Part 1- Quick Tips on Using Telemarketing to Sell Technology Services

If you’ve read my books or heard me speak about various forms of marketing, you would know that I am not much of a fan of telemarketing when it comes to marketing technology services.

Honestly, it’s a tough method for marketing anything as its success depends on many factors woven inside of the campaign. But, if treated like a very sound direct mail marketing campaign, it can actually produce solid results. Of course that also assumes you’ve done a good job in prepping a group of telemarketers who probably know nothing about your business.

Since I have a client that has used telemarketing as a lead generator before joining forces with me and he wanted to continue using this method along with adding others to the mix, I figured I would chronicle what we’re doing and how we’re making it work.



So here’s part 1:

OK, so when I asked this new IT hardware and solutions provider client how he was marketing, he said mostly referral plus an OK website that was getting traffic and telemarketing. Although we decided to mainly concentrate on making the website convert much better and locally, I also agreed to have him not waste money on the telemarketing he wanted to continue doing.

So this is how he told me his telemarketing worked: He provided a large list of potential clients and a generic script to a telemarketing company with a background in technology services. An OK start.

Then he would do some training sessions with the telemarketers assigned to him to get them used to the script and the iterations it took them through depending on reactions and answers to questions from the prospects. OK.

When he would let them loose on the phones, their goal was to set up appointments for him. Again, OK.

So far the set-up was planned and thought out to possibly work out for him.

Now it was time for me to ask about how it was working out for him. As expected, his results were very spotty. After running a few campaigns, he saw a very small but promising response the first round. On subsequent rounds, almost nothing by way of appointments and nothing was getting sold. So all he was getting was a trickle of a cold list turning into a few barely luke-warm leads. Not so good.

So all of the basic elements were in place (list, script, training, purpose of call). Now I needed to look a little closer as to the details of each element. Starting with the all important list.

Check back next time to find out what I discovered, what we did to change things around a bit, and the results.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach