The Building Blocks of Telemarketing

Some companies know little about telemarketing. They are clueless on what composes it and how it functions. As a matter of fact, possessing quality sales leads and qualified appointments is what they care the most. For others, they have seen every piece of detail and thus have an organized idea of what's inside the telemarketing process.

The main building blocks of telemarketing are contact database, cold-calling and appointment setting. These three are mutually dependent with each other. Therefore, the absence of one thing leads to useless pursuit. Try removing contact database. Who would you cold-call or make an appointment? How about eliminating cold-calling? By doing so, can you schedule a sales meeting? Try taking away appointment setting and you just have wasted time, money and effort for nothing.

Contact Database. Telemarketers, through the works of the researchers can only make phone calls when there is a list of potential prospects. This telemarketing lists are placed in a pipeline for security purposes and easy retrieval. Information present in the contact includes personal profile of a customer, namely company name, position, contact number, address and so on.

Cold-calling. The fulfillment of having a contacts list is the start of cold-calling. Telemarketers, called cold-callers, dials the phone numbers of potential sales leads to confirm if a prospect is interested in a product offering or for a particular service. Then, they qualify them through further queries by professionally asking the BANT mnemonics, which stands for budget, authority, need and time. Once these four exist, prospects are deemed qualified.

Appointment Setting. The toughest part in any lead generation program is appointment making. Appointment setters call qualified sales leads and showcase product and/or service proposal to the latter. If the prospect approves, the telemarketer schedules a meeting between a sales representative and the said customer.