In 2024, telemarketing remains a crucial strategy for B2B companies, particularly in Thailand and the broader APAC region. By leveraging telemarketing, businesses can establish direct communication with potential clients, gather valuable intelligence about the business situation, and build lasting relationships.
This article explores how to effectively utilize telemarketing in the current landscape, ensuring your B2B marketing strategy is both relevant and impactful.
Why using telemarketing in 2024
The first quality of telemarketing is that it offers immediate feedback. Back and forth emails can sometimes leave place for interpretation. It is frequent for customers to ghost emails and simply not reply.
Telemarketing is a relationship tool. By talking to a human, you are already building a relationship between the prospect and your company.
Although telemarketing is time intensive, it can be cost effective if done right, since it will act as a support for your sales team, freeing them some valuable time while bringing new warm leads to schedule meeting with.
Key Tips for Effective Telemarketing
1. Start by providing your callers with a well-structured script.
This script should serve as a guide for common conversations and potential objections, ensuring that your callers can communicate clearly and confidently. However, it’s essential that the script remains flexible, allowing for natural conversation flow. A good script acts as a qualification tool to understand more about the company and their readiness to engage in further conversation.
2. Training and demeanor of callers: warm but respectful
Encourage your callers to smile while speaking; this simple act can significantly enhance the tone of the conversation, making it more engaging for the listener. Good manners are equally important in telemarketing, especially in Thailand where it will be expected a certain etiquette based on age, gender and seniority. Think of an interaction with a steward or air hostess in a place. A polite call will go a long way into fostering relations with your company.
3. Integrating Telemarketing with Modern Marketing Strategies
In 2024, successful telemarketing should be integrated into a comprehensive marketing digital strategy. For example your caller will always send further information (brochure or link to a resource, customized according to the outcome of the call). They can also register the person to a drip campaign, meaning the recipient will receive for example one email per week in the next 4 weeks, which will keep your company “top-of-mind”.
4. Remote telemarketing
If you hire internal telemarketers, consider allowing them to work remotely. Many studies indicate that employees often perform better in a comfortable home environment. This flexibility can lead to increased productivity and a more positive attitude towards their work, ultimately benefiting your telemarketing efforts. Think about telemarketing calling platform such as CloudTalk if you have several employees performing that task.
5. Internal or outsourced?
Many companies consider “calling” part of the sales cycle and therefore consider the task should be internalized. But for many international companies with pressure from headquarters on headcounts, it may just not be possible to internalize this function.
Indeed, telemarketing is inherently time-consuming, and you may need several resources to follow up on your lists, sometimes in several languages. For all those reason, outsourcing the calls to professional companies may be a solution. This will shift the telemarketing expenses to marketing or sales, instead of HR.
Whereas internal telemarketing tend to be multitasking. Outsourced telemarketing often work by campaign, with focused target and objective. This will allow more straightforward scripting and marketing support. Thinking in term of campaigns will also help to measure cost effectiveness and ROI.
6. Make your sales team on board with the initiative
Pitch your B2B telemarketing team as a partner for your sales team to allow them to achieve their objectives: this way telemarketers offer warm leads and meeting opportunities and allow your Sales team to focus on quality meetings with prospects, rather than hunting. A good collaboration between Sales and Telemarketing will ensure a better training of the telemarketer, and smoother handling of the prospect from telemarketers to the sales team.
Interested to try?
Interested in learning more about 360 Marketing and Telemarketing outreach campaigns? Reachlane is a 360 Marketing, Telemarketing and Leadgen Agency focused on B2B businesses in Southeast Asia. Consult us for more information.
