Get Your Sales Pipeline Right – Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Telemarketing Company

Sales forecasting is of the utmost importance to almost any sales driven business, because it enables business leaders to formulate an understanding of how their organisation will perform in the coming weeks and months. This, in turn, allows them to make important decisions with at least some idea of what the future holds.

Unfortunately, there is one major issue with sales forecasting: many businesses struggle with it. This means that future projections are unreliable and important decisions may be made against a false backdrop. So, what can your business do to improve the accuracy of its sales pipeline forecast? Simply, you can outsource, what in common parlance you might term “telemarketing”

Throw off your telemarketing preconceptions and shackles!

Many of our clients come to us having searched for telemarketing company or telesales company. It becomes clear quite quickly that their perception of telemarketing has been heavily skewed by the type of telephone based marketing they receive. This of course is entirely understandable. If you Google telemarketing company for instance you will get almost 14,000,000 results! So where do you start.

Perhaps by asking yourself some questions?

What exactly am I looking for?

To merely outsource a ‘process’, or for a business partner that can use telemarketing as just one part of a toolkit to support you, and give visibility of a quantifiable sales pipeline, of a short, medium and long term sales pipeline?

Sure – the process of telemarketing is a chore – so why not outsource it? We might suggest this is entirely the wrong mind-set. If you are just looking to hustle some new leads – any leads perhaps, then find a call centre to blast out a standard message against a long list of contacts. Have you though this might be a triumph of short termism that lay your sales foundation in sand?

Don’t mistake activity for action

It’s certainly tempting if you’re under pressure, to be able to report back that you’ve had thousands of calls hammered out on your behalf. Makes you feel good, right? Perhaps take a deep breath and think again.

Do you want a generalist or a specialist telemarketing company?

Amongst those 14,000,000 telemarketing company responses you will find plenty of call centres who will sell you an input driven, technology and script led approach.

Find a partner whose telemarketing and telesales are designed for companies who need to sell complex products and services to senior decision makers, who combine outbound, unscripted sales and brand advocacy with a bespoke suite of complementary outbound marketing activity that puts prospects at the centre of all activity.