How Can You Boost Engagement With Telemarketing Campaigns?

Whilst the old ways may work best in a lot of different markets and industries, specialist telemarketing is not one of them by any stretch of the imagination.

Aside from taking advantage of analytics and a data-driven approach, the growing consensus in telemarketing and telesales is the importance of the personal touch; with patience amongst prospective customers often razor-thin, it is important to treat them as more than just another potential sale.

Our conversational approach to telemarketing has been ahead of the curve in that regard, focused on the customer at every turn, creating enjoyable and engaging discussions that not only have a higher likelihood of converting but also give us a greater natural understanding of pain points and what is necessary to close a sale.

Better engagement is not only great for customers but vital for marketing staff; constant hang-ups can affect morale and productivity, creating a vicious cycle in the process.

With that in mind, here are some of the best ways you can boost engagement with your customers during telemarketing campaigns and prove that you are different to the rest.

Avoid The Obvious Problems

In more broad-based telemarketing, a common issue is that many people will not answer the phone to a cold caller, and the ones that do will hang up before a single word is uttered.

Minimising technical issues, slow redirections and delays between someone answering the phone and a warm, friendly greeting is vital to avoiding people simply hanging up.

Avoid elementary mistakes like mispronouncing names, a cold or insincere tone of address, getting details about the prospective customer wrong or moving aggressively into a sales pitch can lead to very rapid disengagement.

After all, if you are not treating the person on the other end of the line like a human being, why should they?

Ditch The Script

Scripts are easy to teach and can be beneficial to ensure that you cover every aspect of a sales pitch, but in the vast majority of cases, they come off as insincere. Callers are very savvy and sensitive to tone, grammar and insincerity, and can usually tell a scripted conversation from a mile away.

Whilst it is possible to create a more personal-feeling script, it is better to rely on telemarketers who have a personal, engaging tone and can integrate selling points and important information into a more natural conversation.

This is especially important in specialist business-to-business marketing, where everyone is a peer.

Keep Your Intro Short And Sweet

Simplicity is elegance, and that is particularly true with telemarketing calls. The more you respect your customer and their time, the more respect you will get back.

Provide a warm welcome, introduce your company, but try to avoid spending too long on your value proposition.

Follow the elevator pitch or blockbuster movie principle; quickly introduce yourself, your company, the problem your company is there to solve, why you are unique and how you could help your customer more specifically.

The shorter it is, the less you need to rush the details and the warmer and more confident you will come across.

Actively Listen And Empathetically Respond

Conversations are, by definition, two-way streets, and a mistake that a lot of broad-based telemarketing campaigns make is that they attempt to bulldoze their customer and aggressively move towards the conversion part of the sale.

Whilst Glengarry Glen Ross taught salespeople to “always be closing”, that type of aggressive sales pitch usually leads to a caller hanging up rather than a successfully bullied sale. It is also deeply demotivating for staff.

Instead, allow the customer to lead the conversation. Provide an introduction to your life sciences company and the instruments, products and services they provide, but ask about their research or business needs, listen to their queries and empathise with their issues.

If your marketing team has a deep knowledge of their product, they will be able to respond to new pain points naturally, but even demonstrating this empathy means that a customer will feel valued and that their feedback could make a difference and help provide a new product.

Sometimes it is not necessarily the specifics of the product but the willingness to adapt that will ultimately close a sale.

Communicate On The Same Level As The Customer

Successful communication of any kind, whether it is a parent to a child, a teacher to a student or a buyer to a seller, relies on engaging on the same level and not placing yourself above or below them.

Relying heavily on jargon or overly complex technical explanations will only close a sale if the customer wants to know these details and has made it clear that they want that level of detail to see if a product fits very specific needs.

Conversely, being overly reductive can come off as patronising in the wrong circumstances, so a telemarketing expert will know which mode and level to engage with a specific customer.