How Marketing Can Support Telesales

How can marketing support telesales? It’s quite easy, but warming up the customer before the call.

Imagine how hard it is for a telesales person to get an appointment with a prospect if it is the very first time they have heard from the company. There is no background, context or trust from the prospect’s perspective and so why would they commit to something that is clearly going to cost them money.

It’s far more likely that the telesales person will receive a warm response if they have something to offer the prospect, free of charge.

So how about asking marketing to support in advance of the call.

Let’s take the example of a media company attempting to sell advertising. Marketing can set up a simple, no cost, campaign that will engage with the prospects and warm them up for committing to paid advertising a little later.

Here are the steps to take:

1. Decide on a theme that will resonate with the target sector (if it’s hotels, for example, it might be how to increase room occupancy rates in difficult financial times or off-season)
2. Create a social media ‘hub’ for the sector and begin to publish lots of content using Rule of Thirds content strategy
3. Call the prospects (the hotels, in this example) and ask to speak to the person responsible for marketing and advertising and talk to them about the free content offer. The telesales person should ask if they can come in for a meeting to record a video clip or take a quote that will be posted in the hub and promoted to the media company audience (they are a media company after all, so they have the channels to be able to do this)
4. Visit the prospect and capture content assets as described in point 3
5. Call back the prospect with the performance insights and analytics of their post(s)
6. Off the back of their great (free) results, sell that you can likely 10x their results with paid advertising

This is of course a generic example with lots of assumptions, but the principal can be applied to all sorts of sales (and especially telesales) scenarios to assist in warming up, what would otherwise be a cold prospect.

As we know, the customer journey is all about moving the prospect from initial awareness through to confidence to convert (pay, sign-up, etc.) so the marketing approach above will help to build faith and trust. Who wants to be cold called and especially when it’s all about the sell? Nobody. So an approach like this where there is a true building of a trusting relationship and a fair trade of assets and contacts, is a reliable and authentic way to develop business.

Try it and let me know how it goes.