Telemarketing Challenges Today And How To Fix Them

Telemarketing may be one of the oldest methods to sell services to customers, but not all strategies are successful. It’s because customers have become pickier and are not easily convinced by a sales call.

So, even if a telemarketing campaign is full-proof, it might not produce desired results. However, as 92% of the customer interaction happens overcall, you need to tackle telemarketing challenges as a marketer. These include collecting appropriate customer data, determining the USP, and enhancing your campaigns.

If you’re someone struggling with your telemarketing campaigns, here are the most common challenges and their solutions.

Poorly Defined or Unrealistic Goals

Before you start cribbing about your telemarketing problems, you need to define your marketing goals. If you are not realistic about your expectations from the campaign, it’s not destined to work in your favor.

You have to remember that any telemarketing campaign requires time to produce results. Just because you have a potential lead doesn’t mean it will convert into a customer.

So, you need to sit with your team and determine your target customers, expected revenue, and how quickly you want to achieve success. Or else, your sales strategy may backfire and will bring down the confidence of your entire team.

Solution

Take the following steps to fix the situation –

• Arrange a meeting, get a whiteboard, or prepare a presentation
• Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based) goals. You can set up monthly or weekly goals for the entire team.
• Assign specific targets for each employee and give them regular feedback
• Make everyone understand that telemarketing is not a one-shot process, and they have to keep at it to generate leads.

Determining the USP

Figuring out the unique selling proposition (USP) of a product or service is a key strategy for connecting with the customer. However, with brands and companies popping up every second, it’s hard to separate yourself from the rest.

So, you have to figure out how your product or service is different from others. In this day and age, mentioning fancy words and stats won’t convince the customer, as they have many options to explore.

Solution

Instead of being pushy, try determining what value your service adds to the customer’s life. It will be easier this way to figure out your target customers. Prepare your telemarketing campaign or sales pitch in a way that very easily connects with the customer.

You can try talking to them in a friendly manner than sounding like every other telecaller. Don’t sound too overbearing, and try to be a little comforting while talking about the value your product offers.

That will probably get a customer interested can understand your value proposition.

Maintaining Data Quality

Gathering vital customer data is important for launching any telemarketing campaign. That will collate customers’ names, mailing addresses, email IDs, telephone numbers, and data about their preferences.

But after some time, your customer database may be outdated. It happens because the customer may change their email ID, phone number, and also their buying habits. And outdated data is useless for any marketing campaign.

You may not even know that your data is outdated and keep pursuing prospects that don’t exist. It wastes a lot of your time, efforts and leads to frustration.

Solution

You can try rechecking your customer database and remove the inconsistencies by yourself. However, a better way is to contact a data cleansing company to update your customer databases.

With a simple free or subscription, you can avail of their services and clean your customer data.

The best part? You just have to send your database, and they will fix it for you. That will preserve your team’s valuable manhours and can be spent on scoping out prospective leads. You can also avail of email appending services to fix email errors specifically.

Cold Calling

A study shows that 63% of sales executives have complained that they absolutely hate cold calling. But this is one of the most effective ways to reach out to potential clients. Executives have been successful on many occasions due to cold calling.

Still, executing the strategy has become a little difficult these days. Because of the rise of fraudulent call centers and fake customer executives, customers don’t trust telecallers much. As a result, we try to avoid these cold calls and don’t even listen to them properly.

This situation has negatively affected the ROI for telemarketing campaigns. So, telecalling professionals are getting reluctant to initiate cold calls.

Solution

The best way to improve the response to cold calls is to enhance the relationship with your potential customer. You can do this by sending an email or a message before calling them.

Ensure to make this message or email clear, concise and interesting, without sounding too overwhelming.

This way, the customer can check your company’s authenticity. If you provide your official website’s link in the email/message, they can check it out as well. It will give them a brief idea about your products and services. They may take out time to attend your call.

Always check the phone numbers before calling to save inconveniences.

Remember the American entrepreneur – “One customer well taken care of could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.” 

Insufficient Sales Training

According to market statistics, more than 55% of the sales executives aren’t well-trained or skilled to succeed. Many organizations don’t recognize this fact and don’t train their sales executives and telecallers.

These professionals rely on their experience and past success and don’t upgrade themselves. So, they’re unable to cope up with the competition and failed to execute the strategies.

Solution

It would be best if you organized training and development workshops at least two times a year. Alternatively, you can provide your employees access to online courses to improve their skill set.

You can also invite experienced industry professionals and conduct seminars to spread their valuable knowledge. In short, you have to maintain an environment of constant learning.

Summing Up

Successful telemarketing can make or break a brand’s image. That’s why you need to stay updated with the latest marketing trends and developments. No matter what telemarketing challenges you face, try to focus on the customer and what value you can add to their lives.

Always try to stay positive, be confident about your brand, and ensure the quality of our products or services. With consistent efforts, you are bound to be successful.