Using Telemarketing To Increase Revenue

Many companies are using telemarketing to increase revenue and
reduce cost. Effective and efficient telemarketing saves time, money
and effort for both the companies and their customers.

There are a few ways to contact and sell to customers:

1. Get them to visit your office or retail store

2. Sell your products over the Internet

3. Send catalogs or brochures using email, fax or mail

4. Visit the prospect

5. Call the prospect on the telephone

The telephone is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to
reach prospects and potential customers. You can call hundreds of
prospects a day at a minimal cost in the comfort of your office or even
your home.

While the time and cost of sending unsolicited catalogs can be
tremendous, the cost of meeting the customer in person is yet higher.

Not only do you save your time using the telephone, but your cost of
sale also drops dramatically. Telemarketing also saves time for the
customer. It is a lot easier for a busy person to allocate a few
minutes for a telephone call as compared to meeting in person.

Thus, if you are selling any type of product that can be sold over
the telephone as your primary tool, telemarketing makes a lot of sense.

Then, what about those that need face-to-face meetings for products
that need to be demonstrated or experienced firsthand? In such cases,
the telephone plays a valuable role in pre-qualifying prospects and
scheduling the sales meetings with the prospect.

Telemarketing allows you to enhance sales and should become one component of your overall marketing and sales efforts.

Cold calling is one strategy for telemarketing. This means you take
a list of names about whom you currently know very little, and you
start calling them, one at a time, and give them your sales pitch over
the telephone.

Experienced marketers will do “warm calling”. Before
they call the prospects, they make every effort to pre-qualify the
people or companies that they plan to call. Thus, when the telemarketer
calls the prospect and gets the decision-maker on the line, the
prospect is already “warm”.

Now, it is the telemarketer’s job to communicate the relevant
information to the prospect and be able to persuade that the product or
service fulfills some requirement of the prospect.

Used skillfully, the telephone is a quick way to sound out a
prospective customer. There are three criteria to qualify a prospect.
They are money, authority to order from you and a need for your
company’s product or service.

Once qualified, the extent to which the salespeople can act depends
on the nature of the product. There are products that can be closed
over the phone with money being collected typically via credit card.
Only the fulfillment is handled by the company’s back office. An
example would be motor insurance or home content insurance policies.

Not all products can be closed during the single phone call. If you
are applying for a credit card for the first time with a company, the
prospect information may be recorded and approval given in principal,
but the sale is not finalized yet. There typically are back office
checks done before providing the card.

Then again, there are those products for which you can only qualify
interest over the phone, and then make appointments for your field
salespeople to have face-to-face meetings.

No matter which of the above groups that your company’s
products may belong to, use of the telephone does save time, money and
effort, as at worst it still pre-qualifies customers before the more
costly field salespeople go out and meet them.

Telemarketing can be a daunting task if you expect people to respond
positively most of the time. Most people, in fact, are wary of
receiving calls from telemarketers. To make life less stressful, the
telemarketer should first accept this as well as the fact that everyone
you call will not buy.

The next important thing to do is to plan and prepare. Like any
other sales approach, there must be an objective. The telemarketer must
plan the call and be in control. A prerequisite is a thorough
understanding of the product you are selling.

The telemarketer must remember that he or she has a product or service that could potentially benefit the person being called.

If you find that you are saying the right things and yet you cannot
get the benefits across, you will need to review your sales pitch or
take a different approach. Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes
and try and analyze where you need to improve or change.

It is also important to track the number of sales that are made
versus the number of people called. Knowing which time of the day you
get the best results, which day of the week, which part of the month
could also make a difference. By doing this kind of analysis, you can
fine-tune your approach.

Using telemarketing will allow you to reach more prospects faster, increase your sales and hence generate higher revenue.

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Distributed by Hasan Shrek, independence blogger. Also run online business , matrix, internet marketing solution , online store script .
Beside he is writing some others blogs for notebook computer , computer training , computer software and personal computer

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