We use telemarketing lead generation as a way to find clients who meet our customer criteria. What does this mean? Simply that we are looking for people who have the potential to buy from us.
Consider these:
- Income? Do your clients need to have a certain income level? If they do decide to buy from you in the future, will they need to apply for finance? If they will then you will need clients who work full time, so they get approved on finance.
- Sex. Does your product or service only apply to one sex or another? Or can you sell to anyone?
- Age. Is a clents age relevant to you? If you are selling a product for retirees or the aged, then you may only be searchiong for people over a certain age.
- Home Owner? If your product is for the home, you may only want to speak to home owners.
- Children? Is your product for children? If it is, then you only want to speak with clients who have kids…
- Anything specific to your industry…e.g. Do they already have an alarm, insulation, cladding or whatever it is you are selling? Now we know who we are looking for, let’s look at what I believe is the best way to use Telemarketing for Lead Generation.
Tele-Questionnaires
The concept of a Tele-questionnaire as a form of Telemarketing Lead generation is simple. We cold call people who have never spoken to us before, we conduct a quick market research survey and we qualify the client.
At the end of this process we have a qualified lead who is now thinking about our product.
Let me show you how Telemarketing Lead generation like this works…..
Introduction
Hi, my name is Cathy and I’m calling from (company name), how are you today?
Great. We are just conducting a very quick market research survey which will only take two minutes of your time. It is mostly “yes” or “no” questions…..so can I ask you…
Questions
Here we insert about 5 or 6 questions relevant to your industry. If for instance we were talking about security we could ask:
- Do you think the crime rate in your area is better or worse over the last 5 years?
- Have you or anyone you know ever been robbed?
Or if we were an educational software company we could ask:
- What do you think of the class sizes at your children’s school?
- Do you think that children get too much homework these days?
I hope you are noticing that the questions are not in any way about our product. During this call we will not mention our product or service at all. We are not selling here…we are telemarketing lead generating.
The questions should be designed to get your client thinking about your industry and should be giving you some information that will help you to establish their particular need for when you next contact them.
Qualify
Now we need to make sure that this person has the potential to become one of our clients. So we would say something like this:
That’s the end of the survey. Now just for demographic purposes can I ask you…..
Here you insert questions that help you qualify your clients. Lets go back to the alarm example. Lets say that to buy our alarm, we know most clients use finance. We would ask questions like:
- Do you fall into the age category of 18 – 55 or over 55 years?
- Do you own your home or are you renting?
- What type of work do you do?
These questions help us to see if this person “could” buy from us. It tells us if they have the financial capacity, if they have a good chance of getting approved on finance and if they own their own home (most renters wouldn’t buy security for their home)
When using telemarketing lead generation I often recommend leaving your company details with the client so they know it is a genuine call. In fact doing this prior to asking the questions will help your client to feel more comfortable answering your questions.
Now we have a qualified lead. I recommend calling them back in 3 – 10 days with your offer.
The advantage here is that we have slowed down the sales process to suit a clients comfort level.
By making this short and assumptive questionnaire call we make it easy for the customer to take part in the survey. A two minute, easy call is hard to say no to.
Now when we call back in a few days we are making a warm call. The client should remember speaking to us before and be open to hearing our offer. That is the benefit of Telemarketing Lead Generation!!
