Everyone hates telemarketing, right? Meanwhile, everyone keeps on telemarketing. So, is the bad reputation justified?
The elephant in the room for those us involved in one way or another with telemarketing (whether we’re users or providers of the service) is the widely held perception that no one likes it. And let’s be honest, telemarketing does have a bad reputation. For example, conversations you’ve probably never heard while standing in the supermarket checkout queue include:
- I had a brilliant telemarketing call this afternoon
- I’m so disappointed that telemarketer didn’t call me back
…and many others, all similar. When a telemarketer draws a sales call to a close, (trust me, I speak from experience) he or she doesn’t often hear the magic words, ”can’t we talk for a little longer”!
And yet people continue to use telemarketing. Why? Because it works, so the obvious question is, is the bad reputation justified? The short answer to that question is “no” and the reason it’s “no” is because telemarketing, particularly in the B2B domain, has changed radically in recent years. In other words, the bad reputation used to be justified (and in consumer telemarketing, it probably still is), but in B2B it isn’t anymore. Let’s investigate, because if you’re thinking about launching a telemarketing campaign but aren’t convinced about whether to proceed, you ought to be aware of the current reality.
The negatives don’t have to exist
When people think of telemarketing, the first words that come to most minds are terms like interruption, pressure, generic sales pitches, and aggression. And based on past experience, that may be fair because telemarketing used to be like that.
However, it isn’t anymore. Telemarketing has changed and the bad old days are gone. Now, most credible agencies focus on contacting only relevant prospects, from the outset take a permission-based approach to contacting them, and understand that pursuing those with no stated interest in the topic or product under discussion wastes everyone’s time, caller and recipient alike.
For example, at eCS our objective is to initiate relevant conversations and you can see this in the way our calls are handled: For example, instead of: “I’d like to tell you about our services,” we might say “I’m calling because we work with [type of company] that are dealing with [specific problem]. I wondered if that’s something you’re seeing as well?”
This approach immediately feels more consultative.
The rise of relevance
Telemarketers are more aware than anyone that the best way to create a negative experience is to call someone with no obvious reason. And in the past, the truth is many telemarketing agencies had little knowledge of the products they were repping in pursuit of a hard sell.
No longer. Again for example at eCS, because we’re topic experts having worked in the telco industry for 25+ years, we understand the playing field, recent technology developments, operational challenges, etc. When this kind of expertise informs a call, it feels to the recipient far less like telemarketing and more like the sort of conversation you might have with a colleague at an industry event.
The death of scripts (rest in peace. Actually, don’t.)
Remember those old-world telemarketing calls where you just knew the caller was reading from a script, barely bothering to sound engaged in the process? Well, broadly speaking you’ll be pleased to learn the penny has dropped; scripts don’t work and few if any agencies doggedly adhere to them anymore.
To be sure, scripts do have their uses as training tools and as a guideline where needed for consistency and compliance, but they have largely been replaced today by what we might call conversation frameworks. These work in a stunningly logical fashion, roughly what you might hope from from any conversation, as follows:
- Why I’m calling
- Why it might matter to you
- A relevant question
- Listen
- Decide whether there’s a reason to continue
Today’s B2B telemarketers generally sound like knowledgeable industry professionals, not (bad) actors reading (badly written) copy!
A brief summary: there’s a lengthy shopping list of additional ways in which telemarketing has changed, and together the changes explain why perception needs to catch up with reality because, as we said at the start, telemarketing works. If it didn’t, after all, people wouldn’t use it. Perhaps we’ll explore those reasons further in another future blog.
