Thinking of Running a Telemarketing Campaign?

For B2B businesses, purchase decisions rarely happen without human interaction and multiple conversations between the buyer and the seller.

So, to drive new business sales, B2B salespeople need to talk to as many prospects as they can. But are they generating enough of these conversations? That’s often where the real challenge lies.

Since its inception in the mid-20th century, B2B telemarketing has continued to remain a popular route to market for many businesses, thanks to its range of unique benefits.

A well-executed B2B telemarketing campaign can be a cost-effective way to fuel your sales pipeline, nurture relationships with prospects that have a requirement for your solution but aren’t immediately ready to buy, and to generate sales qualified leads for your sales team.

Need proof? Take a look at the real-world results these businesses have had from running a telemarketing campaign:

• Harrow College converted 80% of leads into new customers
• AH Support Services grew their sales pipeline by £500k
• Climate Wise generated £20,000 per month in pipeline
• Kärcher closed £100k worth of orders in just 12 weeks
• Premier Print generated £450k in pipeline in 4 months
• Essex County Council increased their apprenticeship take-up by 80%
• Infraspeak produced £1.2 million in pipeline

When thinking of running a telemarketing campaign, there are lots of considerations about how to maximise your ROI and generate high quality leads that your sales team can progress.

In this article, Beanstalk Marketing will be discussing the key considerations before running a B2B telemarketing campaign, how to understand your target market and source high-quality data and whether it’s best for you to try to recruit, train and manage your own telemarketer or outsource your telemarketing campaign.

Key Considerations for B2B Telemarketing Success

Before you begin your B2B telemarketing campaign, there are some key considerations to take into account.

Understanding Your Target Market

Your target audience refers to the specific group of people most likely to want your product or service, and therefore, the group of people who you should target your sales and marketing activity at.

For example, HR decision makers of companies within a 100-mile radius of your business, operating within professional and financial services sectors.

According to Marketing Evolution, $37 billion is wasted in ad spend every year from marketing that fails to engage its target audience.

The good news is that most B2B businesses have a target market that is simple to define, although not necessarily easy to reach.

Tip: Create Buyer Personas

To help you maximise the effectiveness of your B2B telemarketing campaign, consider creating buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of the different prospects within your target market.

Take the example of HR decision makers; within a business of 100+ employees, it’ll almost certainly be the HR Director, or Head of HR.

However, if you’re targeting businesses with fewer than 30 employees, the HR decision maker could be the Office Manager or the Managing Director.

A buyer persona delves deeper than demographics, as it explores the needs, pain points, and behaviours of your target audience, enabling you to tailor your value proposition and telemarketing pitch accordingly.

By understanding that what motivates an HR Director to purchase your solution may be different to the purchase drivers for an MD, you can start to develop different messaging for each persona.

Adobe has put together a detailed step-by-step guide on how to create this, which you can read here.

Once you have truly understood your audience, you then will find it much easier to tailor your value proposition into a telemarketing pitch that will drive action.

Sourcing High-Quality Data: The Backbone of B2B Telemarketing

The foundation of any successful B2B telemarketing campaign is data.

While you may have an existing database, think about when it was last updated. You might underestimate the importance of this step, but HubSpot reports that business databases decline in accuracy by 22.5% each year.

Investing in high-quality, up-to-date contact lists or partnering with a professional lead generation agency can be immensely helpful.

Telemarketing agencies will know where to source the best possible data for your lead generation campaign. It might be through data brokers such as Market Location or MarketScan, or LinkedIn.

Sometimes, however, you simply can’t buy a list of companies that are known to use your product, or a list of pre-qualified decision makers within these businesses.

That’s one area where telemarketing comes into its own, as it has the unique ability to clean, qualify and build your prospect database.

The benefits of building this database through telemarketing feed through to your other marketing activities, such as email marketing, or direct mail campaigns, where you know your message is being delivered to the right person in the right business.

Telemarketing Expertise

Telemarketing is a specialist skill. It’s not as easy as picking up the phone and calling your top 100 ideal customers, immediately reaching them and booking in a discovery call.

Navigating past gatekeepers, managing call backs with decision makers who aren’t ready to commit to a discovery call, and focusing on lead generation, not selling the solution on the first conversation, requires technique.

It also takes dedication to consistently make calls, day in, day out.

Should You Outsource Your Telemarketing Campaign to an Agency?

Telemarketing continues to be one of the most effective channels of lead generation for B2B businesses that want to feed their sales team with pre-qualified leads.

If you’re thinking of running a telemarketing campaign, you have two options.

1. Outsource to a specialist telemarketing agency, and let them develop a bespoke campaign for you.
2. Recruit, train and manage your own telemarketer, and manage the campaign yourself.

Building an In-House Telemarketing Team

At first glance, keeping telemarketing in-house may seem like the cheaper, more straightforward route. But once you scratch beneath the surface, things start to look a little different.

How Big Is Your Target Market?

Many B2B businesses have a limited target market. If there are 500 companies that you’d like to call, to try to generate a lead with, does this feel like it’s worth the investment of time and money required to hire someone?

If you interview an experienced telemarketer, they’re going to know that this feels like “a campaign” for 3-6 months, not a long-term career move.

Finding Good Telemarketers is Tough

Good telemarketers don’t grow on trees. And often, even the best candidates aren’t plug and play; they still need developing.

You’ll need to provide a competitive salary (in the region of £30,000 pa) and a realistic incentive scheme.

Most B2B businesses have long sales cycles, spanning months, if not years.

So, whilst offering an OTE of £50,000 might feel like it’s generous, if it’s 6+ months before they’ll earn any commission, there’s a risk your offer will feel like “jam tomorrow”.

Working Environment

Telemarketers perform best when they’re surrounded by people doing the same job.

If they’re the only person in the office making cold calls, how are you going to motivate them?

At Beanstalk, for example, we put a tremendous amount of effort into making the workplace a stimulating place for our telemarketers to work, which is why we’re a Great Place to Work Certificated business.

Technology and Systems

Effective telemarketing requires a good CRM that provides comprehensive call notes and manages the scheduling of call-backs.

Call recording, categorising how calls are dispositioned, reporting on KPIs, such as number of dials, ratio of calls where the telemarketer reaches the decision maker, analysing data captured, are features that need to be included.

Often, the most successful telemarketing campaigns are integrated with email marketing, so ideally your CRM can track prospects that have engaged with your website and other marketing activity, with the telemarketer prioritising calling those prospects that are most engaged.

Do You Really Want to Manage Telemarketing Yourself?

Managing telemarketers isn’t like managing an IT or Finance team. Telemarketers have strong personalities; they need motivating, as telemarketing can be a tough job. They also constantly have questions about how best to respond to a specific question or objection they’ve had.

To get the best out of your telemarketers, you need someone who can manage them with confidence while maintaining a positive, performance-driven culture.

Why A Telemarketing Agency is a Good Option to Run Your Campaign

While every business needs to decide based on its own unique circumstances, usually, outsourcing to a specialist telemarketing agency offers a good solution.

Access to Lead Generation Expertise

Telemarketing agencies understand B2B sales cycles, complex buying processes, and how to get through to time-poor decision makers. They know how to source high-quality data to match your ideal customer profile and how to condense your sales proposition into a message that can be delivered over the phone.

They live and breathe lead generation, and it shows in the ROI they generate for their clients. Beanstalk, for example, retains 80-85% of the customers who run a pilot campaign with them.

They Can Hit The Ground Running

Agencies offer experienced telemarketers who have worked across different sectors. They can help you avoid rookie mistakes, and apply the knowledge they’ve built to your campaign from many years and 100,000s of cold calls.

The benefit of this experience is that they’ll generate more leads, or a greater quality, quicker than if you have to start from scratch, if you decide to try hiring your own telemarketer. 

Tried-and-Tested Process and Technology

Specialist agencies already have the systems and processes in place – everything from categorising call outcomes and prioritising follow-ups, to email integrations and performance tracking.

These tools aren’t just for show – they help ensure the telemarketers stay productive and no opportunity slips through the cracks. You’ll also get detailed reports to track progress and results.

And how many times should you call a decision maker before deciding it’s time it’s not worth calling them again (for several months, at least)?

Should you email the prospect in advance of calling them? And what would you say if the gatekeeper says they’re working from home?

Telemarketing agencies know the answer, because they’ve run 1,000s of campaigns, so they know what works and what doesn’t.

Campaigns Without a Long-Term Commitment

A lot of businesses use outsourced telemarketing for short-term campaigns – perhaps 3 to 6 months to test the waters. If the campaign delivers the ROI you want, you can extend, or even decide to build your own telemarketing team.

With a telemarketing agency, it’s easy to adjust your campaign without going through the hassle of hiring or redundancies.

Many agencies even offer part-time telemarketers, where a named individual might split their week between two clients – ideal if your audience is limited, which as a B2B business, is probably the case.

Focus On Results

Telemarketing agencies keep their clients by delivering results. Whilst often the leads they generate for their customers may take months (or years) for their customers to close, the agency is measured from the first month, and then every month.

If they don’t generate leads, they don’t get retained.

This results-focused culture permeates throughout the entire agency. They invest in training and development and constantly motivate their telemarketers. And if they do hire a telemarketer who doesn’t quite make the grade, they have to take a commercial decision about letting them go, because if they don’t, they won’t retain their clients.

Need to Generate Leads for your business?

B2B businesses almost always need to generate more leads if they want to win new customers.

If you’re thinking about running a telemarketing campaign, in summary:

✔ Telemarketing is an effective way of generating sales leads
✔ Specialist telemarketing agencies have the experience, the people and the technology that will ensure your campaign delivers the maximum ROI

If you’re looking to kickstart your sales, send us a message, we’d love to hear from you!