The secret to B2B telemarketing success

In a time where most businesses are over reliant on marketing online to attract new customers and encourage them to reach into the business, there is no better time than now to start reaching out to potential customers.

The problem is that online marketing, tends to generate traffic to your website but much of this traffic is lost when visitors leave the site without leaving their contact details. Also, leads generated online, especially if you sell high-value goods and services, tend to be of a variable quality.

Telemarketing is an ideal way of generating high-value and high-quality B2B leads with higher rates of conversion to real sales. For this purpose, telemarketing has a proven track record. But, of course, telemarketing comes with its own challenges.  It can be easy to spend significant sums of money contacting businesses over the phone to identify decision makers and build relationships with them only to find that they have no need for your products/services.

That’s why it’s important to narrowly define your target market and build a list of potential customers who are most likely to do business with you. Once you have a focused target list your budget can be devoted to winning these high-potential customers and getting the best possible return on your investment.

Before you can identify your target market and build a target list you need to be clear on your strategy for business growth. Then you can identify your ideal customers and ensure your telemarketing programme aligns with this.

If you are unsure about your strategy for business growth, you could use a simple model such as the Ansoff Matrix.

To describe alternative business growth strategies, Igor Ansoff presented a matrix that focuses not only on your present products/services and existing customers, but also on your potential products/services and customers (markets).

By widening your opportunities in this way to also include offering new products and services and targeting new markets, there are four possible product/service-market combinations.

A representation of Ansoff’s matrix is shown above

The Ansoff’s product/market grid has two dimensions: products/services and markets and provides four different growth strategies:

Market Penetration – the business seeks to achieve growth with existing products in their current market segments, aiming to increase its market share.

Market Development – the business seeks growth by targeting its existing products to new market segments.

Product Development – the business develops new products targeted to its existing market segments.

Diversification – the business grows by diversifying into new businesses by developing new products for new markets.

Selecting a Product/Service-Market Growth Strategy

This depends on many factors including where your business is in its evolution, how saturated your existing market is, on your view on risk-reward and the potential for product/service development in your business.

The market penetration strategy is the least risky since it leverages many of your existing resources and capabilities. This strategy normally focusses on changing infrequent customers to regular customers and regular customers into heavy clients and can involve volume discounts, bonus cards and customer relationship management. It can also involve attracting customers in your existing markets away from your competitors.

In a growing market, simply maintaining market share will result in growth, and there may exist opportunities to increase market share if competitors reach capacity limits. However, market penetration has limits, and once the market approaches saturation another strategy must be pursued if you are to continue to grow.

Market development options include the pursuit of additional market segments or geographical regions. This strategy focuses on introducing your existing products/services into new markets e.g. foreign markets or to introduce new brand names in a market. The development of new markets for your product/service may be a good strategy if your core competencies are related more to the specific product/service than to your experience with a specific market segment.

Because you are expanding into a new market, a market development strategy typically has more risk than a market penetration strategy.

A product development strategy may be appropriate if your strengths are related to its specific customers rather than to your specific product/services themselves. In this situation, you can leverage your strengths by developing a new product/service targeted to your existing customers. The focus here is often to try to sell other products to (regular) customers. This can be product accessories, add-on services, or completely new products/services. Often existing communication channels are leveraged.

Similar to the case of new market development, new product development carries more risk than simply attempting to increase your market share.

Diversification is the riskiest of the four growth strategies since it requires both product and market development and may be outside your core competencies. In fact, this quadrant of the matrix has been referred to by some as the “suicide cell”. However, diversification may be a reasonable choice if the high risk is compensated by the chance of a high rate of return. It normally relies heavily on “credibility” communication to explain why you are entering new markets with new products/service. Other advantages of diversification include the potential to gain a foothold in an attractive industry and the reduction of overall business portfolio risk.

Although already decades old, the product/service/market grid of Ansoff remains a valuable model for deciding and communicating your business growth strategy.

Once you are clear on your product/service and market strategy for growth, you can then identify your target market or your ideal customers and build a target list for your telemarketing programme.

Where do you start to identify your target market and build a target list?

You should start this process by asking yourself some straightforward questions:

Question 1: Who are my ideal customers?

To identify your target market or your ideal customers you’ll need to consider characteristics such as business sector, geographical location, and number of sites, annual turnover, and number of employees etc. to determine which customers would make the most significant impact on your profitability if they were to do business with you. Then add as many of these customers to your target list.

Question 2: What are the typical buying motives for your products and services?

Customers will buy your products/service only when they are motivated to do so. Customers are motivated to buy things in two ways: either they want to achieve something, e.g. aspirations, goals, plans, or they wish to avoid something, e.g. pain and problems in their business.

You should start by getting closer to your products/service and your existing customers to ensure you understand what your products/services can help your customers achieve and avoid.

You should then target customers who are likely to have these buying motives and add them to your target list.

Question 3: Who are the customers who should buy from me and not my competitors?

It helps to understand the unique selling points of your business (the characteristics that make you better than your competitors) and the benefits of your products and services (the things they will do for your customers that they want done). These are the things that set you apart from the competition. Once you understand this, you should look to identify customers who would be most impressed with your USPs and who would benefit the most from your products/services and add these to your target list.

Also, make sure you get these USPs and benefits across in your advertising and in any telemarketing contacts you have with your target market.

Question 4: Who is not my target market?

There will be some customers who you will not want to do business with or will not want to contact. This could be down to previous experience dealing with a business or people in it, or down to a poor credit rating so they could be the type of customer who could hang around on your debtor sheet or not pay at all. For whatever reason, identify those businesses within your target market that you cannot or wish not to do business with, and delete them from your target list.

Once you have a focussed target list your telemarketing programme can start in earnest. Typically, this would begin with initial calls to your target list to qualify each customer and find out who are the key decision makers, followed by calls to introduce your company, find out about current arrangements and, more importantly, to understand their unique buying motives.

On average it takes 7 contacts (calls and emails) to move a decision maker to a position where they take your introductory call to the position where they agree to a meeting to explore your products/service.

If you can find a way to deliver these contacts, the pipeline will develop and high-quality leads and appointments should come thick and fast!

If you would like support with identifying your target market, building a target list or delivering a telemarketing programme, contact us here: https://www.pdtmarketing.co.uk/contact

Phil Gower

Performance Development & Training Limited – The Telemarketing and Lead Generation Experts

01249 758425

www.pdtmarketing.co.uk

References:

http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_productmarketgrid.html

http://www.quickmba.com/strategy/matrix/ansoff/

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