In the first blog in this series (which you can read here), we established why telemarketing should be a critical part of the marketer’s arsenal around any industry event or trade show they’re attending.
We also set out the role telemarketing campaigns should play in ensuring the investment you’ve made in the event delivers your desired return – qualified sales leads.
In this blog, we’ll assume you’ve taken note and have decided to go ahead with a telemarketing campaign to support your next event attendance so now we’ll focus on how to make your campaign successful because if you’re selling high-value products or services like those common in the telecoms industry, you have the perfect use case for a post-event calling campaign. However, to achieve a payoff, you must have the right campaign methodology.
Telemarketing success starts in the exhibition hall!
The first thing to understand is that effective telemarketing doesn’t begin when you pick up the phone so if you think success is as simple as calling all the leads you’ve collected, you’re in for a disappointment! You must begin by thinking about “information flow” from your prospect’s perspective. What do your targets want and expect when they engage with you? Generally, the answer is something like this:
- They want informed conversations, not random contact and e-mails
- They have complex requirements, so they want you to be conversant with their language
- They’re generally senior decision-makers, so they value their time. They don’t want you to waste it.
- They don’t make impulse purchases, so they don’t want to be oversold
That means, when you contact them after the event, you need to:
- Quickly re-anchor the conversation you had at the booth
- Test whether there’s a real project behind the conversation
- Map stakeholders and buying timelines
- Start to build a relationship with the prospect.
But before you even get that far, the likelihood is that your campaign’s success (or failure) will depend on what happened at your exhibition booth. Why? Because from a follow-up marketing perspective the value of a suitcase full of business cards is compromised by:
- Inconsistent accompanying notes
- Lost context (“Nice guy, asked about X”)
- Callers having to guess what key points were raised
There’s an easy fix. If you’re heading to an event, in advance make sure all your sales team and booth personnel are trained to collect the following information every time they receive a business card or meet a prospect.
Interest area: (e.g. OSS modernization / billing / network analytics)
Trigger: (what was the problem they mentioned)
Timeline: (now / 6–12 months / “just exploring”)
Role: (technical / commercial / exec)
Next step promised: (call, demo, intro, send info)
Train your staff to write keywords, not sentences with every contact name they submit.
How your post-event calling should actually work
Presuming you follow the above advice and your team return from the event you’ve attended with the goods, here’s the ideal campaign plan.
Call timing
It’s critical that you launch your telemarketing campaign as soon as possible after the event. The longer you leave it, memory fades and competitors win the business that might have been yours. If you’re attending an event, you should be setting up your post event campaigns a month or two before it takes place.
Know your goal
Remember, your immediate post event follow-up is not a pitch-call. The goal of the telemarketing campaign is to confirm whether there is a real initiative and book the right next meeting for your sales team. In other words, to qualify the lead. What you want to achieve is some or all of the following:
- Clear problem statement
- Stakeholder map
- Rough timeline
- Agreed next step
If you can hand the above information over to your sales team, you’ll have delivered a win. It’s up to them to close the sale. Your call script therefore needs to do three things:
- Prove relevance
- Show respect for the prospects’ time
- Give them a clear understanding of your value
How many calls should you make?
Even if you come back with a suitcase full of leads, don’t boil the ocean. Segment your leads based on the information you’ve collected about them (see above) then aim to call 100% of the hottest leads, 30-50% of the medium leads and for those leads for which you have no information (cold scans of business cards), set them aside for nurture by e-mail only. Remember, speed and context beat volume.
Lastly, who should do the calling?
Trust the experts
This is a big question. There are generally three possible answers.
- Your sales team (in-house). Sales teams are generally made up of either farmers (relationship managers) or hunters (deal closers). What they are not is telemarketers. It pays to have professionals handle your campaign…to put it bluntly, if it didn’t the entire telemarketing industry wouldn’t exist!
- The conference organiser. Some, even many, conference organisers have a telemarketing offering, disguised as booking meetings for you in advance of or after their event. Obviously, they charge for the privilege. But conference organisers are no more telemarketing experts than your sales team, so why would you use them for that purpose?
- Telemarketing agencies. Not any telemarketing agency, but the right telemarketing agency, should be your go-to option for event related lead generation. The “right agency” in this case is one that has:
a. A proven track record of success
b. Knowledge of the telco industry and the ability to speak about it fluently to telco professionals
c. An understanding of OSS and BSS, and the sort of products and services those in the industry use
If you follow the advice in this blog series, the likelihood is that your next event will have a significantly increased chance of success. Remember, it only takes one deal win to transform your Return on Investment.
How to succeed at industry conferences and events, part 2
In the first blog in this series (which you can read here), we established why telemarketing should be a critical part of the marketer’s arsenal around any industry event or trade show they’re attending.
We also set out the role telemarketing campaigns should play in ensuring the investment you’ve made in the event delivers your desired return – qualified sales leads.
In this blog, we’ll assume you’ve taken note and have decided to go ahead with a telemarketing campaign to support your next event attendance so now we’ll focus on how to make your campaign successful because if you’re selling high-value products or services like those common in the telecoms industry, you have the perfect use case for a post-event calling campaign. However, to achieve a payoff, you must have the right campaign methodology.
Telemarketing success starts in the exhibition hall!
The first thing to understand is that effective telemarketing doesn’t begin when you pick up the phone so if you think success is as simple as calling all the leads you’ve collected, you’re in for a disappointment! You must begin by thinking about “information flow” from your prospect’s perspective. What do your targets want and expect when they engage with you? Generally, the answer is something like this:
That means, when you contact them after the event, you need to:
But before you even get that far, the likelihood is that your campaign’s success (or failure) will depend on what happened at your exhibition booth. Why? Because from a follow-up marketing perspective the value of a suitcase full of business cards is compromised by:
There’s an easy fix. If you’re heading to an event, in advance make sure all your sales team and booth personnel are trained to collect the following information every time they receive a business card or meet a prospect.
Interest area: (e.g. OSS modernization / billing / network analytics)
Trigger: (what was the problem they mentioned)
Timeline: (now / 6–12 months / “just exploring”)
Role: (technical / commercial / exec)
Next step promised: (call, demo, intro, send info)
Train your staff to write keywords, not sentences with every contact name they submit.
How your post-event calling should actually work
Presuming you follow the above advice and your team return from the event you’ve attended with the goods, here’s the ideal campaign plan.
Call timing
It’s critical that you launch your telemarketing campaign as soon as possible after the event. The longer you leave it, memory fades and competitors win the business that might have been yours. If you’re attending an event, you should be setting up your post event campaigns a month or two before it takes place.
Know your goal
Remember, your immediate post event follow-up is not a pitch-call. The goal of the telemarketing campaign is to confirm whether there is a real initiative and book the right next meeting for your sales team. In other words, to qualify the lead. What you want to achieve is some or all of the following:
If you can hand the above information over to your sales team, you’ll have delivered a win. It’s up to them to close the sale. Your call script therefore needs to do three things:
How many calls should you make?
Even if you come back with a suitcase full of leads, don’t boil the ocean. Segment your leads based on the information you’ve collected about them (see above) then aim to call 100% of the hottest leads, 30-50% of the medium leads and for those leads for which you have no information (cold scans of business cards), set them aside for nurture by e-mail only. Remember, speed and context beat volume.
Lastly, who should do the calling?
Trust the experts
This is a big question. There are generally three possible answers.
a. A proven track record of success
b. Knowledge of the telco industry and the ability to speak about it fluently to telco professionals
c. An understanding of OSS and BSS, and the sort of products and services those in the industry use
If you follow the advice in this blog series, the likelihood is that your next event will have a significantly increased chance of success. Remember, it only takes one deal win to transform your Return on Investment.
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