Top Outbound Telemarketing Tips to Boost Your Sales

Outbound calling is a crucial aspect of many sales and marketing operations.Telemarketing is utilized by businesses for various reasons. It is a cost-effective approach to reach out to potential clients while saving time and money.

With the right outbound telemarketing tips , businesses may establish lasting relationships with prospective clients. Additionally, companies may increase their ROI and grow their consumer base.

There are several ways to refresh your outbound telemarketing strategy, from cutting-edge technology to a personalized approach.

What is telemarketing?

Telemarketing is the process of directly marketing your product or service via the telephone or the Internet. It does not, however, does not include direct emails.

It generally involves using outbound cold calls to reach out to leads. It is part of the “approach”, “qualify”, and “pitch” stages of sales cycles.

The best outbound telemarketing tips

Clearly define your telemarketing goals

Before thinking about anything else, be very specific about what you want to achieve.

The goal of your telemarketing campaign will shape the way you conduct your outreach:

• Tone of messaging
• Channel of communication (social media messages, phone calls, emails, etc)
• Industry of target audience
• Position/Job titles of target audience
• Etc etc …

Once that has been clearly defined, you should move on to clearly define the next most important thing – who do you want to reach out to?

Conduct in-depth research on your personas

Before you even start conducting your outreach, you need to know clearly who you want to target. And to do that, you need to conduct in-depth persona research.

This would ensure that all your marketing and sales processes are aligned with the needs and preferences of your target buyer.

Say, for example, if you intend to sell your product/service directly to C-suite executives, you may want to avoid sending messages in a more formal tone. Or maybe they don’t even want to be contacted via email or LinkedIn!

Once you have clearly defined your buyer personas, you should gain a much better understanding of where and how to reach out to them.

Treat your leads differently

Now that you’ve categorized your leads based on job title, industry, preferred channel of communication, etc, it’s time to further finetune your categorization.

old, warm, and hot leads differ based on how much the lead has ‘warmed up’ to your company. Hotter leads tend to be more familiar with your company and have interacted with you in one way or another in the past. For example, they may have praised your content on your social media page. Or perhaps they have already subscribed to your blog.

Hotter leads also tend to be more willing and are more ready to make the purchase.

This form of categorization helps you personalize the tone of your approach when conducting your telemarketing campaign.

For instance, when approaching cold leads, it’s best to avoid selling your product/service right from the start. Instead, focus more on building the relationship and the trust in your business can develop.

Come prepared with a script

Telemarketing campaign goal ✔️

Clearly defined buyer personas ✔️

Can you start now? NOPE 

Ever heard of the iconic saying “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”? Even when conducting outbound cold outreach, come prepared.

Of course, that’s not to say that you should think of every possible scenario of how the conversation will go. That’s impossible. It also doesn’t mean that you need to memorize a script word-for-word.

This simply means that you should come up with a skeleton of the things you want to say. In terms of preparing for possible scenarios, you can always ask your peers about some of the most common situations they encounter when they conduct their telemarketing campaigns.

Focus on the Right KPIs

To create an outbound call strategy that you can use and, most importantly, improve, your agents’ efforts on the phones need to be measurable. 

On the one hand, that means setting concrete, measurable goals for improvement. By tracking progress against these benchmarks over time, you can better understand your growth.

On the other hand, however, it means you need to have the right tools in place.

Use the right tone

You could say all the right words, but if your tone of voice doesn’t match, then you’re not going to make the sale.

Simply put, you can’t afford to use the wrong tone.

You also have to sound confident. If you’re bored, your prospects can tell and they probably won’t be inclined to buy. After all, if you, the person selling the products, can’t be enthusiastic, why should they?

It’s also best to sound assured and strong but not too pushy. There’s no room for aggression in cold calling.

Don’t do all the talking

Successful cold calls last an average of 5 mins 50 s, while unsuccessful ones last 3 min 14 s.

But this doesn’t mean that spending more time on the phone equates to higher rates of selling. It depends on the things discussed in the call.

Perhaps the call lasted long because the sales rep was engaging and had interesting topics to discuss. Perhaps the call lasted longer because the sales rep used more case studies.

Speak in an open-ended manner

You know how much your tone matters, but what you say is almost as important.

Particularly, the way you ask questions can sometimes be the factor determining whether or not the prospect gives you useful information.

You want to focus on asking questions in an open-ended way.

Asking yes/no questions only provides you with, well, yeses and nos. While they’re not completely useless, they’re not able to provide you with in-depth insights into your prospects’ needs.

Try peppering in a few more open-ended questions next time you talk to a prospect. Even if you don’t get the sale, you’ll be impressed with how much more info you glean.

Persistence is key, follow-up!

The high rejection rates of cold calling can make it exhausting for sales reps when they repeatedly fail to close a deal. It’s not hard to understand why 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up call not being successful.

Record your calls and learn from them

A great telemarketing tip here is to record your calls. And many outbound dialing software allows you to do that.

This allows you to re-listen to the entire conversation and pinpoints any areas of improvement that you can make for subsequent telemarketing campaigns.

Call at Different Times

Even if you’re calling people who are in the same role, in the same industry, in the same region, they’re not going to have the same schedules. There’s no one right time of day to call your prospects, so make sure you aren’t calling the same prospect at more or less the same time every day.

Here are a few easy strategies you can use to switch up your calling routine:

• Do your admin work or prospecting at the end of the day instead of in the morning, or vice versa
• Reverse the order of your calling list
• Sort your calling list a new way (by last name instead of first name, for example)
• If you have different lists for different days of the week, switch the days up as well

Don’t Talk Too Fast During Outbound Sales Calls

Just because you’re conscious of your prospects’ time and your own doesn’t mean you should rush through the call. Speaking too quickly can cause you to come off as desperate or nervous, and it can make your prospects feel confused or even disrespected.

Practice makes perfect

What if you’ve tried this whole cold-calling thing and you’re just not good at it?

Keep practicing. You know the saying that practice makes perfect, and it is true in this instance. The more you speak with people on the phone, the faster your nerves will dissipate.

As time passes, you’ll naturally become less nervous about cold-calling prospects.

It’s important to bear in mind that even the most successful salespeople have faced many rejections from prospects throughout their careers. 

Take notes during the calls

Don’t just talk during calls. It is also important to write down important things your leads say. Not only will this help you remember these points better, but it also helps you save time when you listen to the call recordings again later.

You won’t need to listen through entire conversations just to pick out some key points because you would’ve already written them down.

Have fun with it!

When you make that many calls, the task can become stale and boring.

And your energy is contagious. If you go into a call sounding grumpy and disaffected, you’re not going to do a good enough job of getting the person on the other end of the line excited.

Although it’s not always easy, try to treat each call as its individual experience. More so, have fun with it! Talk about lighthearted subjects for a bit, maybe even crack a joke if appropriate.

This can help liven the mood and make your leads more willing to listen to you.

What’s next?

And there you have it!

I hope that these outbound telemarketing tips have been useful in helping you better understand how you can close deals.

If you’ve noticed, we have brought up outbound call software a couple of times. That’s because it has become the norm to use technology to improve sales processes.

References:

• https://www.kixie.com/sales-blog/10-winning-tips-for-outbound-sales-calls/
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/15-tips-making-successful-outbound-sales-calls-darryl-praill
• https://www.magellan-solutions.com/blog/outbound-telemarketing-tips/