Telemarketing Software Featured Article

Planning in addition to telemarketing software within any campaign is important, but only if the plan works. That’s why improvisation is just as key.

“Like a jazz musician who continually improvises to capture the riffs of the moment to create an enhanced musical experience, a business makes similar deviations to its marketing plan to capitalize on new opportunities or market fluctuations,” noted Peter Whalen in a recent Huffington Post editorial, a marketing professor at the University of Denver (News - Alert).

Whalen and his colleagues studied when riffing on a marketing plan made sense and when it didn’t, and this can benefit any marketer who is currently considering a deviation from his or her telemarketing campaign.

First of all, don’t riff too much.

“Firms that reported successful outcomes from plan deviations were less likely to make changes very often, while firms that altered marketing plans more frequently were more likely to report unsuccessful outcomes,” noted Whalen.

Second, external factors accounted for nearly two thirds of adjustments, with half of those surveyed reporting that the deviations from plan were intended to alter the value of the product and the way it was promoted, which suggests that these aspects are more likely to be adjusted.

In terms of telemarketing campaigns, this means keeping track of campaign metrics and digging deep into the specifics the agents are encountering so adjustments can be noticed.

The flexible data querying in VanillaSoft’s lead management and phone sales solution is a good example of how to keep on top of the campaign to notice when adjustments need to be made.

The software provides lead management and features such as automated dialing to give telemarketers a leg up, but one area where it really shines is with its data query features. VanillaSoft lets campaign managers slice and dice call data and build queries off of custom fields, call history data and script responses, delivering the insight needed to make plan deviations on the fly.

A third factor when it comes to deviating from plan that might surprise is that the data from Whalen’s research suggested that both the most rigid and the most flexible companies were the least likely to succeed at making adjustments mid-campaign, suggesting that there’s a middle ground between throwing out everything in a plan and being too inflexible.

Finally, a little less surprising is that metrics matter when it comes to making adjustments. Not just metrics to know when to adjust, but also making sure that improvisation can be measured for future assessment on how the adjustments panned out.

Taken together, these insights from the University of Denver study can help guide the way when it comes to whether to stick to the telemarketing campaign plan or alter it mid-stream.