A telemarketing service is a quick and affordable method that uses the telephone to contact prospective customers in order to help generate leads, make sales along with gathering marketing information. Besides agents calling directly, pre-recorded sales talk is also used to be played over the phone upon automated dialing. It is a highly interactive tool that is used by various companies to make sales by contacting customers.

Telemarketing is also considered as an effective marketing technique that comes action-packed with tons of advantages irrespective of whether you run a small business or is the head of a multinational corporation. It’s main advantage, as we all know, is gauging the interest of your customers immediately in your company’s product or service. Its other benefits include-

a) Generating leads and appointments.

b) Help create rapport with your customers.

c) Promotions go non-stop 24 hours a day.

d) Provide direct feedback from the customers.

e) Efficient with cross-selling and up-selling.

f) Helps expand your sales territory.

And a plenty more. However, the common misconception that most people hold in their mind is that telemarketing is only limited to cold calling sales activities and nothing else. But trust me, this is just the tip of the iceberg, there’s much more than what meets the eye. There are a number of ways you can use telemarketing to turn various opportunities into business. Let’s learn about a few,

1. Customer Support

Telemarketers can be effectively used to offer customer support service to your clients in order to sort out their complaints and queries. Just make sure your agents know how to address the issue properly as bad reputation often has a way of traveling faster than its good counterpart.

2. Debt Collection

We all know how overdue payments and outstanding invoices has a way of crippling a business and hindering its progress. But a team of telemarketers can go through your debtors’ list to identify defaulters who owe money to your organization also ensuring that you have the current contact details for them. After that, your telemarketing team can send reminders and start the recovery process.

3. Launching Products

While planning to launch a new product or service into the market, it always comes in handy to do a survey by phone of potential customers beforehand in order to learn their opinions and understand their demands before you go into production. Not only that, you can even call your existing customers to know their thoughts on this matter as well.

4. Market Research

Market Research is another one of telemarketing’s time-tested features. Apart from using it for customer feedback and product review (as we have learned above), telemarketing, with the help of latest integrated technology, can also be used for collecting a full range of qualitative and quantitative data that includes everything from small executive level surveying to gathering customer feedback on a national scale.

5. Soft Lead Generation

Soft lead generation is basically the way of determining if the prospect shows any future promises of doing business with your company or not. This is done with the help of an approach that is tightly scripted along with preparing a list of relevant profiling questions to be asked before finalizing leads. This soft-sell approach is turning out to be more successful than an overt sales approach.

6. Seminar Reminder

In case you are holding a seminar, having a telemarketing team at your side will greatly assist you by calling the attendees the day before in order to reconfirm the starting time and the venue. Once the agents start calling, you will be surprised to know how many of them have already forgotten about the seminar and the related details.

7. Data Cleaning

In today’s fast-paced world, we know how quickly the information in our database goes out of date. However, an expert telemarketing team can easily go through your data, allowing you to edit, delete or amend the details of your existing customers as per the requirements. And since it is also a legal requirement in many sectors, so you can easily keep your nose clean with industry regulations.

8. Assisting Retailers

If you happen to be in retail business, you can always put your telecallers with the task of checking up on store managers to know about how your goods are selling in the market and depending on their answers, you can offer them a demo or some advertising materials to display in order to help them increase sales. This act on your behalf will go a long way into strengthening relationships.

Conclusion:

This is just a small list that I presented above, but you can also use telemarketing to promote events, trade shows, winning back your non-active customers, selling advertisement space by designing a campaign, informing your customers of new developments and much, much more. Telemarketing isn’t what it used to be in the past, use it wisely and it can permanently change your entire business for the better.