It’s estimated that a sales call by your own sales person costs about $350 per call - regardless of whether or not the sales person makes a sale. It is for this reason that businesses are using telemarketing, direct mail and advertising to reach more customers.

Telemarketing

Selling by phone can put you in contact with more customers than a salesperson can see. A typical telemarketer will make about 20 presentations a day out of about 100 calls. If no sales are made, you can get feedback from the marketplace and fine-tune your message to what customers want.

Telemarketing costs which is estimated to be about $20 per call is another advantage. However, telemarketing will not work by itself. It must be integrated into your overall marketing plan. Telemarketing is a very profitable tool for canvassing sales leads and qualifying prospects. Telemarketing can set up appointments with customers that have expressed interest in your product or services. They can also follow up on dormant accounts and help with account management by maintaining contact with current customers.

The best strategy is to start with a direct mail campaign, followed by telemarketing, and close the sale in person.

What to sell. The more easily understood a product or service is, the better suited it is to telemarketing. Complex or expensive products or services are often impossible to sell over the phone. A products price is also key to successful telemarketing. Products above $1,000 are almost impossible to sell by phone. Items below $100 are prime candidates. Generally prices between $100 and $1,000 are risky. However telemarketers have been successful in selling high price items by quoting prices by the day, week or month to reduce the sting of a high dollar item, and make it attractive for telemarketing. Obviously over a year the total cost generally exceeds $100.

Do it right. Years ago telemarketing was an easy way to rack up sales. Customer resistance was low. However today customers are bombarded with telephone sales call and resistance to telemarketing sales pitches is growing stronger. Buying a few phone lines and hiring people with pleasant voices is not going to make it. Don’t expect to be successful on a shoestring budget.

Telemarketers must be able to withstand pressure and bounce back quickly from rejection. Most telemarketers burn out fast, and those who don’t are prime candidates to be lured away by businesses willing to pay much more money. You’ll be looking for people constantly.

The key to success in telemarketing is training. Poorly trained telemarketers can misuse the telephone by talking too loud, slurring their words, or read the script and not treating it as a guide - which can turn off a potential customer. Good training will teach your people how to project a positive image with their voice, emphasize the benefits to the customer, and turn objections into selling points.

Hire twice the number of telemarketers you will need. Train them and pick the ones that have the potential to become good telemarketers. Pay the telemarketers that you have kept competitive salaries after they have passed the training period. Base their earnings on a flat rate plus incentives for each call made, plus an incentive for each call generating a lead for your salesperson, or a bonus for each order taken.

An alternative would be to hire a telemarketing firm. This is one way of finding out if your product or service can be sold over the phone. Monitor the firm’s efforts closely to ensure the right message is going out, and you are getting the response you are seeking. If the firm is successful then you should weigh the cost of using an outside firm with a comparable system in-house. It may make more sense to leave it with the outside contractor.

Getting Free Publicity

Businesses are gaining valuable sales-building space free in newspapers and magazines. Editors are always looking for information about new products and good feature material and ideas. However it’s important to know what makes a good story. Pertinent information is always welcomed, and it’s extremely rare that a magazine will turn down a good story or refuse to use a new-product release just because you don’t advertise in their publication.

A good feature article must offer information that the newspaper or magazine’s reader will want to read. Such facts come from answering the questions: who? what? where? why? and how? The “how” question is the one editors look for most carefully. How does your product work better? How do you save time or money by using your product or service? How does it improve...?

It’s absolutely essential to understand that your article must show benefits to the reader. The editor or the reader does not care how good your product is. They’re only interested in information that is useful to them.

Make sure your story has something new. Readers are always interested in learning about new products and services.

Keep advertising out of the story. A story loaded with puff and unsubstantiated claims will most likely end up in the trash basket.

Tell about your best-known customers. The more prominent your customer or his company the better. A low budget way to get ideas is to send a questionnaire to your customers and asking them how they use your product or services. The information you receive can be used to show examples of your product or service in use. It may be able to tell you about any changes in trends the market is experiencing - which is also interesting to an editor.

If you can, get the Editor involved by visiting your customer and asking the Editor to write a human interest story.

In preparing your press release, get to your point immediately. Editors want to know what you’re writing about. If they don’t get the point in the first few seconds, they probably will not read further. If possible, also include a photograph. It is also best that you send your releases to publications with readers that would have specific interest in your products or services.

Paid Advertising

Probably the best ads for a business is one that solves a problem, and establishes a bond with your customer. One method is interactive advertising - ads that solicit consumer feedback or responses through business reply cards, toll-free 800 numbers, free product samples, giveaways, etc.

However, you can’t develop an ad campaign until you have done your market research to find out what customers want and what they are about. You will need to study customer habits and their buying patterns.

Yellow Pages

Test have shown that small ads in the Yellow Pages get just as much attention as a full page ad. The reason is that when a customer goes to the Yellow Pages, he or she is ready to buy. And in most cases they are looking to buy from a business closest to their home. Other rationale that customers consider is that if the ad is large, the cost for the service or product is going to be high. If the distance is far, the cost for service could also be high, or it would be inconvenient to travel the distance.

For a service business where the business owner goes to the customer, advertisers will leave out their address, but list several phone numbers, each covering a local area. This gives the impression that the business is near by. For a retail store most of your customers will be near-by and you probably will be successful only in the local phone book. However if your product or service is one-of-a-kind, you will probably want to advertise outside of your immediate area. If you provide delivery or shipping or credit card services, a 800 number outside of your immediate area could be useful in reaching these customers.