Telemarketing Software Featured Article

Just as customer communications with contact centers are no longer confined to a single channel anymore, marketing efforts can no longer be stuck in one channel. While “omnichannel,” or the idea of customers beginning a support transaction in one channel and transitioning to others, began in the contact center, it just as easily applies to marketing efforts. If you’re sending a half dozen marketing messages to customers, each different depending on the channel, how do you expect to make sense of such a fragmented campaign? How will you measure the results?

Even if you engage in omnichannel marketing, doing it right is something else entirely. Marketing campaigns have always been complex, but today they may involve outbound telemarketing, email, social media, direct mail, in-store kiosk, mobile app or any other modern method. How do you keep track of such a dizzying array of factors?

Experts say marketing automation is the only way. According to Ben Camerota, president of MVP Visuals blogging recently for Salesforce, sales executives who really want to boost sales will invest in automated marketing systems that can take sales to another level.

“These automated management steps can integrate direct mail, online marketing, advertising, customer service, email marketing, distribution management, and more, leaving you with less to worry about and more to gain,” he wrote. “The idea is to increase marketing productivity, not to spend more money on marketing. If you boost sales while simultaneously reduc[ing] your per-customer marketing expense, you’ll see improvements in bottom-line profit and operating efficiency.”

Automation is a great way to prioritize your sales activities and your marketing dollars. It’s a way to ensure that sales teams are dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s, and that no good leads are getting left behind. Automation is of particular use in telemarketing, which is fast-paced, difficult and sometimes confrontational. Telemarketing agents need to juggle many balls at the same time: engaging the customer from the get-go, listening to and understand his or her problem, making the connection between the customer’s problem and presenting how the company’s products or services are ideal, and overcoming common (or uncommon) objections.  If the outbound telemarketing agent also needs to worry about manual administrative tasks such as dialing, lead management, appointment setting and lead routing, something’s going to get left on the table during the sales process.

Telemarketing solutions providers such as VanillaSoft can automate most of the “housekeeping” processes when it comes to telemarketing, leaving inside sales professionals with more time to sell, and more reminders to sell well. Automated dialing processes take the wasted time and repetition out of the connection process, and automated workflow processes for call follow-up make it easy to properly document customer relationships. The result is more than just increasing the speed at which a salesperson can make calls; it’s increasing productivity while maintaining quality.