Photo Credit: Chad McDonald via Compfight

It’s almost as if people were wishing it were dead!

I suppose if we relate cold calling to our own personal experiences of really bad calls as consumers (usually when you are about to sit down for dinner) then I can relate to people who wish that kind of cold calling dead.  I share that sentiment entirely!

But for b2b cold calling and by this I mean Businesses who want to call other Business to introduce their services or products and generate new leads, enquires, new business, and pipeline then it’s a different story…

B2B Cold Calling is Very Much Alive And Kicking!

It’s such an exciting time for cold calling and business telemarketing in general right now with such a boom and range of activity with social media. People are sharing more and more business information in more and more places. They are also connecting with people on a social level and that’s just Gold to Cold Callers or at least it should be!

The old fashioned and traditional telemarketing companies or inhouse telemarketing teams will really struggle to make up lost ground if they don’t get to grips soon with these platforms for sharing and gaining information and potential prospects and relationship building as part of the cold calling and telemarketing processes.

Here is a quick list of real life scenarios and benefits of social telemarketing:

• Call people who have an immediate need and they are talking about it openly and requesting recommendations
• Calls whizz past the gatekeeper where there is already an online relationship
• Calls can be targeted by geographical locations (thanks to tools such as sproutsocial)
• Potential needs can be qualified before calling to make efficient use of time
• Pipeline can be nurtured both online and offline by phone
• Data is bang up to date as it is real time information and so much more effective than an old and inaccurate data list
• There is an opportunity to contact people who are on CTPS by seeking permission via social networks, email or messaging systems
• Influencers and Decision Makers are more easily identifiable.
• Information on current suppliers or current situation can sometimes be known beforehand giving excellent call preparation

One of the biggest attractions of b2b cold calling is that it enables businesses to go out and win business with their most profitable types of customer.

This has got nothing to do with social media. Even with the growth in social, cold calling as an independent marketing and sales tool delivers on it’s own. If we consider how social media has changed the landscape for cold calling and telemarketing then a few things have happened over recent time:

• Less companies are cold calling due to the boom in social media and this means that good quality cold calls get listened to more than before
• Prospects can check someone’s web presence out online whilst on or just after a cold call

These two things help with reassurance of credibility which used to be one of the biggest barriers of cold calling with businesses being sceptical of being approached by phone. I cannot see the attraction diminishing any time soon of being able to pick up the phone and immediately win work for the best type of customer.  Even with such a broad range of marketing strategies available telemarketing and cold calling still remains one of the most cost effective methods to acquire high quality business with an excellent level of return on investment.

It can also be used to compliment other internet marketing activity such as prioritising people to call from click throughs on web pages or email marketing.

However like any other marketing activity there is still the potential for it to be handled poorly.

Here is my list of poorly handled social telemarketing cold calls:

• Cold calls that ignore CTPS
• Cold calls that target specific lists such as Linkedin Groups or online directories. People are not stupid and know where the caller has got their details from. They will get irritated with online information and connections being abused.
• Cold calls that are poorly targeted and are just telephone spam

As social media grows it will get abused for cold calling. That’s just an unfortunate fact of business life. I hope that companies will continue to report breaches of CTPS even though it takes a bit of time or call them out on social networks to discourage an upsurge in rule breaking and keep a basic level of etiquette in place for telemarketing.

Those that do abuse the opportunities presented to them will quickly see online reputations being damaged. Admittedly there will be some people that don’t care about that too much but I predict that less people will be so flippant about this in future.  I have already seen a few cases at UKBF with a company abusing the business forum for cold calling only to be called out by other forum members. This has left a trail of negative comments about their company right up there at the top of google searches.

Cold Calling isn’t suitable for every type of business but then there are other marketing activities that are not right for everyone either. Telemarketing and Cold Calling in particular should be considered as part of a marketing mix and the modern uses can enhance other marketing activities.

Poor Laura got the boot because of her poor sales performance even though she has a strong track record in real life. She also was a great contributor to the tasks. But none of that matters when it is time for the scores to be announced along with individual sales contribution.

Expectations

If you announce to the world that you are a “Top Salesperson” then there is already an expectation set.  In my business I put myself out there as a Top Telemarketing Agency so obviously there are expectations set already with prospective clients. Sometimes I have to re-set expectations as being perceived as good/great/above average etc doesn’t help for an objective forecast.  It doesn’t make someone a magician and it is important that people spending or investing money have a realistic and objective set of expectations.

Individual focus

If ever there is a time when sales are judged on individual merits to a deadline it is time to dump the “team spirit” mentality to a certain extent and focus on individual action. It is not the time to be schmoozing and asking people “are you having a nice time?”.

When the sales focus is on in real life it is about

*  Preparation

*  Qualifying

*  Asking for the sale

Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing

We see this in all walks of business life and as I type this blog I think about the debates that go on over at UK Business Forums (see post 29) with the inbound marketing versus the outbound marketing people.

Some people concentrate on bringing customers to them via Search Engine Optimisation, converting traffic to enquiries, and generally getting the phone to ring.  For others it is about getting off their butts and marketing directly to the customers they want to do business with.  The rights and wrongs of inbound versus outbound and finding the right balance would make for an enormous blog article but generally it works well where it is a deliberate and well thought out strategy based on key metrics such as Cost-to-acquire.

Unfortunately though, sales strategies can also be influenced by what the small business person is comfortable with.

Some people think that as long as they are in front of the right target audience the sales will come in.

This leads me to thinking that networking, social media, email marketing, and similar easy ways of coming into contact with potential customers is the new “schmoozing”.

I work with lots of businesses where “online schmoozing” is the preferred sales and marketing strategy.

That’s fine if you are a small business that can afford the time and money to fund huge pipeline building on the whim, hope and prayer that sales will come in naturally.

But for the many SME’s that cannot fund that sort of approach …. it’s time to ask for the sale!

Photo Credit: Steven Perez via Compfight

As a general guide I don’t usually encourage leaving voicemail messages for small lists and prefer instead to try to get to talk with the right person.

However, for larger lists leaving voicemails can be an opportunity

Voicemail messages sometimes contain information such as when the person is available in the office to take calls. Sometimes they provide alternative phone numbers such as mobile numbers. They may also give names of other colleagues who you could speak with.

Tips for leaving voicemail messages:

1)   Don’t sound too “yee-ha”

If you are too upbeat and salesy it will make people feel that this is what a call with you will be like with all sell,sell,sell.

2)   Don’t sound you have said it a zillion times already

Put the effort into making the message sound more personable, specialised and unique to them.

3)   Tease but don’t slime

This is really difficult to not sound slimey and slippery with your message but give enough information that comes across genuine, helpful, sincere and special without giving everything away and therefore no reason to call you back.

Professional telemarketing means putting in the effort to pre-qualify leads before calling not spamming as many people as possible with a boring and irrelevant message. Provided you have done your homework then it can work really well to leave a positive, informative voicemail message encouraging a call back for a discussion with you.

Why give it a go and see what happens?

Remember to be prepared for inbound calls as if someone calls and they get your voicemail or worse it doesn’t get answered at all, then the prospect is unlikely to try again and your hard work with your voicemail messages will have been in vain.

Copy of post from UKBF Marketplace Ad

*  600 Telemarketing calls (200 per month for 3 months)
*  Lead generation for appointment setting for free site surveys and quotes for services
*  Build up high quality email marketing list where prospects request to receive information by email.
*  Free data to support the campaign by industry (food outlets, care homes, agricultural, hotels, etc) with contact names and CTPS checks
*  HTML designed bulk email template with email messages x 6 over the 3 months with analytics on open rates, clickthroughs, invalid and bounces for correction.
*  Inbound call handling to support the campaign with dedicated phone number and up to 50 free calls per month included in the price.
*  Social Telemarketing (basic plan) for opportunities for calling identified via social networks using media alerts
*  Full management reporting of all conversations with narrative for improvements to marketing messages and activity.
*  Completely free web based CRM system set up with a login to see activity at any time and work collaboratively with emails, lead notes etc.
*  Leads and appointments communicated real time via email or text alerts or phone call to you if at short notice.
*  Marketing consultancy via telephone or skype with me x 4 half hour sessions for review and improvement. First session is prior to the start.

The price of the package is £600 payable over 3 months at £200 per month.

Notes & Conditions

Unfortunately this offer excludes companies who wish to target Cambs, Essex, Surrey, Manchester & Bolton.

You must have a website up and running that prospective customers can refer to.

This is on a first come first serve basis and the offer is subject to availability due to capacity contraints. I expect to only be able to take on 5 campaigns.

This offer may be withdrawn if availability is filled via our other advertising activity.

At the end of the campaign all data and CRM is handed over to you completely.

If you are interested, please give me a call on 01480 878082 and quote reference UKBFPEST

When I say index your phone number I mean to make this a specific keyword or phrase that is found by search engines. In the screenshot above I have used our phone number 01480 878082 for illustration purposes.

People will do a google search for phone numbers and it’s important that the results return something relevant and professional.

If a phone number has been displayed via CLI on an outbound telemarketing call, the person being called may exercise discretion as to whether to pick up and answer there and then or let it go to voicemail.

Anonymous calls are less likely to get answered and calls with a phone number displayed get answered more frequently.

If someone misses a call from a displayed phone number they may decide to perform a search for the number that called them. If the results look interesting, they are more likely to call back.

It also helps even if they don’t call back immediately. Next time the telemarketing call is made the person remembers the company that they looked up and is more likely to answer the call.

Having a local number displayed can be powerful too as it lets the people you are calling know you are a local caller. Obviously with the flexibility of VOIP solutions you may not actually be that local to them but just serving that local area.

Indexing your phone number is very easy and inexpensive to do. Maybe you have a contact us page. Make sure you put the phone number in the first section of the paragraph that is being indexed rather than a long way down a pile of text. This way it is likely to get displayed in the little summary that you see when viewing google results.

You can vanity check your phone number yourself by just typing it into Google and see what comes up.

So hopefully you can see how indexing your phone number can help improve telemarketing results from encouraging call backs in to your business from outbound telemarketing calls, and improve the rate of contact attempts to conversations, as well as improving your internet marketing.

This was followed by a load of impersonal comments saying “I’m sorry you feel that way please email us at xzy@blahblah.. or log your issue at domainname.com/issues”

This type of twitter timeline gives a big loud message that the company has a bad reputation for customer service!

Now if you are in an organisation that has an embarrassing ratio of poor customer experiences versus good ones then please remember that a twitter account with just grumbles, complaints and frustrated customers will advertise that fact!

It needs to be dealt with not re-directed somewhere else.

Tweet such as “I’m sorry you feel this way but please raise the issue with us another way” when out of balance with good feedback is just like saying “We are on twitter to tell you to shut up and don’t talk about your issues here”.

If it is balanced with good feedback then people reading the twitter timeline are likely to feel that the organisation is transparent and trustworthy and bad feedback alongside the good is to be expected.

Of course I can understand the organisation wanting to catch and redirect the complaints but when this is so obvious and out of balance with good feedback it doesn’t portray a very good image.

The real point with the timeline that I viewed is that I had no idea the company I was looking at had such a bad reputation until I looked at their twitter account. This brings me onto my second point and that is why advertise how bad you are unless you want more people to know?

For any organisations out there who have been persuaded into thinking a twitter account for purely customer service issues is a good idea let me tell you that it really isn’t a good idea and I’m sure you are feeling the pain of this decision.

Customers want resolutions whether that is by phone, by tweet, by email, by ticketing systems or online chat or by carrier pigeon. It’s the resolution that is needed and that does not take priority over the method of communication.

It’s a much better idea to actually sort the dissatisfaction issues out at root cause rather than try to catch and re-direct them via twitter and hope that nobody notices.

What do you think? Are you put off by seeing a twitter feed of bad service mentions? Is it enough that the company is on twitter?

Anonymous or Real?

This is the first question to ask yourself and the answer you come up with will tend to be aligned with your objectives. If you are intending to use a business forum for lead generation then my advice would be to be open and transparent where you can. This is simply because people like to know who they are conversing with and potentially likely to do business with.  The rest of this article is based on being real rather than anonymous.

Tip 1 – Think about your profile

People will sometimes view a profile before clicking a link through a web page. Therefore it is important that this gives enough information for people to get a good first impression and also what is the best route to follow to find out more about you and contact you. Tell people what you are best at, what offers you currently have running and provide links to find out more about products and services.

Tip 2:  Link to Landing page

You can usually have a link to a web page from your forum profile so make the most of this as people will click on this after reading your posts to find out what you do for a living or what service or products you provide. The easiest and most basic thing is to have a link to your Homepage but you might also want to have a think about a more specific landing page. This could be a different page of your website but it could also be a squeeze page, or a more custom greeting page for your forum visitors. It could even be a page to your public linked in profile or your youtube channel or facebook page … the choice is yours. Experiment and see what works best for you.

Tip 3:  Reputation

Reputation is pretty much everything on business forums. If you get a reputation early on for being argumentative or a bit of a spammer or someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about then it can be difficult to shake that reputation off and build credibility later on down the line. When you first join a forum it is a good idea to have a read of the rules as these will vary from forum to forum and decide what reputation you would like to build for yourself from the start. My general advice is that quality is better than quantity.

Tip 4:  Search out relevant posts quickly to spend more time on quality

Quite a lot of forums have an ‘Advanced Search’ tool and you can use this to find conversations by key words and phrases either by post mentioning those things or by title. This is a short cut way to find all posts by key words. The more time you cut out finding relevant posts the more time you will have to devote to quality postings

Tip 5:  Community Spirit

Forums can foster a fantastic level of community spirit but you need to get a feel for this within the forum in terms of “how things work around here”.  The rules are a good place to start but also reading through past threads to get a feel for what types of posts are most welcome and unwelcome by other members. Charging into posts spamming your product or service or slagging off a competitor (or even another forum member) is generally not seen as cricket ie; not the done thing.  Notice too whether people tend to post pictures of themselves as avatars or their company logo.  Try not to embellish the truth too much either as forum members tend to sniff out BS fairly quickly.

Tip 5:  Personality

Business forums don’t usually carry conversation in the context of “The Royal We” ie; “We do this, We do that” and posting style is usually as a person talking about their company or product or service so “I” is generally better than “We” for showing personality, being human, and having a human opinion and advice to offer. People like to do business with people they like so be careful not to be too corporate or too cold. At UKBF there is a lively “Time Out” thread where members post about all sorts of non business stuff. These parts of the forum are just as important for relationship building sometimes than other parts of the main forums and sometimes get forgotten about when it comes to lead generation.  Simply connecting and conversing with people will lead to click throughs onto your user profile and possibly an enquiry being made for products or services. This can come from simply just having a bit of a laugh or posting in a manner than is helpful and not at all promotional.

Tip 6:  Ask for referrals in a non spammy way.

There are sometimes opportunities within conversation on threads to ask for referrals in a non spammy way. This may be where talking through a business issue or an area of growth for your business. You can still usually drop things into conversation provided that you are not peddling your wares too much. This is a bit of a grey area usually and the area that a lot of people struggle with finding a balance so if in doubt err on the side of caution. Smileys don’t make self promotion ok with the moderation team usually either

Tip 7:  Good use of signatures

These appear under the bottom of every single post you make across every sub forum so put these to good use!  Sometimes people will have a cheesy quote or just a web address or telephone number but both of these miss the mark of opportunity.

For paid up members these can be highly sought after quality backlinks so use of words and phrases as part of an SEO strategy is something to think about here.

For free members it can be a good idea to have something that entices people to find out more such as “Newly released tips for xyz now available at our website” that is much more compelling than just simply writing the web address.

Tip 8:  Post Titles & Tags

If your forum has these then make use of them when posting. These help the content to be easily found in search engines. Apart from that it helps draw members attention to your posts.

Tip 9:  The Wider Audience

It’s very easy on forums to think that your posts are usually only seen by other forum members and to write posts in a manner that suits that particular forum however there is a hugely wider audience to consider and that is the people who will find you via search engines. Many forums also have what are called “lurkers” which are people who read but don’t post much. Think about the lurkers and the search engines when you are posting if this is part of your lead generation strategy too.

Tip 10:  Links within posts

Everyone wants links through to their blog, website, linkedin page, facebook page etc and quite often there are opportunities to do this from within your forum posts. The main point here is absolutely to resist the temptation to do this in a spammy and self promotional way. You can usually only get away with this if it is helpful, useful and not advertising or promoting yourself overtly. If you get this wrong then you can expect for other members to report you as self promoting and you don’t want this because  you will end up getting banned, warned or lose credibility within the forum community so be careful.  It’s also a little bit like the boy who cried wolf. If you are always posting links then they won’t be seen as special enough to click on them. Otherwise you will have to work really hard to make them decent enough in terms of content for people to think “Oh here’s a link posted by XXX I bet that will be worth looking at”.  Choose wisely before link dropping.

Tip 11:  Make it easy for people to understand what you do

Besides the profile and signature make it easy for people to get an impression of what you do and what benefit you bring to others. You can make the most of opportunities to do this in a helpful and a way that gives advice but not self promoting.   If this means taking time to write a post rather than copy and paste a section of your blog then take the time if you want to get responses or build credibility.

Tip 12:  Don’t do’s

Quick summary of things not to do…. Don’t flame, troll, get angry or argumentative, be rude, slag off competitors or other suppliers unnecessarily, make claims that embellish the truth, blatantly self promote, be too sarcastic etc.  All of these things are because  you will either upset the community or you will not portray a good impression of yourself to the wider audience.

I hope you find these tips useful and feel free to add some more of your own …

However this company has gone through an internal re-structure recently and apparently the account managers no longer are allowed to take inbound sales call enquiries.

That’s OK, I guess the restructure is all for the good of operational efficiency.

Hmm … but the inbound sales team can’t handle the call very well. Their product knowledge is weak, they don’t really understand the jargon and day to day use of their product and how new potential customers can benefit.

So my recent referrals have come back to me with “Why are you recommending them? They are a joke?”

I will stop recommending them now until they get their act together as quite frankly I cannot be bothered to do their job for them.

Obviously there is a “bedding in” period with any change and restructure but potential new customers should be protected from this where ever possible.

Taking the drastic step of not ALLOWING someone to speak to a potential customer is going a bit too far really if for an interim period they are the people with the knowledge and skill to handle the call properly whilst the new call handlers develop their competence.

I have probably referred about 5 clients in the past 5 months. So by not handling that one particular call they will probably miss out on a further 20 referrals from me. And the clients I refer usually have their own customers to refer too and so it snowballs.

So this is a plea to let whoever is the best person to handle the call do so whilst new teams develop their skills and don’t impact on customers negatively unless you really really have to.

I like it’s huge appeal for different age groups as younger members in the family get just as much fun as the older members.

However… parents please be careful of the Random game creation..

It is quite easy for someone to click on Random instead of Username when creating a new game.

If this happens then you may end up playing a game with a random person. That has certain appeal but for young children may not be a wise idea.

I did this myself by accident as my fat fingers hit Random by mistake and I went through the process of drawing something as I couldn’t find a way to quit the game that I had created.

Imagine my shock when the person guessed my picture but added some rather disgusting and lewd sexual remarks in the comments attached to the drawing in return for me to see. Their picture that they drew for me to guess was certainly not for a younger audience. I am thankful it was me that made this mistake and not my young daughter.

If anyone from OMGPOP, Zynga, Getsatisfaction or whoever is able to influence and develop this app is reading … please add a function to disable the Random game creation so that younger people can play without risk of being upset.

And whilst you are at it, is there a way to block or report abuse from a username?

Thanks

Background

Well known brand has a relatively new retail store in the local area. The launch about a year ago involved much razzle-dazzle with hot air balloons and girls in promotional t-shirts.  There were lots of special offers and discounts during the launch and immediately post-launch of this branch. They attracted exactly the type of target audience and ideal clients and all was going swimmingly.

Objectives of the Marketing Task

A branch manager decided to send an email to all of his account customers for two reasons. Firstly to ask for feedback from them either positive or negative. Secondly because he wanted to increase sales in that particular store. It later transpired he had been encouraged to do this by Head Office as 80% of the business came from 20% of the customers. Smart logic to look after existing valuable customers. Not so smart to delegate responsibility to someone lacking in the skills, knowledge and support to do it satisfactorily.

Human Error

Unfortunately the email was sent to 500 recipients in a manner where everyone saw the list of email recipients. This was a case of putting all addresses into the To: field rather than in the BCC: field. A basic and simple mistake to make.

What Happened Next

A series of emails exploded from disgruntled recipients mentioning breach of their data under Data Protection Act and the Privacy of Electronic Communications Act.  Unfortunately people replying to the emails would hit the ‘reply all’ function so all of the 500 recipients were getting all of the email trail. The branch manager was clearly out of control and sent an apology email explaining the wrong button was pressed but by that time the email list was calling for compensation, discounts, and venting their anger.

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO PRESSED THE BUTTON AS KEY CUSTOMERS ARE NOW VERY UPSET!

Now we all know that these things happen. Or do they?  This was completely preventable.

You wouldn’t give all staff access to the company bank account would you?

It never ceases to amaze me that companies will put in all sorts of controls to protect the company assets. Things such as copyright, intellectual property rights. Then there are the enormous amounts of financial controls in place such as cheque signatories, who can sign off expenses, who can make decisions on pricing and discounts, or credit limits or who hold the keys to the building. These are just a few examples but I am sure you can think of all the other controls you would expect to find that protect a company from financial loss.

Where is the control for bulk email marketing?

Quick calculation says that if the average spend of these customers per year was £20k x 500 = £10m.  20% of upset customers equals a loss of £2m.  What is the marketing budget likely to have to be to replace those customers and deliver the same level of profit?  Remember this was a local branch so the geographical target audience is restricted by territory and fairly small population.

Sympathy for the mistake?

Whilst I have sympathy for the branch manager trying to do what he was asked to do I am afraid I don’t have much sympathy for the damage to the brand locally. I have an impression of this large corporate business now that it does not care very much for their employees if it puts them under unfair pressure to deliver objectives without the right level of skill, support, training, knowledge or tools.

And furthermore I have the impression now that they cannot care about their end customers very much if they are so happy to delegate responsibility like this on a whim without consideration for the things that can go wrong, how to mitigate any risks, how to portray their company in the best light, and essentially deliver a good customer experience.

Sales are from marketing, listening, and delivering service not through spamming!

It must have taken a considerable amount of effort, time and money to get the branch to a successful local position yet the desire to increase sales was seemingly more important than caring enough to treat the customer base with the respect.

Is this a case of encouraging the wrong behaviour?

I would be really interested to know what this branch managers targets were and whether their was one target that was more dominant than any others.  I am placing a bet here that the sales target was responsible for driving the wrong behaviour. Pressure and panic can very easily lead to not asking for help or checking you know what you are doing.

What good are skills at Head Office if they are not offering support at the coal face?

A quick search online returns results a raft of vacancies at head office calling for high quality skill and experience but what good is that if the skills are not directed in the appropriate areas of the business?  This branch manager was clearly out on a limb. If he was a ‘rogue employee’ then controls were lacking. If he was simply trying his best to achieve a target then it’s the leadership that was lacking.

You can tell I have quite strong opinions on this but I really do find it incredible that mistakes like this can happen. It’s a smack in the face for the value that some companies put on the value of the customer base. In a recession it’s even more important than ever to have a brand built on the qualities you regularly deliver against objectives that are set. It undoes so much hard work to get remembered for something negative over and above the many positive experiences.

Final thoughts ..

For what it’s worth I did call the branch manager and offer free advice and support. I have recommended some reputable and free or low cost bulk emailing tools and customer survey tools for future use, talked him through the key points with email marketing and conducting satisfaction surveys.  I didn’t do this to get work but simply to help someone out who I thought had got themselves in a bit of a sticky situation.

What would you have done? And are mistakes like this preventable?