Telemarketing can be a productive marketing tool for businesses with suitable products or services. This two-part guide firstly discusses the kinds of products or services likely to be suitable for telemarketing and secondly offers some tips and techniques to make your telemarketing more successful.
This Solution Guide is part of a series on telemarketing. Other guides in the series you can request from your Business Banking Manager are:
- ‘How to build strong relationships on the telephone.’
- ‘A basic guide to telemarketing.’
- ‘Developing a telemarketing campaign.’
A. Suitable products or services
What types of products or services are suitable for telemarketing? You need to consider four aspects:
1. The value
Your product or service should be of reasonably high value. Products below $100 are usually too low to justify telemarketing.
The exception would obviously be where a low value initial sale leads to ongoing revenue. For example, a consumable item costing $20 might need replacing each week. In this case you’d look at the total overall spin-off from getting that initial order.
2. The target market
If your target market is the general public, then other marketing approaches such as mass media advertising will probably be more successful.
Telemarketing techniques work best where the product or service is specialised or where you can identify a relatively small, defined market.
For instance, you might be selling a leasing scheme for large vehicle fleets. In this case you would only need to target the relatively small number of medium and large businesses that might require such a system.
Your telemarketing strategy would therefore start off with a broad understanding of where the market is likely to be and end up with a more precise perception of this market’s potential for your product.
3. Contact’s ease of access
Is the desired contact easy to access by telephone? In the example above, you would need a decision from the fleet manager or other senior management person. In telemarketing you need to identify not only the organisation, but also the decision-makers. This identification should include full details of title, name, address, and telephone number.
In addition, the decision-maker must be accessible by telephone and be receptive once you get through. This is not always the case. For example, doctors can be difficult to reach by phone and dislike approaches of this type for some products.
4. Product or service sensitivity
How suitable is the product or service for telemarketing? Certain products, such as some health related products, or personal finance products are difficult to market over the telephone or require a very tactful telemarketing approach.
However, many apparently sensitive products can still be promoted by telephone if you have the necessary skills.