I recently joined in a debate on LinkedIn titled ‘Surely telemarketing is dead already’. The initial comments made by others seemed to support this claim. But I argued that quality telemarketing - when targeted and done professionally - remains a powerful tool and can benefit the recipient of said call. I used the example that I was able to save a business over 50k after receiving a well-researched telesales call. This prompted one commentator and telemarketer sceptic to say I should “thank my lucky stars I didn’t work for him” as he would have wanted to know why “some stranger on the other end of the phone had to point out I was wasting £50k”.
The reason why the call saved the business £50k was because the company making the call had introduced a new MPLS* solution reducing internet connectivity costs for multiple site connections. After researching our current wide-area network set-up the telesales caller was confident this new technology would improve the service and reduce costs.
The call was well researched and relevant. Many of us in our busy day-to-day lives don’t always have time to research new technologies and products and that is why telemarketing can provide a useful service. Sceptics might ask ‘why couldn’t they just send an email?’ But how many emails do you receive a day? And can emails interact and answer questions?
I did not reply in this length of detail to the LinkedIn commentator but just said that I will thank my lucky stars I don’t work for him!
In response to the general question ‘telemarketing is dead already’ - no-one likes receiving phone calls from companies offering irrelevant products and services from someone reading from a script, or even worse, an automated message enquiring about PPI or an injury you may have suffered in the past 2 years. However, these should not be confused with a professionally trained telemarketer. And, if telemarketing is dead, why do so many companies use this as part of their sales and marketing strategy? And why are telemarketing courses so popular at the Chamber?
So I stand firm and say that telemarketing is not dead. Combined with e-marketing, social media, and face-to-face sales, it still remains a valuable tool to grow a business.
Finally, to all the sceptics out there, I have just one question: “Have you been injured at work and it wasn’t your fault?”
Posted by Darren Precious
* Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a mechanism in high-performance telecommunications networks that directs data from one network node to the next based on short path labels rather than long network addresses, avoiding complex lookups in a routing table. Click here for more details.
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