Business-to business telemarketing is tough, there's no doubt about it.
The thing you realise very early in that job is, even if you are the best B2B telemarketer IN THE ENTIRE WORLD, you will still spend most of your working life being told "no thanks".
You will be calling all day every day, trying to speak to people who don't particularly want to speak to you. Even if your target individual takes the call, the response will probably be chilly. Some prospects even take truculent pride in being unpleasant to B2B telemarketers. (There is actually a technical term for such an individual. It is "dickhead".)
Goldcat was in charge of sub-contract telemarketing teams for a number of years, and during that time we were frequently asked by potential clients how our staff on the front line motivated themselves. The basis of the question being "we don't fancy picking up the phone ourselves, why would anyone else want to?"
Here's what we said about our telemarketing operations.
There are five stages to a typical B2B telemarketing call. They are as follows:
Dial
Gatekeeper
Decision-Maker Contact
Sales Conversation
Yes/No
In more detail:
Stage 1: call the prospect company.
Stage 2: try to charm your way past the receptionist/PA . (This stage alone warrants a full blog post. So many telemarketers get it completely wrong.)
Stage 3: having been put through to the person you were looking for, say hello and hit them with your killer intro.
Stage 4: if your decision-maker hasn't by now pretended to be in a meeting in order to get rid of you, deliver your sales pitch.
Stage 5: close for the go-ahead on next steps and cross your fingers.
Most telemarketing operations really only concentrate on Stage 5. ("Did you get the deal or didn't you?")
Instead, we asked our telemarketing team, "What do you do when you get to a successful outcome at Stage 5? If you arrange a demo, schedule a meeting or make a sale off the back of a cold call?"
They said, "We stand up, we pump our fist and we say "YESSSS!"
The problem is, telemarketers reach Stage 5 so infrequently and even if they do, will only secure the business a fraction of the time. No wonder it can be demotivating.
We realised that the key to ongoing telemarketing motivation is to concentrate on Stage 3 of the call, Decision-Maker Contact. Why? Because it's the most crucial step.
The only way to achieve the objective of your B2B telemarketing call, whether it be selling something, arranging a meeting, completing a survey, or even just imparting information, is to speak with the decision-maker. That's Stage 3.
On that basis, we changed our entire telemarketing operation - its focus, objectives, KPIs, bonuses - to revolve around what we called "Effective Calls." These are telephone calls in which the decision-maker has been physically engaged, whether a successful outcome has been achieved or not.
We made Stage 3 the celebratory moment in telemarketing. That became the "YESSSS!"
In this way, each member of our telemarketing team was able to say "YESSSS!" 15 to 20 times a day, rather than half a dozen times a week. That was a wholesale change in emphasis, one that none of the staff had experienced before but one which made them far happier in their jobs. In every case, their numbers improved as a result.
The moment you are speaking to the decision-maker, the chances of succeeding in your telemarketing objectives take a leap into the stratosphere. Stage 3 is everything.
Simply ensure that Stage 3 - Decision-Maker Contact - becomes your telemarketing team's daily "YESSSS!" and everything else will follow.
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