By Amee BellWanzo - The Phone: A Powerful Weapon in your B2B Marketing Arsenal.

1. When most of us think of phone marketing, it’s the consumer variety of
telemarketing – which is much maligned for its dinner-interrupting
tendencies – that comes to mind.
Business-to-business phone marketing, however, is a different animal. It is
a powerful tool, which is often forgotten or underestimated in our marketing
plans. The fact is, in business, people are just as overloaded by marketing
messages as they are at home. A phone call – especially when made by a
knowledgeable professional who is able to establish dialogue – can be the
personal touch your campaign needs to get results.
Adding phone marketing to your B2B campaign plan
Marketing 101 teaches us that campaigns with multiple touches are more
effective. The more times a prospect hears your message, the more likely it is
to generate a response. Particularly if the message is personalized. Touches
frequently come by way of direct mail, broadcast or print advertising, online
advertising, and/or email – but the highly personalized phone component
often does not make it into the marketing plan.
Yet a phone component is the difference between sending messages out
to your customers and waiting for them to get back to you – and having an
immediate, active exchange that allows you to adapt to customer needs in
real time.
So how do you incorporate a phone into a marketing plan? The most common
uses are:
• Lead generation – Broaden your sales team’s efforts at gaining entry
with new prospects. A good phone team employs expertise at getting past
gatekeepers and opening doors for sales meetings. In combination with
a door-opener mail campaign, a phone team can generate a high volume
of leads, and can sometimes even get your sales team in the door with
prospects who have successfully eluded sales meetings for years. Phone
marketing tends to perform well above average for complex sales or big
ticket expenditures, but may not be ideal for making low-cost sales.
• Lead nurturing – Everyone on your list might not be ready for a sale right
now. But they will eventually. Use a phone team to stay with them until they
come to that stage. And you’ll avoid letting prospects fall by the wayside
after you spent time and money to acquire them in the first place.
• List clean and build – So you’ve got a list. Some of it came from a trade
show. Some of it came from your sales team. Some of it was on a five-year-
old prospect list upper management passed down. Part of it has complete
contact info – part, well, doesn’t. Before you spend your money marketing
to this list, have a phone team call through it to fill in holes and update it.
Even if you’ve successfully marketed to a list in the past, it is subject to
attrition. So set yourself up for campaign success by making sure your list is
clean before you spend marketing dollars on it.
• Event support – Have a phone team drive event attendance by calling
with a personal invitation and/or an event reminder. To get the most out of
your event, also have them make followup calls.
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Dialing Up Results
The Phone: a powerful weapon
in your B2B marketing arsenal.
Written by: Amee BellWanzo, Creative Services,
Sudden Impact Marketing, Inc.
• Customer touch programs – So you’ve gathered a prospect’s name at
a tradeshow or taken an order from a new customer. Do not let your contact
fade away. Stay in front of your customers and prospects to win new orders
and cultivate relationships.
In-house or Outsource?
If you currently have facilities, staffing and management for a call team
in-house, you may be able to provision an internal team to test an effort.
On the other hand, outsourcing can allow you to more accurately control
costs, tap into expertise not available in-house, and provide superior results
comparatively. The right outsourced team will be well trained and highly
experienced in making contacts and generating dialogue.
Regardless which direction you choose, run your program for a minimum of
three to four quarters to fairly evaluate the impact on your pipeline.
Scripts
Perhaps the most frequently asked question about phone marketing is, how
do you keep phone people from sounding scripted?
The answer is simple: don’t make people work from scripts. Instead, create
briefs which outline conversation objectives. Thorough training on products,
services, and recognition of pain points and hot buttons will allow your phone
team to have intelligent conversation with prospects.
Listening sells more than talking, and the more equipped your team is to ask
questions and react logically to the information flowing back to them, the
more success you will see from your phone team.
ROI
Like any marketing, phone programs need to be evaluated in terms of ROI.
The ability to examine current marketing and advertising efforts from a cost
per lead, cost per sale perspective is critical in building comparative analysis
across your efforts.
You make the call
Every organization has a need to stay in front of customers and prospects to
win new orders, build business, and cultivate relationships – all of which can
be accomplished with phone marketing. See what a phone component can
add to your next marketing campaign.
Real Results
In three recent lead generation campaigns, followup calls
from a phone team after a door-opener mailer boosted
results to generate serious ROI. Response rates went from:
• .79% with only a mailer to 12.27% with phone calls
• .78% with only a mailer to 12.5% with phone calls
• 1.42% with only a mailer to 15% with phone calls