Archive for the ‘Telemarketing’ Category

1. Why use telemarketers?

   Posted January 28th, 2010

   Whatever your business – whether it involves predominantly business to business trading or direct sales to individual customers – the telephone is likely to feature as one of your primary marketing tools. Do your business resources stretch to running your own team of telemarketers, or have you resigned yourself to that type of marketing being available only to much bigger enterprises? It might surprise you to discover, in that case, just how affordable – but no less effective – it might prove to buy in the services of professional telemarketers.

   The experience

   Buying in the services of professional telemarketers, of course, includes the experience they have already obtained in the market place in which your business operates – in our case it is 16 successful years’ of just such experience across a range of different markets.

   The market

   The markets successfully targeted by telemarketing are as diverse as they are competitive. Our telemarketing team has experience across the board, with a proven track record founded in our early successes in lead-generation for the commercial insurance sector (arranging cover for a myriad of small businesses from pubs, shops, restaurants and hotels, to offices, landlord-owned properties, and commercial vehicles). Today, however, those same telemarketing skills are put to equally effective use across an even wider range of business sectors.

   The data

   The Business Octopus solution has become the source for one of the UK’s biggest supply of live leads to businesses, not only because of the experience and expertise of our team of telemarketers, but also because of the extensive and comprehensive range of data we maintain about a range of different markets and their customers.

   Our proven success in lead generation is in no small part due, for example, to the more than three million business records and forty million consumer records which we maintain and keep up to date. But it is not only the ability to identify and contact this huge pool of potential customers. Each record is detailed enough to contain the full postal address, telephone number, and email address of millions of businesses and consumers, together with additional data that will help you segment the market in order to focus your sales drive towards the richest seams.

   The work

   Armed with all the above resources, together with a thorough understanding of your own business aims and objectives, our own telemarketers can ensure that the hard, time-consuming and expensive work of lead generation is taken off your hands and safely put into those of the professionals.

   Tags: Telemarketers, Telemarketing
   Posted in Telemarketing |

2. Telemarketing services, without the effort (and cost)

   Posted January 17th, 2010

   Telemarketing has provided one of the major drivers in the explosion of competition within just about any marketplace in recent years. For the many smaller businesses operating in this same market, however, telemarketing might conjure up pictures of huge call-centre operations requiring vast sums of investment. The reality, however, is that your business could benefit from others’ telemarketing experience, bringing home the benefits to your business, without the direct effort and cost to yourself.

   We have more than 16 years of successful telemarketing experience – an experience that we are well-placed to share with you and which could prevent your own business from having to re-invent the wheel. Instead, our experienced, top-grade tele-consultants can work alongside you, understanding your business requirements, your business offering and your customer base, in order to develop with you a telemarketing campaign (or campaigns) designed specifically for your business.

   As you can imagine, the services required by one business in the insurance market will probably differ from any other. The services we offer remain entirely flexible – in order to match your own business needs – therefore, but might typically include some or all of the following telemarketing services:

   • Lead generation;
   • Appointment setting;
   • Database cleaning;
   • Re-activation of static customer accounts and the winning back of dormant customers;
   • Sales; and
   • Cross-selling and up-selling.

   Even less effort

   The effort, time and cost of successful telemarketing really can be taken almost completely out of your hands by employing The Business Octopus call centre staff. Once set up to match the parameters of your own business, our staff can help you to generate leads in real time and pre-qualify each call to ensure that you handle only those calls that match the profile according to strict criteria that you have previously agreed with us.

   This allows members of our experienced call centre staff to put potential leads on hold while they call your office for confirmation that you will be happy to take the call. Once you agree, the call can then be transferred to you, so that you can prepare the quotation that will hopefully lead to a sale.

   For our insurance customers, pre-qualification of such calls ensures that all leads will be within 30 days of the caller needing to renew their insurance when they will be actively seeking a quote. The lead we pass to you is for your exclusive use only and will not be passed to any other insurance provider.

   Because our customers are enjoying an exclusive feed of live feeds, they report that they are presently issuing quotes on 90% of the leads referred to them, whilst between 30% and 40% of those leads are converted into sales.

   Tags: Marketing Data, telemarketing services
   Posted in Telemarketing |

3. Knowing who to call – telephone data

   Posted January 14th, 2010

   Probably one of the most critical pieces of equipment in the armoury of marketing devices for any business is the telephone – no matter what your business marketplace. It is used in a countless number of ways to penetrate new and existing markets, capture new customers, revive dormant clients, communicate with existing and potential clients, and to conclude vital sales. All of this depends, however, on the accuracy and integrity of the telephone data to hand.

   To have a successful telemarketing campaign, you need the most up to date information available on individual business-to-business or business-to-customer telephone details which is tailored to match your profile.

   Certainly, knowing just who to call, of course, generally relies on rather more than a simple shot in the dark – it demands a knowledge of your market and potential customer base, the profiles of your individual customers, and, obviously, the specific telephone numbers to call.

   Although this is usually the sort of telephone data that practically any business will build up over time, it is a laborious, time-consuming and costly process, and still the data rapidly becomes out-dated as numbers change, business goals and objectives diversify, and customers’ needs develop.

   So, how do you ensure that your telemarketing campaign reaches the right people?

   Among the many business services we provide, we can:

   • clean up your existing database;
   • provide our own relevant telephone data;
   • provide you with pre-screened leads;
   • run your whole telemarketing campaign with fully trained tele-sales staff.

   By working closely with your own business, getting “under the skin” of what makes it tick, and understanding the demands of all your present and future clients, we can help to ensure that the telephone data you are using is as extensive as the market has to offer.

   Making the data work for you

   Once your unique business offering has been understood and the segmentation of your potential customer base analysed, professional services are available that can even take off your hands much of the actual spade work involved in telemarketing.

   A company like ours, for example, can draw on own data of more than 3 million business records and 40 million individual consumer details and this is combined with an established record of telemarketing.

   We can provide you with live leads. As an experienced telephone data provider, we can carefully screen each call to ensure that it meets the criteria agreed with your business in advance and, so, ensure that you have the opportunity of dealing only with “pre-qualified” enquiries.

   Since such lead generation is conducted in real-time, even greater control over the calls you need to field can be achieved by the customer being put on hold by the third party call-centre in order to check with your own business that the call should be put through.

   In this way, professionally gathered telephone data is made to work for you, at your own pace and in touch with only those enquiries most likely to represent genuine returns for your business. This means that you only speak to businesses or individual contacts that match your profile, saving you time, effort and money.

   Tags: Telemarketing, Telephone Data
   Posted in Telemarketing |