev Up Direct Marketing for Products Still Under the Radar

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The “commodity sell” is, generally, anathema for the complex sale. Nevertheless, for clients of mine with products that operate “under the radar,” just a bit of “commodity sell” does the trick to drive the performance of direct marketing (essentially a combination of telemarketing, teleprospecting, and webinars) as a driver for the complex sale.

If contacts at enterprise size business prospects know nothing about your product, and little about your niche (regardless of its strategic importance) there is no other option than to include a presentation of what you offer within your early conversations with the prospect. This presentation provides just the “pinch” of commodity sell to spark contact interest in furthering conversations and, thereby, the gathering of information that you must do to qualify just who this contact is and what he/she does relative to important related projects and plans (or the lack thereof) at your enterprise business prospect.

It is absolutely essential that the information that you convey via the presentation be completely consistent with any subsequent information your sales team may communicate to the specific contact as well as any other contacts at the prospect. Understand that your product is still under the radar of the marketplace; therefore, the information constitutes the only branding that you possess. Whenever the information changes, then your brand changes and, therefore, the power of repetition along with the development of subliminal associations is substantially diminished. Keep the presentation consistent, better yet, require that any and all references to features, benefits, value proposition, etc make refernce to the same uniform information.

The importance of this point is doubly critical if your product is an integrated solution. Permitting communication of ambiguous information abvout an integrated solution provides the prospect with an opportunity to break up your solution into components. This opportunity spells doom for the complex sale and lots of revenue will be left on the table. I have worked with clients with this problem who saw projected revenue growth delayed by six months, and longer, as planned complex sales trended into commodity sales of components with dangerously lower pricing to customers.

If you opt for a direct marketing approach to product promotion and lead generation then do consider a hybrid method that includes a highly controlled and consistent presentation to contacts. Review any/all printed and electronic collateral to ensure that information is completely consistent. Revise as required or risk diluting your potential for complex sales, not to mention precious revenue.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Use Teleprospecting to Validate Decision Making Processes for Complex Sales

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I use prospecting over the telephone, or teleprospecting, to perform a key function within the sales planning process for complex sales to enterprise prospects — test and verify all important assumptions about the prospect. Important assumptions include:

  • Who needs the complex product or solution
  • Why the need makes sense for the prospect
  • When will they need to satisfy this need
  • Who will approve the purchase
  • Who will use the complex product or solution
  • What the final integrated solution should look like, and
  • How they plan to get to the final integrated solution

In my experience, acting on untested assumptions, more often than not, results in wasted time and effort for the sales team. Close ratios can be doubled by simply increasing the number of conversations with contacts at the prospect business and verifying that answers to my Who/Why/When/What/How questions, as listed above, are accurate and, therefore, useful.

Examples of untested assumptions include job titles, published prospect initiatives, and planned capital expenditures. The facts are that job titles are often poor indicators of decision-making authority; published initiatives can, and often do change and, finally, budgeted capital expenditures can be preempted. Better to learn what the real drivers are for the prospect and who is leading the charge.

A team of telemarketers who are dedicated entirely to prospecting and gathering specific pieces of information about prospects can be used successfully to test any and all sales campaign assumptions. Candidates for membership in such a team must be able to demonstrate an ability to engage high level individuals in meaningful dialogue crafted to produce required answers. Further, these candidates must demonstrate a thorough understanding of the complex product or solution and a commensurate understanding of how the complex product or solution interconnects with other complex products or solutions already ensconced within the organization or on the schedule to be added within the same time frame envisioned by the sales campaign.

Once the teleprospecting team has been selected, depending upon the size of prospect businesses, this information gathering activity can be ongoing. Be sure not to start validation efforts until the sales team approves public discussion of contacts, prospect plans, etc. This timing requirement is critically important. Keep in mind that the actual names of contacts, and apparent prospect plans, must be topics of discussion within the teleprospecting calls if they are going to produce any useful information. In reciprocal fashion, steps in the sales campaign should be timed correctly so that important meetings transpire after the information collected by the prospecting work has been discussed and plans modified as required to better align with emerging facts about the prospect.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

What a Pair! Elusive Decision Makers and Ambiguous Needs–Welcome to the World of Complex Sales

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Sure, it’s very hard to motivate a sales operation without buyers, and even harder when the reasons buyers cannot be found can be attributed to ambiguous needs and ambivalent interest in complex solutions. Nevertheless, sales must be made. Buyers, like birds hidden by shrubs, must be flushed out. Sales people have to shine a light on buyer needs and pique buyer interest. Ultimately, sales must build buyer commitment to purchase complex solutions. Happens every day. But how?

As I’ve written earlier in this blog, telephone prospecting, teleprospecting, provides a very useful foundation for complex sales. For example, prospecting over the telephone provides an excellent method of revealing buyers within enterprise businesses for complex sales. Prospecting over the telephone amounts to engaging with many contacts within a prospect enterprise business in telephone conversations to determine three critical pieces of information:

  1. The level of maturity of the prospect relative to other prospects with regard to the complex product or solution offered for sale
  2. The groups within the prospect business who will use the complex product or solution, who will propose the purchase and, finally, who will approve the purchase
  3. The perceived value of the complex product or solution for the enterprise prospect, and the probable timing of a decision to purchase

A teleprospecting campaign to determine the answers to these three points can take several months or even years to complete, depending upon the product and the size of typical prospects. Nevertheless, if vetted correctly, the quality of information collected from telephone discussions will be high and, therefore, the information will be indispensable to formulating a sales plan for the prospect.

The best approach for soliciting teleprospecting discussions with contacts can be found in an expressed interest in gathering information, much in the manner of a survey. Contacts are much more willing to share an opinion than to entertain a sales presentation. This greater willingness to talk can be used to engage contacts and collect the information required to qualify the enterprise business prospect’s likely interest in purchasing and successfully implementing the product.

Understanding the likelihood that a prospect can successfully implement a complex product or solution should be critically important to correctly determining whether or not a sales campaign makes sense for a prospect. After all, a favorable image of a brand within an enterprise market can only be built on satisfied customers who have successfully implemented a solution and derived the greatest possible value. Embarking on a sales campaign for a prospect that lacks the maturity to successfully implement a complex product or solution is only asking for trouble.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Best Practices: Outbound Teleprospecting for Complex Products for Enterprise Business

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As I have written earlier in this blog, a teleprospecting campaign can yield substantial results for sales of complex products targeted at enterprise business prospects. These substantial results can amount to high quality sales leads, depending on how successfully the campaign is managed. The key to quality, of course, is the level to which leads are correctly qualified for the specific product offering and the targeted market. But how to run such a campaign?

The best method of running a teleprospecting campaign as an outbound lead generator for complex products targeted to the enterprise business market is in some variation of a survey. Taking a survey is rarely perceived by participants as a sales effort. But if the survey questionnaire is crafted correctly, the information gathered can be very useful as the sales force “fills in the blanks” about the enterprise prospect. Don’t lose sight of the fact that the enterprise prospect is actually a complicated organization with a system for purchasing products and services that includes many individual participants and a set of required procedural milestones that must be properly completed or else there will be no sale.

For the subset of complex products targeted to enterprise business that will require a reorganization of processes across a customer’s business (should a decision to purchase be forthcoming), the need to compile information about important individuals, recent business history, etc is especially important in advance of a sale or even the overture of a sales effort. The fact is that the core purchase process may be broken and dysfunctional. Further, the participants may not play the perceived role and the agenda of priorities may be deceiving.

This latter characteristic of some complex products for enterprise business, that a reorganization of business processes will be required as the product is implemented by the customer, plays a powerful role within the sales effort. Janus-like this aspect of the product, as implemented, can be either a smile or a forlorn frown as the sales effort wends its way to success or failure. The way is especially volatile where the perceived value of the product within the marketplace is ambiguous. Truly intangibles, sometimes these products deliver substantial benefits and sometimes not. Examples of this type of product include solutions for Operational Risk Management, and Enterprise Risk Management. What is most vexing for the market is that such a product, within heavily regulated businesses like Financial Services (including Banks, Asset Managers, Brokers & Dealers, Insurers, etc), is required and mandated by regulators, but the “how to succeed” directions are no where to be found.

In the best of all worlds for the firm offering such a complex product (with unclear perceived value in the enterprise business market), formulating an outbound teleprospecting campaign within the shape of a survey is mandatory. The firms that can follow this script typically have lots of time and, generally, lots of capital to slowly and carefully sell into the market.

But what about other firms with less time and, typically, less capital to build a market? Is there a way to use teleprospecting to advantage in a less than perfect world? I will provide an answer in my next post.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved

Use Teleprospecting to Build Targeted Leads

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Direct Marketing and, specifically, “teleprospecting” adds substantial value to sales for complex products targeted at enterprise customers.

“Teleprospecting” is a new buzz word with a definition in flux. You can observe some of the ambiguity of the definition of this direct marketing technique in a debate on “Telemarketing vs. Teleprospecting vs. Inside Sales” (http://www NULL.focus NULL.com/questions/marketing/telemarketing-vs-teleprospecting-vs-inside-sales-are-they/).

I define teleprospecting as the use of direct telephone contact to individuals within targeted prospect companies to determine organizational structure, decision trees, stake holders, roles, projects, plans and other matters of interest. The collection of information that results from this teleprospecting activity is a very rich resource which a nimble business with a complex product or service can use to develop accurate understanding of the “critical perspective” (Jeff Thull, “Mastering the Complex Sale”, John Wiley & Sons. Second Edition, Page 124) of targeted prospects.

I, myself, have written earlier in this blog about the necessity of developing this precise understanding in a post on why the old adage that a sales person with an address book can be so true, as long as the sales person carries a useful reputation and a prior history of business with his or her contacts.

The fact is that qualifying prospects without recourse to a foundation of knowledge and understanding about the business, roles, etc., can produce unreliable information. Prospects may not open up during untrusted conversations; therefore, an outbound contact effort has to be built on useful business intelligence.

The objective of teleprospecting, as I understand it and as I make use of it is twofold:

  1. to promote conversations with stake holders by scheduling meetings between subject matter experts and prospects and
  2. to create a “map” of targeted prospect businesses complete with roles, decision trees, etc

The objective is not to sell anything. Further, efforts to transform teleprospecting contacts into customers will generally be fruitless. The nature of the conversation in teleprospecting as compared to the nature of a conversation in a selling technique like telemarketing is fundamentally different. The first is exploratory, expansive, intentionally non threatening and clearly a pure information gathering exercise, while the latter is focused, concentrated and clearly intended to accomplish an objective: a sale as well as providing the customer with a desired solution.

So how do we get from teleprospecting to sales? Via the meeting noted in objective number 1 above. These meetings (and it may take several meetings to collect the required information and then modulate from information-gathering to sales) provide the setting for transforming the discussion into a sales campaign.

Try it, I think you’ll like it.

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2011 All Rights Reserved