How Do You Solve The Top Specialist Telemarketing Challenges

In a world so dense with marketing messages, sales pipelines and constant attempts to gain customers, it can be difficult at times for a business to get its name, its products and its message out to the people most likely to engage with it.

This is a general issue that marketing companies aim to fix, but the challenges for a business-to-customer direct marketing campaign are often somewhat different from those seen with marketing in a specialist field such as life sciences.

Whilst concepts such as the attention economy and the importance of a tailored, personalised message are broadly similar priorities irrespective of the sector itself, marketing to a relatively small audience of experts is different from a broad audience that may have varying degrees of knowledge of your product or its market sector.

Here are some of the largest issues found with marketing to specialist sectors and some potential approaches to solve them.

Depersonalisation

Telemarketing is an inherently personal form of marketing that can only work if the approach to each and every call is similarly personal. Every lead is a person who would get something slightly different from your business and the goal of the telemarketer is to identify this and provide it.

When people talk about bad experiences with direct sales and especially cold calling, they will often discuss how they did not feel valued or respected but instead were another number to be called and provided the same hard sell script.

This approach relies heavily on having a huge amount of leads, is extremely labour-intensive and is not overly cost-effective in broad business-to-customer marketing campaigns. Attempting the same tactics with specialists is almost destined to fail.

The solution is simply to do the opposite; work with specialist marketing teams who understand the needs of people in your target market and allow them to develop a business relationship which values their time, their expertise and their humanity.

Lack Of Expertise

People can typically tell the difference between a script and genuine insight, and with specialist marketing that can be enough to hamper a company’s credibility with a particular lead.

In many cases with generalised telemarketing, it is an issue of scale, both timescales and the number of operatives needed to contact a broad list of leads.

However, not only does a lack of expertise often lead to strategies that can exacerbate depersonalisation issues, they can reflect poorly on the business as a whole if they are operating within a relatively small industry.

Marketing, sales and customer service staff are often the points of contact for many customers and what they say, how they act and what they know will reflect on the company.

Putting the work in to train staff on the products, services and events they are offering not only helps provide them with enough knowledge to tailor their approach to leads, but it also leads to much more involved and satisfying conversations with potential customers and react appropriately to their needs.

Unclear Goals And Aims

The success or failure of a telemarketing approach will inevitably be shaped by the goals set at the very beginning. It is possible for a telemarketing campaign to generate a long list of high-quality leads but for this not to convert into sales, bookings or attendees.

Whilst this is a problem with any marketing campaign, and a call-to-action (CTA) should be a foundational part of the initial discussions when working with a marketing partner, it can affect specialist sectors more because of the more involved lead generation and nurturing process.

The best goals, as with any other project, follow the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) framework in order to properly ensure that the telemarketing approach agreed to and being followed is successfully meeting the needs of the business.

The easiest way to think about this is to ask oneself a simple question: what does the ideal outcome of a phone call to a potential customer look like?

Short-Term Customer Relationships

If the goal is about more than generating a single sale to a single customer, then your telemarketing approach will need to involve follow-ups, updates and general enquiries that may not necessarily even involve attempts to sell a product.

An approach that is particularly successful with charities is to nurture donors by calling them simply to provide them with good news, discuss news and interesting topics in the field or even just to thank them and let them know where their money is going.

The sciences are as much a research and development dialogue, and nurturing existing leads who have already purchased from you or have registered their interest is critical for recurring sales, something that ultimately is necessary for the long-term success of businesses.