Marketing/Sales/Telesales

[ComputerStoreLtd]

Hi All,

I run an IT Company that deals with primarily SME's, we have grown organically over the last 2 and a half years but would like to grow at a quicker rate, so we are in the next month or so going to undertake a telemarketing campaign.

What I would like to know is (A) where can I get data for telemarketing (B) peoples experience of this type of campaign.

I am a tech not a sales or marketing person, we are going to employ someone to hit the phones, once in front of the company I have a pretty good record of 'closing the deal'.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks all.
Tim.

[Stretchy]

Hitting the phones will be most successful if you do it as part of a properly thought out marketing strategy.

Make sure the person making the calls knows exactly what they are supposed to be doing.

You mention you know little about marketing, so the first thing you should do is spend some money on research to find out in which direction your marketing efforts should go.

[Adam Loveday]

100% agree with Stretchy's post. If you don't understand your target market(s) you could be missing opportunities by deploying a campaign to the wrong segment/vertical. Business data can be segmented in various ways (employee size, site status, industry clasification, turnover) and provide you with robust contact details including a telephone number (and to a more limited extent a personal email address). Its fairly straightforward to choose the business data accordingly once you have decided on your target markets, how you are defining an SME etc. If you want any tips on data buying drop me a pm and I can give you some direction.

From a previous life running a small telemarketing team the IT campaigns we undertook were usually successful. The quality of the lead generated was a combination of identifying and speaking with the right person (decision maker), understanding the product enough to have an initial conversation, qualification of any interest (fact find) and agreed next steps (2nd call, send info prior to call back, possibl mtg, cb in 1 month etc).

Rgds
Adam

[telemax]

Originally Posted by ComputerStoreLtd

Hi All,

I run an IT Company that deals with primarily SME's, we have grown organically over the last 2 and a half years but would like to grow at a quicker rate, so we are in the next month or so going to undertake a telemarketing campaign.

What I would like to know is (A) where can I get data for telemarketing (B) peoples experience of this type of campaign.

I am a tech not a sales or marketing person, we are going to employ someone to hit the phones, once in front of the company I have a pretty good record of 'closing the deal'.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks all.
Tim.

Tim,

Go out and knock on doors, local industrial estates etc. You'd be amazed how many qoutes you will get just from showing your face. Remember in the IT business customers are reasured by a friendly local face.

[varrul]

Some of the Telecom companies they are selling their customer phone number database to other businesses. You can contact any mobile phone or telephone network companies and try to purchase the telephone number database. You can also check and the local directory websites to get the collection of telephone or mobile numbers to start your telemarketing campaign.

[CallboxInc]

Before starting a telemarketing campaign, make sure you know who your target market is. Know your lead criteria and specification.

There are telemarketing firms that provide list, tell them the specific of the business you are after. There are telemarketing companies that have worked with IT companies just like yours. You can search online.

Hope this helps.

Natalie

[Mitchell]

You can get this data from a broker, like "CorpData", who will get you key stuffs like:

Number of employees
Number of Workstation users
DMC contact details
Vendor preference (Dell, Apple etc)
Num of servers
Num of desktops
OS
Office version

This'll give you something to chew on, and if you so wish, you can even split out data request by vertical market, like public sector, private sector, retail, automobile, manufacturing, etc etc etc - to get you similar companies to your target market or track history / success stories.

What I'm seeing is a lot of companies looking to move into the cloud, so instead of buying £50K on servers for this FY, they are moving into the cloud and are putting out RFQ's on professional services etc to meet their needs of 24/7/365 operations, all running via the cloud.

Lots of dumb terminals.

Funny isn't it? It all used to be mainframes back in the 70's/80's, now it's dumb terminals and cloud computing.

You could also try an outside telemarketing firm to get the data and ring it for you as a tester, to get your feet wet, and then guage the results and perhaps come back with some more options.

I think there are IT-specific telemarketing firms out there who know the industry well.

M

[varrul]

Although the first step is to get the good list of contacts, you should assist your business with the good telemarketing dialler powered by the good CRM software. This will help you to improve your telemarketing process better. Getting the assistance of BPM workflow software will also help you to identify your business bottlenecks to take the necessary steps to improve your business process.

[altwebdesign]

you can buy leads from around the web - or just get on google and do a search for directorys.

Your hardest step will be getting past the gate keeper - if you have some genuine benefit to offer those you are calling, it shouldn't be to much of a problem.

Make sure you have a script idea in your head, you can dial this in from experiences ringing around and tweaking as you go.

Telemarketing can be quite expensive and a rather slow burner so dont rely on this as your only method.

Craig

[captaincloser]

telemax has the answer above..knock on doors and introduce yourself...you should be amazed by teh results on local business estates.

Also if you are the guy who is the greatest at closing sales when appointments have been made for you ....you should be beginning to realise how important the appointment making is and actually where the real 'sale' is born before you go in and take the order.

Meeting makers are the lifeblood of any set up, but how many SME business owners ever cotton onto that ?