Although telephone prospecting is facing new challenges in an increasingly digital world, it still plays an important role and outsourcing it to an experienced call centre can be an effective strategy to boost your sales team’s appointment-making.
Telephone prospecting: a tool for differentiation
Digital prospecting offers a number of advantages, including automation, wider reach and potentially lower costs. However, it will never offer the same flexibility and potential for personalisation as telephone prospecting.
Through telephone prospecting, you can stand out from your competitors by:
- Adopting a personalised approach: with telephone prospecting, you can establish direct, personalised contact with your prospective customers. You can adapt your approach to the specific needs of each prospective customer, ask relevant questions and offer tailor-made solutions.
89% of customer relationship managers say that personalisation is a key factor in competitive differentiation.
- Creating a sense of trust: telephone prospecting allows you to establish a closer relationship with prospective customers. Frequent interaction, provided that these calls are timely and respectful, will help to create an understanding of prospective customers’ specific needs, build trust in your brand and develop long-lasting relationships.
- Eliciting an instant response: telephone prospecting provides an instant response about prospective customers’ interest. This can be particularly useful for products or services which require a quick decision or for prospective customers who prefer direct communication rather than waiting for a response by email or chat.
- Generating qualified leads: telephone prospecting is an effective way of qualifying and updating a database or CRM; it can also be used to identify the most interested prospective customers and schedule an appointment. What’s more, these telephone conversations can provide key information for your sales departments, including consumer needs, interests, etc.
Outsourcing appointment booking
Organising and managing a team of sales representatives or telemarketers is a time-consuming task that requires hands-on management and a wide range of tools including telecommunications, a CRM, scripts and reporting. That’s why many companies of all sizes choose to outsource sales appointment campaigns to a call centre.
A call centre can help you to optimise your sales processes and improve your conversion rate:
- Save time and resources: by outsourcing your sales appointment campaigns, you can free up your sales teams to concentrate on tasks with more added value. In this way, you can optimise the use of your resources and spend more time on sales and signing contracts; You won’t need to manage recruitment or deal with any absences;
- Greater flexibility and scalability: call centres are designed to be flexible and scalable to meet your needs. As such, you can adjust the number of appointments you wish to make and benefit from higher call-handling capacity in response to your growth or seasonal changes.
- Expertise in communication and sales: Sales Advisors who work in call centres are trained and specialise in sales appointment campaigns. They’re trained to communicate effectively with prospective customers, identify sales opportunities and convince prospective customers. Their expertise in communication and sales can increase your chances of successfully generating qualified appointments.
- Compliance with rules and regulations: When organising a telephone prospecting campaign, you must be aware of all the regulations governing telephone prospecting, such as the GDPR, the DNCM (Do Not Call Me) and so on. Call centres have expert knowledge of these regulations and can help you to develop a compliant and targeted telephone prospecting policy;
- Personalised monitoring and reporting: Your call centre partner will provide detailed reports on calls made, appointments made, results obtained, etc. This data enables you to monitor performance, analyse trends and adapt your appointment-making strategy.
- Access to IT tools and developers: Call centres have access to a wide range of technological tools which are required to manage sales appointments effectively: VOIP telephony, call recording and analysis, automatic call dialling, etc. They can also create links between your CRM and their tools to simplify data exchange.
Whether or not you choose to outsource, telephone prospecting is and will always be a way to differentiate your prospecting efforts. However, it must be carried out in a respectful and targeted way, complying with applicable regulations. You also need to train your teams, set clear objectives and provide the necessary resources.
