Perhaps you have ever wondered "What is telemarketing?" Well, we are here to satisfy your curiosity. Telemarketing is a type of direct marketing that involves communicating with a target audience and selling a company's goods or services using the telephone.

Goals of telemarketing

But now that we’ve answered the question “What is telemarketing,” it’s time to move on to telemarketing goals. Telemarketing is used in different areas of B2B and B2C businesses. More importantly, it can be one of the marketing channels of an omnichannel strategy to move a potential customer down the sales funnel. Conventionally, telemarketing can be divided into two types:

• inbound;
• outbound.

The first involves receiving calls from customers, and the second – a call to users by specialists in order to sell goods and services of the company. Depending on the sphere of business, the specifics of work and the type of telemarketing set a single or a series of goals. 

Let’s get acquainted with them closer.

1. Simplification of the communication process. In dialogs, the pace of speech and intonation plays a big role. It is with the help of these tools that the manager disposes the customer. Telemarketing allows you to communicate with a potential customer in real-time and receive instant feedback.
2. Accelerate and increase sales. Telemarketing helps to identify customer needs faster, provide the right solution, and shorten the sales funnel.
3. Gather customer information. Telemarketing helps in getting additional data such as place of work, marital status, hobbies, and much more. This information can be used immediately to drive sales or added to a CRM system to build further communication.
4. Post-sales service. With telemarketing, companies determine customer satisfaction, increase loyalty, and collect feedback to generate testimonials to post on their website.
5. Finding new customers. Telemarketing helps to quickly research the market, attract customers, and retain them in the future.

As you can see, you can accomplish different goals with telemarketing. However, for successful work, you need to take into account the pros and cons of this tool. We will talk about them in the next section.

Advantages and disadvantages of telemarketing

Now, having identified the goals for which telesales help, it is necessary to evaluate the benefits of telemarketing and identify the disadvantages of telemarketing compared to other advertising methods.

Telemarketing provides direct contact with the customer, so it has a number of advantages for company promotion. Let’s take a closer look at the main pros of using phone calls to build communication with potential customers. To the benefit of telemarketing can be included:

• high level of customer engagement;
• instant feedback;
• rapid expansion of the customer base;
• sales stimulation;
• control of the sales process and tracking of results.

Now, familiarize yourself with the disadvantages of telemarketing that you should consider when building your communication strategy.

• Bounce rate. Today, phone calls have become so common that even a good and interesting offer can be automatically answered by callers with a rejection. To combat this, companies go to different tricks, modernizing scripts to retain the subscriber.
• Negative response. High levels of subscriber irritation are often associated with exposure to a number of negative factors. Poorly thought out communication strategies and annoying calls from companies, using users’ mobile numbers without their consent – all this only fuels negative emotions of customers.
• Lack of visual contact. In order to position the client and generate the necessary trust, it is not enough to have well-crafted scripts, well-considered intonation, and the right pace of speech. Most of the information we convey with the help of non-verbal communication. Therefore, sometimes it is not enough to finally convince a potential customer.
• Limited ability to transmit information. If you compare a conversation on the phone with an online chat on the site, the latter tool allows you to quickly transfer visual materials, documents for review, links to the characteristics of the product, and much more. With telemarketing, this is impossible to do. Therefore, it is always important to use several communication channels in your marketing strategy.

In addition to these disadvantages, there is another negative factor – poor competence and low motivation of the manager or operator. Sometimes companies save on staff training and script development. Unfortunately, more and more often on the phone, you can hear template dialogs that cause only irritation. Therefore, it is always important to pay special attention to the quality of scripts. It should also be taken into account that managers are subject to high emotional stress, and their fervor quickly runs out. To keep employees motivated, you should organize various events and think about reward systems.

Principles of telemarketing

The foundation of successful telemarketing is a carefully developed strategy and a prepared plan of action. Despite its apparent simplicity, communicating with customers over the phone requires special skills and knowledge. Below we have prepared the basic principles of telemarketing, which you should take as a basis in your work.

• Quality sales script. It is important that the dialog script is lively. The client should not feel as if he is being read from a sheet of paper. The script can be developed independently or turn to specialists. The main thing is that it should be developed specifically for the needs of your company, taking into account the specifics and nuances of work.
• Refusal of templates and unobtrusiveness. Remember all the phone calls you received from different companies. What phrases did you hear most often? What was most annoying in the behavior of the operator? Agree, formulaic phrases and intrusiveness do not cause any positive emotions. Therefore, it is necessary to speak in a lively language, and most importantly, to respect the time and opinion of the client.
• Confidence and competence of the staff. A good and effective manager is an employee who knows his business. He is able to gain trust, knows the answers to all questions regarding the goods and services of the company, is able to find a way out of unforeseen situations. Of course, professionalism is always based on experience and knowledge, so you can’t do without continuous improvement.
• Knowledge of sales techniques. Confident speech and a steady voice do not guarantee success. Sometimes the dialog with the client can go beyond the script, and the manager must be ready for such situations. To achieve the set goals, it is important that he knows different sales techniques and is able to apply them in time.
• Use of CRM-system. It allows you to structure the collected information, create customer bases, and segment them based on the level in the sales funnel. In the service, you can set reminders, track the efficiency of operators, and analyze the effectiveness of marketing efforts. 

With the right approach, telemarketing can be an effective tool for solving marketing problems. Use the principles in this article, track performance and improve regularly to achieve your goals.