Many business-to-business organizations rely on cold-calling of potential customers to find new business leads. While B2B teleprospecting can be effective, you could be doing a lot more to find and convert qualified leads faster.
On the plus side, teleprospecting calls are a warm, personal way to engage someone in a real-time conversation, and they can produce big rewards, when all the stars align. First, the person making the call has to be knowledgeable and sharp; then, the prospect has to be available and interested in what you have to offer. If he or she has a problem you can help solve, they still need to have the authority and means to make a purchase.
Reach Beyond The Phone
In today’s B2B marketing relationships, the prospect/customer has much more control in the process. A report by SiriusDecisions indicates, “67 percent of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.” When making a B2B purchase, Google reports B2B buyers’ travel 57 percent of their journey without ever contracting sales.
Demand Generation Warms Up Leads
To supplement teleprospecting calls, many B2B marketers employ Demand Generation programs and methodologies like search engine optimization to capture the attention of potential online buyers and stimulate inquiries.
Whenever web users express interest in you site, they’re curious about what you offer. While their curiosity would technically give them designation as a lead, their degree of interest may not yet require a phone call. Using behavior/response-driven tactics, you can learn what attracts and motivates visitors at your site, and then engage them through offers of related useful information, such as issue focused related white papers, event invitations, links to other educational resources, etc. Then you can track other online activity to refine your target offers, and even distract visitors online to where you can capitalize on their needs with customized interactive messages.
Optimize Your Selling Process
The process of profiling and nurturing leads helps you qualify, prioritize and convert the most viable, sales-ready leads quickly, and dramatically shorten your company’s sales cycle.
A popular way to augment and improve the effectiveness of B2B teleprospecting is to partner with a professional third party to manage this type of multi-tiered program. For many companies, the telemarketing function attempts to balance prospecting and selling, which typically ends up weakening both. By trusting your demand generation and lead-qualifying activities to an experienced partner, your internal staff can apply their energies and product knowledge much more effectively in pursuit of the qualifies leads that are handed to them.
When a promising lead fits the profile you want, initiate your company’s formal process to go after that lead through the right channels, which will streamline your sales cycle and boost revenue sooner.
