Many people get confused between telemarketing and telesales. They assume both to be the same.
So what is the difference between telemarketing and telesales?
Both activities comprise of different activities and cater to different needs for businesses. Telesales was the original activity that started for businesses to reach a larger potential customer base and sell a product or service through the phone.
By comparison, telemarketing is a more recent term which encompasses more activities than just selling through the phone. Telemarketing campaigns can be useful if you want to reach a larger audience than door-to-door calling for several activities.
According to Virtual Sales:
Telemarketing is a service that generates interest, creates opportunities provides information, factors, customer feedback, makes appointments and produces leads by telephone.
Telesales is a service that sells your products or services directly to the customer by telephone.
Thus, telesales is a subset of telemarketing.
Telemarketing is of two types:
1.Outbound – where the business reaches out to people in its database and engages them for lead-generating-and-nurturing activities other than sales mentioned above.
2.Inbound – where prospects reach out to the business by dialling a number or filling a form, thus showing their initial interest in the product, and get nurtured as prospects by your agents.
Telesales mainly is outbound (manual calls and automated voice calls) to try and convince the receiver of the call to buy the product or service.
Let’s discuss what is the difference between telemarketing and telesales in more depth.
What You Can Achieve with Telemarketing
1.Identify potential leads for your sales team to pursue
2.Clear doubts and questions that prospects have about the product or service.
3.Build an authentic and reliable database of prospects for your sales team, and also set appointments for them.
4.Reach out to new and existing customers to inform them about the latest offers and schemes, or new product launches.
5.Create awareness about seminars or webinars that you’re going to hold to share insights that your sales leads will find valuable.
6.Provide after-sales support to your customers.
7.Collect feedback from customers on how they found the product and what they feel are your areas of improvement.
8.Collect referrals from satisfied customers and add them to the database of prospective leads.
9.Turn informational calls, i.e. when prospects call to get information, into potent leads.
10.Convert prospects who are already willing to buy into customers.
11.Remind customers of renewals for subscriptions, insurance plans, and more.
12.Present your business in a more professional way to your target audience and create a positive impression of your brand in their minds.
What You Can Achieve with Telesales
1.Work towards converting an extensive database of prospects into customers much faster than door-to-door calling.
2.Increase lead-to-customer conversion rate while reducing training costs.
3.Follow up more accurately and in a timely manner with customers when they ask for a call back at a specific date and time.
4.Build a team of expert telecallers who can close difficult sales.
5.Make the best use of data and insights about prospects provided by the marketing and telemarketing teams.
6.Tailor the size of your telesales campaign to fit your budget.
7.Reduce expenses like travelling and invest in more solid technological tools.
At Enjay IT Solutions, we deploy both telesales and telemarketing teams. The telemarketing team generates leads, sets appointments for the sales team, and also gives us insights into the most common customer queries, something that’s handy to refine our sales pitch. The telesales team connects with the leads and tries to close deals on the phone itself.
Both teams need to work towards a common objective, know what their Key Performance Indicators are, and how they will be rated against their KPIs. When it comes to telesales and telemarketing, it’s easier to track and improve their performance since modern tools give you control to listen to their calls, track important metrics real-time, and get analytics and reports of performances at an individual and team level. Accordingly, you can work on the training program to improve their efficiency and effectiveness.
Summing Up
Both telemarketing and telesales are essential for a business.
However, it’s not necessary that you have to deploy both activities at an optimal level. You can choose which activity will contribute more to your business goals currently and work on it.
If you would like to know more about what the difference is between telemarketing and telesales and which is the right choice for your business, you can connect with us for a no-obligation discussion.
Related : Is Telemarketing a Beneficial Activity for Your Business?
