1. Enable Telemarketers & Sales People To Cultivate Using Email And Telephone

With a sophisticated automated eMail marketing system (like ePartner), highly-personalised HTML eMails can be produced very quickly, using eMail image templates and pre-packaged content templates. Your agency’s telemarketers will be able to use this system as a tool to assist their Telemarketing efforts.

• Pre-qualify with a free download offer
  prospects will often pre-qualify themselves when they download a valuable white paper or other information, even if they do not fill in a form.

• Prioritisation
  by tracking the delivery of eMails, as well as opens, responses, and profile submissions, you can gauge the prospect’s interest. If they then decline to be interviewed by phone, you will still have enough information to send them personalised eMails.

• Initial cold calls
  One very effective method is to have your outsourced Telemarketing agency conduct the initial cold calls and send them as "branded" eMails. As soon as your prospect responds, your inside sales team can be notified, and based on a glance at the lead’s "score", contact history and notes, they will be able to decide whether or not to call the prospect.

• Build your opt-in list
  an added benefit is that you can quickly build up your opt-in eMail marketing database, when the profile form includes an option to opt-in to future communications. The "score" will determine whether you nurture via eMail or phone calls.

• Avoid sending attachments
  HTML eMails will promote your brand in a far more professional way. It is so much better to provide the extra information via a link to web-landing page, rather than an attachment. Your prospects will also be very cautious about opening potentially-infected attachments.

• Cost-per-response
  your Telemarketing people (whether they are internal or outsourced), are paid to spend their time on the phone- not designing and copywriting eMails – so the system must be very simple and quick-to-use.

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2. Get Real-Time Telemarketing Information

With an integrated campaign of eMails, direct mail etc, each prospect will be receiving many different types of communication within a short period. It is essential for the Telemarketing people to know whether the prospect has already responded, and to which particular communication.

• More responsive
  when your telemarketers have this information in real-time, they can be much "quicker off the mark", and don’t have to worry about calling someone who has already responded – they will know already!
• More intelligent conversations
  they can mention particular eMails and direct mail, and even the particular version that they received, making the conversation very much more professional and useful to the prospect.

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3. Get Real-Time Salesforce Information

It’s essential that your sales team also have access to this same information they need to be able to see a complete contact history as well as any notes that outbound callers may have made.

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4. Follow-Through And Score The Leads

Telemarketing agencies normally supply a database of leads, both as a supplied file and as a web-based system to view online. Each lead is normally graded or "scored".

Sometimes, your sales people may feel that the "score" is not in line with the initial assessment criteria that has been set. A dialogue between the telemarketer and the sales person normally occurs, but with many systems, the lead does not get updated. This affects the data and the subsequent measurement of the data.

• The ability to change the attributes
  it’s absolutely essential that the system allows the sales person following up the lead to change profile attributes or "qualification criteria".

• Train your telemarketers
  B2B callers need to be adequately trained and have a level of professionalism to ensure that the qualification criteria are correctly assessed.

• Improved collaboration
  enabling direct communication between your sales force and the outsourced telemarketers improves collaboration even further.

• Influence your agency’s  incentives
• Be careful of your agency’s individual productivity incentives that may affect the accuracy of lead scoring – especially when your agency is not operating on a real-time platform that you can access at any time.

• Reward for accuracy
  a better approach is to get your agency to reward their telemarketers for quality issues like accuracy of input, call performance, objection handling and low rates of lead "score" adjustments.

• Group incentives
  consider a telesales partner that awards group incentives, based on client satisfaction and renewed business.

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6. Focus On Performance Indicators

Telemarketing agencies often provide "telephony reports" i.e. reports on the efficiency of the outbound telephone activities – the number of attempts, number of successful calls per hour etc.

This is all very interesting, but at the end of the day, you’re paying for qualified sales leads – and what you really want to know is "how many eMails has the agency sent out?" – this will determine the quality of the leads.

• Measure effective conversations
  assuming eMails are only sent out after live conversations, you can gauge how many conversations occurred based on the numbers of eMails sent. A breakdown of eMails sent, opened and responded provides you with much more insight into the agency’s overall effectiveness.

• Measure profile submissions
  the reporting should also indicate which prospects actually submitted a profile in response to receiving an eMail from the cold caller.

• Other measurements
  real-time lead reporting should identify elements such as the performance of lists, the distribution of leads by territory, as well as the breakdown of prospect attributes so that you can refine future efforts.

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7. Outsource The Follow-Up Of 'Low-Score' Leads

The use of a shared real-time lead-generation system enables you to easily outsource the validation of "low-score" leads to the external telemarketing agency.

Sometimes a genuine “hot prospect” gets a low score because he fills the information in too quickly – with missing information.

Your sales people are too valuable to follow these leads up, so it makes sense for your telemarketing agency to do this work. With a less-focused campaign, you will expect to generate a high percentage of low-scoring leads, so send the responses to a specific landing page, for your external agency to access all of them straight away.

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8. Choose An "Outbound" Agency

There is a significant difference in the skills of inbound and outbound telemarketers. The outbound callers attempting to secure appointments or stimulate interest have a very different mentality and approach from inbound callers who simply answer questions and take orders.

If your campaign is strictly lead generation, make sure that your agency specialises in outbound lead generation only.

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9. Find A Specialist Agency

Agencies with 30+ Telemarketing people are better-equipped to handle large, "shotgun" campaigns. When your database is highly-targeted and realistically-sized, chasing through the contacts as quickly as possible is not the objective.

Getting in contact with decision-makers and getting them interested is what matters. For highly-targeted campaigns, working with smaller agencies will be a better solution.

Also, smaller agencies tend to specialise within particular industries, and with fewer clients, they can be more responsive and offer a customised solution.

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10. Use Talking-Points, Not Scripts

Many large agencies use scripting software, and train their telemarketers to follow a script. This does not work with B2B marketing, particularly in high-tech markets like ICT.

A better approach is the use of talking points. Well-trained Telemarketing people think on their feet and use talking points to overcome objections and qualify the lead. Listen to some of the agency’s people at work, focus on how well they think on their feet rather than how well they can read a script.