Telemarketing is the method of using the telephone to achieve or contribute to marketing and sales goals.
It includes:
- Selling products and services
- Creating awareness about seminars, training and new offers
- Generating leads and appointments for the sales team
- Conducting surveys and collecting feedback
- Raising funds.
And so on.
Many businesses regardless of size, have adopted telemarketing calls because technology has made it a viable option for teams of any size, ranging from two people to 2,000.
But should your business venture into it? Will the resources be worth the investment?
Telemarketing has advantages and disadvantages. Let’s examine them so that you can make a more logical decision.
Some Telemarketing Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages of Telemarketing
Here are three advantages of telemarketing:
1. Quick Results
Since telemarketers’ primary role is to make phone calls, they can complete connecting with a database far quicker than salespeople who have to make calls, set appointments, meet customers, and so on.
The automated dialing feature saves agents the time and effort of manually having to dial through a database, which helps them achieve results faster.
2. Easy Connection with Customers
Telemarketers can quickly answer questions that your prospects might have about the product or service. They can also set reminders for callbacks to prospects who asked to be called at a specific time.
Thus, your team can reach more potential customers over the phone than through door-to-door marketing, not just in quantity but also over a wider geography. In other words, your agents become more efficient and effective.
3. Better Control of Output
It can be quite a task to keep track of how salespeople pitch to prospects and how they use their time. You have to take their word for it because you cannot attend their prospect meetings and they may not follow the disciplined structure of updating the CRM software.
But you have tools that can help you track everything related to your telemarketing team’s performance right down to the last metric. You can listen to their calls (real-time and recorded), track each call’s duration and their conversion ratio, and train them to improve their performance accordingly.
Disadvantages of Telemarketing
Here are three disadvantages of telemarketing:
1. Reputation
Due to its intrusive nature, telemarketing has earned itself a bad reputation. To the extent that rules and laws have been designed to govern how telemarketers work. Consumer reactions might not be friendly, and a poor experience with telemarketers previously might create a bad impression in their minds.
It’s important to ensure that your agents do not call people on the Do-Not-Disturb list and are polite with all the prospects they speak to.
2. Scripted Verbiage
Since telemarketers have to run through a database quickly, they generally follow a predefined script while talking to prospects. The problem is that while using such a script, they often come across as robotic and cold, which puts others off.
Your telemarketers need to follow a script that sounds personalized and gets refined to engage with prospects better over time.
To know how you can create a personalized script for your telemarketing agents, you can click here.
3. Expensive Customer Lists
The increase in telemarketing has led to an increase in demand for contact details of people, which has made databases more expensive. Many times, these databases are outdated, which means that the return on investment for calls made is low.
To get maximum returns for telemarketing efforts, it’s important to identify who your target audience is and build a sales funnel to capture them. Also, keep your database of existing customers updated and collect referrals because they’re the most effective target audience to turn into customers.
Summing Up
Like everything else, telemarketing was made to be useful for human beings, especially businesses.
If you build a system around specific objectives, inform your agents about them, and apply the right metrics to track their performance, you can outdo the benchmark in your industry to achieve your business goals.
