Perhaps you have conducted the mid-year review of your Sales Pipeline, and it could do with a little boost to ensure you reach or over achieve your targets. Now you are thinking about what you can do to help your sales team achieve and exceed your corporate sales targets for 2015. But where do you start?
For those of you who have previously conducted B2B sales lead generation campaigns, you know that they can not only provide your sales team with a good stream of quality sales opportunities, but can also bulk up your sales pipeline with some more future potential opportunities too.
For those who have never outsourced, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why a company might engage with a B2B telemarketing company to conduct a lead generation campaign.
Lack of time: Your sales team is there to close sales and win new business. This is what they are hired to do. They should be spending their time meeting and engaging with the right contacts, in the right market place, at the right time.
Lack of skill sets: Some of the best sales teams in the world may admit that they do not like calling. Their skills come into play when they are in front of their prospect, in control of the conversation and knowing that the prospect has displayed interest already.
There are a number of areas you will need to consider and decide on prior to meeting with and assessing different B2B telemarketing agencies.- Budget. If you have decided to engage with an outsourced provider and it is mid-way through the year, it may be a case that a budget may not have been assigned to this new telemarketing campaign. Perhaps a review of how budgets have been allocated to different activities will help identify where funding for this new campaign can come from.
- Timeframe Generally speaking, the objective of conducting a lead telemarketing campaign is to build a pipeline of opportunities that will close in the same year and/or to build a pipeline of opportunities for the next year. This of course is dependent on the typical sales cycle of your offering. This objective will dictate the implementation date, the duration and also the objections or criteria you will have for the campaign.
- Complexity. The complexity of your solutions or products will have a few impacts on the campaign. Firstly, is it possible that you have one offering in particular that your agency can focus on? Rather than offering your full suite of services, which can delay the decision to purchase/engage, try have one to zone in on firstly. Once your sales team are at the meeting they may discover the requirements for others. Secondly, the complexity of the solution will also impact the start date of the campaign. Training on your solution will be required and it may be a case that the agents will need to spend longer on each call discussing it with your audience.
- Measures of Costs & Success. You will need to define what metrics you will consider in order to measure the cost effectiveness of the campaign. Will you consider ROI as the main gauge? or cost per lead/campaign/opportunity? Additionally, how will you measure success? Is it the number of sales, amount of sales revenue or ROI?
In addition to the above, before going to market for an outsourced B2B telemarketing company, you need to bear in mind that each agency can differ. On initial review of different providers, it may seem that they offer the exact same services. However, you will need to look into the detail of their offerings and see what is most suitable to your company. Take the time to assess specialities and track records. To help you out with your review process, we have provided you with an eBook and comparison worksheet, click on the link below…
If it is a case that outsourcing your telemarketing efforts is new to you and you’re still not quite sure where to start, feel free to give Maven TM a call. We specialise in B2B Telemarketing, particularly for companies the Technology Industry. We have conducted 100’s of campaigns into 23 countries with the capabilities to serve 12 languages.
