If you knew something would offer your business absolutely no benefit and annoy people you wanted to buy your products, would you do it? Let’s see why Telemarketing campaigns seem to polarise everyone and contrary to what some people think, Telemarketing campaigns can provide great value.
Cold Calling is Dead
I came across a social media post by a local company lamenting Telemarketing campaigns and saying cold calling was dead. I hear that again and again, yet telemarketing persists. Let’s take a look at the story in the own words of the person that posted it, then unpack it.
Quoted here is their post on LinkedIn:
“Last week we made a mistake and experimented with cold calling. We hired a cold calling specialist to target a pre-selected group of marketing agencies…we’d love to have as clients.
The first report I got from the team making the calls showed Cold Calling was annoying people – and was not generating any valuable data or leads. It confirmed my belief that it is a crappy sales generation tool. So [we] took the decision to call the campaign off early.
On reflection, we also noticed how hypocritical it was for us, a brand that continually publishes about our hatred of the phone, to then authorise a cold call campaign. So to the people,[sic] we annoyed – sorry!”
So it seems like this company only tried cold calling for less than a week, expecting instant results. But to be fair, most companies expect instant results from all marketing. Cold calling, however, is not Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
I’m not sure how an experiment could be seen as a mistake, because there will be a lot of things you can apply to future campaigns. In fact, let’s look at three opportunities a great marketing strategy could make use of to provide great value from a telemarketing campaign.
Telemarketing Builds Data
First, there is now some data about cold calling from which the company can draw insight and create more content like the post and video they put on LinkedIn. If you have the data, a blog post with response rates and a breakdown of what type of responses you received, what time of day you’re most likely to get a favourable response or ‘annoy’ people.
Here’s an example of how to collect data and present cold calling data in a valuable blog post that people want to read and share.
Marketers love data. The sample size in this case is probably too small to draw real conclusions for telemarketing specifically, but this can be mentioned and the findings used to inform your future telemarketing campaigns.
Alternatively, you could compare your telemarketing campaign results with other marketing campaigns of a similar size, which would be something conclusions could be drawn on. By not allowing a campaign to finish, you’re robbing yourself of important insights.
You might also consider using the lessons learned from this campaign and trying again in another location, perhaps combining it with my second and third suggestions to run an integrated marketing campaign.
Integrated Marketing Campaigns Using Telemarketing
The second thing is that you are now in a better position to launch effective integrated marketing campaigns. It seems your telephone campaign was well targeted, but did you try making contact online or in person before calling, or was calling the first step in the journey?
Let’s make an assumption about this telemarketing campaign. I you were to run this campaign, you could use LinkedIn and other sources to find out a bit more about the companies you plan to target.
Find out who the decision makers are, what type of person they might be or even if the target company would or would not be a good fit and why. This extra knowledge would allow you to start your campaign by post, then follow up on the telephone with the people you didn’t get a response from or close the deal with the people who did respond. Maybe both?
If your post campaign was memorable, your target audience would be more likely to take your call. They’ll also be more receptive to your message.
Improve Your Marketing Message
Thirdly, you’d also get an idea of why prospects were or were not interested in what you had to offer. This knowledge would benefit the pitch in future calls and the way you market your services through other channels.
Of course, the value you get back is highly dependant on the approach taken, because if the calls were giving the hard sell, you probably wouldn’t get much useful information. More open-ended questions are needed, allowing prospects to paint a picture of their needs and how they could be met.
The outcome may not be instant leads, but at the very least you’ll learn something useful and be able to create content to share on social media and inspire conversations.
In the end, the business owner who made the post disabled the comments. With over 3,000 views on the post but only 18 likes, I suspect the poster didn’t get exactly the reaction they were hoping for.
If you knew something would definitely annoy your prospects, would you do it?