What Types Of Telemarketing Are Best For Life Sciences Orgs?

While telemarketing is a catch-all term for telephone marketing services, it’s important to recognise that not all telemarketing activity is the same. Broadly speaking, telemarketing can be broken down into four different areas: inbound, outbound, lead generation and sales. 

Each is subtly different and therefore the approaches that your telemarketers use will vary depending on who they are speaking to and the purpose of the outreach. In some cases, such as inbound telemarketing, the customer will call you. This naturally means you approach the conversation from a different perspective than if you’re reaching out to a prospective customer.

Within the life sciences industry, some companies have salespeople who handle the sales calls, but they don’t have a large enough team to handle lead generation and nurture too. 

This is where outsourcing life science telemarketing is incredibly valuable. With the right team of professionals making calls on behalf of your organisation, you can be confident that your sales team will have a steady stream of qualified leads to speak to. 

With that in mind, let’s look at what we believe are the three most effective types of telemarketing in the life sciences sector: demand generation (outbound), lead generation and lead qualification and nurture. 

What is demand generation telemarketing? 

Demand generation telemarketing is a form of outbound marketing, where the aim of the campaign is to raise awareness of your product or brand within your target demographic. When these conversations are handled well, they can create engaged potential customers for your organisation. 

The key is not to sell, but to listen with the aim of understanding each person and organisation’s challenges and pain points. This is a highly personalised approach to outbound telemarketing that makes prospects feel heard. 

These conversations are also an excellent opportunity to qualify leads and ensure that those whose details are passed to your sales team are genuinely in a position to benefit from your products and services. 

How is demand generation different from lead generation?

Lead generation is different because it focuses on bringing people into your marketing or sales pipeline, rather than making them aware of your products or services more generally. 

Such conversations are still highly targeted, but with a greater focus on encouraging prospects to take the next step, which is usually booking a sales call. As with demand generation, such calls qualify the people in your pipeline, ensuring that only the most appropriate potential customers are spending time speaking to your sales team. 

In both cases, however, the aim is to build trusting relationships with prospects, which enhances your brand’s credibility and ensures that by the time a prospect reaches a salesperson they are truly ready to buy. 

Research conducted by Mckinsey revealed that B2B customers now engage with ten distinct channels during their buying journey: email, phone, in-person, supplier website, procurement department, e-procurement portal, mobile app, video conference, web chat and web search. 

This is double the number of channels (five) that were identified in 2016. So, you can’t afford to neglect any of these if you want to make sales within the life sciences sector. 

What is lead qualification and nurture?

Lead qualification and nurture is the middle ground between someone becoming aware of your organisation and engaging with you to them speaking to your sales team. 

Lead nurture and qualification involves personalised outreach once someone has expressed an interest in your products or services. So, these leads are people who are already aware of your business and want more information. 

A phone call from an experienced telemarketer at this stage will ensure that only qualified leads get booked into your salespeople’s diaries. But it is also an opportunity to build a personal relationship with each customer.

So, even if they aren’t yet ready to make a purchase, they still have a positive experience of dealing with your business and therefore are more likely to consider you when they are in a position to buy. 

One of the main advantages to using lead nurture in your organisation is that it can shorten your sales cycle by building trusting relationships with your customers quickly – especially when the outreach comes in the form of a phone call. 

However, there are many other advantages to lead nurturing activities, including improving engagement with your marketing campaigns and materials and helping you to remove dormant leads (those that aren’t engaging with your content any longer) from your database. 

All of this results in stronger, more engaged and more qualified prospective buyers reaching your sales team, making it more likely that they will convert them to customers.