Telemarketing can be a powerful and cost-effective lead-generation tool in the B2B space.
B2B telemarketing builds trust and personal connections through direct contact with influential decision-makers. This often results in a speedier lead qualification stage and more conversions.
Read on to discover how you can implement a B2B telemarketing strategy in your business to generate more leads and, ultimately, more sales.
What Is B2B Telemarketing?
B2B telemarketing simply means “Business-to-Business telemarketing.”
B2B telemarketing places more emphasis on building business relationships than solely selling products through sales calls.
In B2C (business-to-customer) telemarketing, a company’s call center agents call customers directly to sell their service or product. The basic premise of B2B telemarketing is exactly the same—just replace the customers with another business.
Through telemarketing, your company can:
- increase brand awareness,
- generate more new leads,
- increase brand awareness,
- collect instant feedback,
- and nurture the prospect into the next step of the sales funnel.
Businesses that use telemarketing are typically software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies like VoIP providers, financial service providers, and healthcare companies.
What Can B2B Telemarketing Be Used For?
B2B telemarketing is about more than just direct sales.
Either through an in-house team or by outsourcing this service, telemarketing can support all types of sales and marketing activities.
Let’s take a closer look.
Outbound sales
In general, outbound sales are typically simpler than inbound sales. Outbound leads can come from a list of potential clients you draw up or lead-generating content on your website, social media, or subscribers from your podcast, for example.
Because outbound leads often come in after downloading a resource or interacting with a blog post, you might have an idea of what the prospect is interested in. The downside of outbound sales is that they often take longer to close.
Requiring more research, time, and typically more calls, outbound lead generating is a more focused approach to target key decision-makers in specific industries.
Your telemarketing team’s focus for outbound sales is to get in touch with the prospects as quickly as possible post-conversion activity. From there, it’s a case of building brand awareness and trying to book a demo or sales meeting.
Inbound sales
With inbound sales, a business is reaching out to you, which means you’re halfway there already. Using inbound sales generation strategies, your telemarketing team must quickly address prospects’ problems, interests, and needs by positioning your business’s services as the solution.
During calls, your inbound support team can help qualify leads and follow up efficiently with relevant and valuable sales resources. This tactic works well to ensure your service or product is not far from the prospect’s mind.
Lead nurturing
Building trusted relationships with other businesses in B2B telemarketing often requires giving them something of value.
Because B2B telemarketing can be a slow burn, forcefully cold-calling through telemarketing calls is not usually effective. Consider offering free demos, webinar invites, digital marketing collateral, and other quality content that demonstrates that your business is valuable to prospects.
Just don’t go so far with the email marketing that your prospects end up searching “how to stop spam emails” as a result!
Event telemarketing
If you’re seeking more attendees for your events, use B2B telemarketing to increase headcount while improving your lead generation rate.
You can achieve this by asking the target audience questions and confirming their attendance at your event. Highlight the key benefits of attending, together with the agenda, and reinforce the value that businesses who attend will receive.
How to Ensure B2B Telemarketing Success
One of the crucial things to remember about succeeding at B2B telemarketing is that you must have qualified and quality leads.
Here are some steps for success in B2B telemarketing:
1. Set relevant goals
Establish exactly what you want to achieve with your telemarketing efforts. Being clear about your goals sets you on the right track. To set goals, think Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely (SMART).
Setting SMART goals ensures that your end goal remains in focus.
Here’s what it all means:
- Specific: A well-defined and clear goal.
- Measurable: Specific criteria that measure your progress towards the clear goal.
- Attainable: An achievable goal that’s within the realm of possibility.
- Relevant: Within reach, realistic, and relevant to your business.
- Timely: A clearly defined timeline, including a start and end date.
2. Create buyer personas
Telemarketing triumphs happen when you truly understand your target audience.
Create comprehensive buyer personas that you can use to determine the best tactics. To do this, consider your personas’ pain points and how your business alleviates them.
For example, a business you’re speaking to might raise the issue of needing to improve its agents’ productivity rates. Offering them an intuitive solution like a predictive dialer will show that you are listening to their problems without a hard-sell attitude.
Understanding and addressing their concerns empathetically will win you trust points and is successful B2B lead generation 101.
3. Brand building
Potential customers who know your business are more likely to engage with you.
Creating relevant content on your website and social media as a lead-generation campaign helps you reach out to interested prospects. But the key is to track content engagement rates because this tells you what your target market finds valuable.
4. Be personal
Rather than endless rounds of cold-calling and telephone tag, B2B sales telemarketing allows you to be pickier with prospects.
To this end, take measures to personalize your prospect communications. This shows you’ve done your research and will continue to get to know them. Personalization is a well-known method of generating higher conversion rates.
5. Create scripts
Well-written scripts are incredibly useful marketing tools to help telemarketers during sales calls.
Create scripts based around common pain points, objections, and current industry market research. This way, you empower your sales team to feel more confident about addressing potential blocks to sales.
If this is part of your marketing strategy, keep scripts to the point but with flexibility for your team to hold natural conversations.
6. Schedule calls
Train your sales team to initiate telemarketing calls around the most appropriate time for decision-makers. This strategy should yield a better chance of securing an online meeting.
Encourage your sales reps to talk with the call receiver to explain why you are calling and politely request a meeting.
7. Analyze and iterate
Schedule time to regularly test and analyze the success rate of your methods.
You might find different strategies work best in different scenarios. B2B marketing campaigns are not “one and done.” Think of them as a constantly evolving effort to reach out to the best-fit customers for your business.
To track your metrics, look at the number of leads and overall conversion rates. Hold brainstorming sessions to come up with more successful lead-generation tactics.
8. Encourage team feedback
Telemarketing is not for the faint-hearted. Bear this in mind and encourage your team to speak to you whenever necessary.
Consider implementing events for rewarding incentives and contests to create a healthy workplace culture. Ongoing training is vital for your entire telemarketing team to maintain fresh knowledge and skills.
Essential B2B Telemarketing Skills
You’ll need the best sales reps to ensure that B2B telemarketing is a success for your company. The following skills are what you must look for when hiring your all-star telemarketing team:
Listening
This is one of the most important traits of a telemarketer. Active listening is a commonly deployed B2B telemarketing approach, but it requires practice.
During a sales call, agents must reflect on prospects’ words, ask open questions, listen to the answers, and paraphrase their comments. Repeating the information back to prospects is key to thoroughly understanding their needs and wants and ensuring they feel they’re being heard.
Emotional intelligence
B2B telemarketing is all about forging meaningful business relationships with the professionals in companies that will commit to buying from and partnering with your business. Those professionals are human beings and will sometimes rely on emotions, along with hard evidence, to make decisions.
Successful B2B telemarketers possess the emotional intelligence to ensure prospects reveal what it is about their current problem that personally affects them.
For example, a marketing professional may be frustrated by their company’s current project management software.
A savvy sales rep can influence the professional’s mindset by discussing what they need, how unintuitive their current system is, and how their life would improve by seeking a replacement solution.
In this way, B2B telemarketing depends on developing emotional relationships to help professionals.
Get Started With B2B Telemarketing
Let’s recap the secrets to success with B2B telemarketing:
- Identify your target market and individual prospects.
- Decide whether your telemarketing will be in-house or whether you’ll outsource telemarketing services.
- Train your telemarketing sales reps on the most relevant inbound or outbound sales tactics.
- Schedule calls with business executives to secure their attention.
- Regularly analyze sales team performance to improve marketing efforts.
Deploying a lucrative B2B telemarketing strategy is within your grasp. Telemarketing offers a great opportunity for your company to develop relationships with other businesses—and by tapping into the emotional side of prospects, you’ll be well on your way to success.
And if you’re considering outsourcing your telemarketing campaign, we have the resources to assist you in your search. Check out our list of top call center service providers and their verified reviews here.