It’s the start of a new year! Time to brush off those cobwebs, wave goodbye to old bad habits and make some positive changes! The New Year is also a great time to look at your bad business habits and make resolutions for change.

Many companies run telemarketing campaigns, but how many run successful telemarketing campaigns? Here are our top ten tips to change your campaigns for the better in 2010!

Quite simply, direct sales is when a company sells its only products and services ‘directly’ to its client or customer base without an outside party involved. People say that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the direct route, and so direct sales is the conventional approach of selling directly to your customer and cutting out the middleman. Cutting out the middleman sounds like a good idea at first. Selling directly means that you keep all of the profit; no one is taking a chunk out of your sales. But on further consideration this is not always the case.

If you’re considering outsourcing your telemarketing needs, it would be good to understand the terminology of telemarketer.  This glossary aims to provide access to all of the necessary vocabulary required to discuss telemarketing like you’ve been doing it for years.

Agent
A trained telemarketer who makes or receives calls on behalf of a Telemarketing Company.

Appointment Setting
This is one of the tasks of an Outsourced Telemarketing team working on a B2B campaign or project. The aim is create leads for the client’s sales staff to convert by setting appointment times for them to call or visit.

Telemarketing or Telesales: Do you know which one you need?

Let’s face it; most people don’t know the difference between Telemarketing and Telesales.  This suggests that they don’t understand the important distinct values that can be gleaned from each service.  The words ‘Telemarketing’ and ‘Telesales’ are still often used interchangeably and then, they can be used to describe activities that often cross over.  However, if you wish to get the most from your telephone campaign, knowledge of the differences and how they can be best employed to help your business is vital.

“Outsourced selling may be alright for some, but it’s not the right for model for me because……”

Rapidly increasing in popularity amongst SMEs and corporates, Outsourced Selling is all the rage, but there are still a lot of commonly held misconceptions about it and how it works.  Andy Dickens, Managing Director of Virtual Sales Limited, explains how the business works.

In theory, Outsourced Selling can work with any kind of a business from smallest start-ups, to established SMEs through to some of the biggest international organisations.  However, people often misunderstand what it is and how it works, and think that it won’t work for them.  Here are some of the objections that I hear to a company outsourcing its sales operations, and why they are wrong!

Most business people feel fairly confident about talking about their products and services to a prospective customer face-to-face. But how do you get those appointments? One of the most effective ways is making calls to a target audience – unfortunately, this happens to be one of the most difficult ways. Getting to speak to the right person is a highly skilled job – handling objections, getting past the ‘gate keeper’ and making the valid points to the decision maker is no mean feat. It also involves a high level of rejection, which a lot of people find soul destroying. It’s a job that not many people are good at, and the ones that are, are highly sought after and can earn large sums of money. Needless to say, these high-performing individuals tend to get snapped up by the large corporates who can entice them with attractive remuneration packages. Not good news if you are an SME.