Advantages of Telemarketing

The main benefit of using telemarketing to promote your business is that it allows you to immediately gauge your customer's level of interest in your product or service. Additionally it allows you to do the following:

Provide a more interactive and personal sale service

• Create an immediate rapport with your customers.
• Explain technical issues more clearly.
• Generate leads and appointments.
• Sell from a distance to increase your sales territory.
• Reach more customers than with in-person sales calls.
• Sell to both existing and new customers.
• Achieve results that are measurable.

Types of Telemarketing

The telemarketing is basically categorized into two different types which are the Business-to-consumer telemarketing and the business to-business telemarketing.

However it also involves a few subcategories which are taken into consideration like,The sales which is known to involve the convincing and persuasion so as to sell a particular product or service to the customer.

The Lead generation is another sub category which includes the gathering of the information.

The most importantly used subcategories of telemarketing today are the Outbound and the inbound telemarketing. Outbound is the proactive marketing in which the customers either who exist already or the prospective ones are all contacted directly for the purpose of the marketing.The Inbound telemarketing includes the reaction and reception of the orders and also information coming in so as to explain the customer about the product and give detailed information on which they are interested.

importance of telemarketing

      Telemarketing has a very important role to play in direct sales and marketing. Telemarketing, as the name itself suggests, is nothing but contacting customers directly over the phone for promotional purposes. This is of great advantage to the direct seller especially because contacting through the phone establishes a very direct kind of relationship between him and the customer. He is also able to make a rather clear assessment of the tastes and interests of the customer, which of course is very much important in direct sales and marketing. The seller is also able to clear doubts and confusions that the customer may have about the company and the products that are being promoted.
     
       Telemarketing helps the seller in getting instant feedback and creating a database, which he can update over the phone itself. There is also much scope for follow-up in telemarketing. This too is very important in direct sales and marketing. Anyway, there are some things to be noted. People may sometimes take marketing calls as an interruption and may even react harshly. The caller has to be very tactical indeed so as not to hurt the feelings of the customers or irritate them in any way. It should also be seen that if there are legal issues involved, the calls have to be made in accordance with that. Anyhow, there is no denying the fact that Telemarketing has got a vital role to play in direct sales and marketing.

Need for Telemarketing

1.Generate leads. Telemarketing along with direct mail and e-mail marketing is currently the best 1-2-3 combo for generating and maintaining awareness among business-to-business prospects.
2.Find hot opportunities. It's the best way to find out what opportunities exist right now inside your prospects and clients companies. Telemarketing experts say they are almost always able to find active opportunities that the company didn't know about -- no matter how big or well-known the company is.
3.Communicate one-to-one. Telemarketing allows you to put a voice to your marketing and sales efforts long before the prospect is ready to meet with a sales person. It's easy to customize the message and to adapt to special needs of the specific prospect.
4.Qualify prospects. Telemarketers can follow-up on inquiries from your website and other marketing activities and determine fairly quickly just how qualified the prospect is and whether or not - and when - this company is likely to become a customer.
5.Engage at the top. Many experts agree that telemarketing is the best way to get through to and start a dialogue with top executives.
6.Increase sales team effectiveness. Telemarketers can take a load off your sales people. A Gardner study called Inside Sales: Selling More at Lower Cost found that adding a teleprospector to support a direct sales person can increase that sales person's closing revenue by from 50% to 150%.
7.Advance the sale. Telemarketers are often able to identify hesitation in a prospect. By handling questions or objections that might not otherwise be voiced, telemarketers can eliminate friction and move the prospect along sales cycle.
8.Promote other marketing activities. Telemarketing can increase webinar participation, trade show attendance, white paper downloads and many other useful methods of interacting with your prospects.
9.Build and clean your database. With each call, a telemarketer can add to and confirm information in your marketing database. This is critical to reducing waste and expanding your reach within a given company.

Telemarketing Introduction

Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits prospective customers to buy products or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or Web Conference appointment scheduled during the call. Telemarketing can also include recorded sales pitches programmed to be played over the phone via automatic dialing.