Telemarketing Software Featured Article

In many companies, the sales, marketing and contact center departments seem to work in a vacuum, very much apart from one another. While the contact center is busy trying to overcome silos of customer information and communications channels so they can be true multimedia customer support centers, fewer companies are trying to eliminate the silos that represent individual departments.

This is typical across many organizations. According to a recent article by Jennifer Watkiss on Business2Community, one survey found that 87 percent of the terms sales and marketing departments within organizations use to describe one another are negative. This is a shame, because of the potential synergy between the two. The same study found that sales cycles can be shortened by 23 percent when sales and marketing work together to co-develop marketing content in lead-nurturing programs. A critical element of this is the contact center.

Contact centers understand customers better than anyone in the organization, perhaps even better than dedicated sales departments. They speak to customers every day, and they generally get “the true face” of the customer more readily. They can provide leads to the sales department, and they can offer product-focused insight to marketing to allow the latter to gain a better understanding of what customers want.

In very successful organizations, marketing, sales and the contact center even share technology. The customer relationship management (CRM) solution should be a cross-department platform that is regularly updated and viewed by all three departments. By doing this, a company can ensure that regardless of who “touches” the customer, he or she has a complete picture of the customer’s relationship with the organization (nothing turns a customer off more than a feeling that one hand of a company doesn’t know what the other is doing).

Telemarketing solutions are another technology that, when used to their best capacity, can benefit all three departments. The ability to boost the number of outbound calls and the likelihood of reaching the right people – a hallmark of a good telemarketing solution – can offer multiple benefits. The marketing department can use the technology for customer surveying, or direct marketing efforts. The contact center, of course, can act as an inside sales team to gather leads using outbound telemarketing methods. And the sales team can reach many more people each day with a good telemarketing solution.

Solutions such as those from VanillaSoft offer a number of other perks that can be helpful to all three departments, such as appointment setting. They can help guide the sales process, keep track of and prioritize leads, shift the focus for the sales team according to standards set by sales management, allow marketing to effectively survey customers and share the pertinent information with sales and the contact center and keep sales personnel up-to-date with customer and prospect information.