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Scoring Leads and Other Ideas Make the Most of Telemarketing Solutions

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Scoring Leads and Other Ideas Make the Most of Telemarketing Solutions
 
September 16, 2014

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  By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor
 


As every good salesperson knows, not all leads are created equal. Treating them as if they are is silly: it wastes time and effort, and risks that very hot leads will cool off while sales personnel fruitlessly try to warm up stone-cold leads. For many effective sale organizations, the solution to this is lead scoring, which assigns values to leads and ranks the more high-value ones at the top of a list for sales team members to pursue.


“When done well, lead scoring enables sales teams to become more productive by focusing on those prospects most likely to purchase,” wrote Blair Symes of demand generation solutions provider IfByPhone in a recent article for Business2Community. “It can also help guide marketing in the creation of campaigns that deliver more high-quality leads.”

The latter piece of wisdom should be a given: if you can understand what characteristics the most highly scored leads have in common, you can build campaigns that target companies or individuals who fit this profile.

Following this wisdom means building a telemarketing-based lead-generation program that is based on high levels of knowledge. The solution should draw all available information from valuable sources such as customer relationship management as well as sales databases. It’s even valuable to engage in 100 percent call recording, so the system can use keyword spotting via speech technology to “pull” the most relevant inquiries and turn them into high-value leads.

“Keyword spotting monitors conversations between callers and sales agents for the keywords you determine best indicate a lead’s quality (if the lead says ‘buy’ or ‘pricing’ or ‘appointment,’ for example),” wrote Symes. “It then scores the call based on the appearance and frequency of those words, and who said them.”

Another upside to an automated lead management process is that it makes it easier to attach numbers to the entire sales process, including return on investment (ROI) on any solutions being used, and can help more effectively measure the results from a sales campaign.

One of the most critical elements, however, is tight integration with the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Sales people are not mind-readers or jugglers. The more relevant information they have in one place, the more accurately they can judge the quality of a lead and follow through to turn it into a sale. Solutions such as VanillaSoft offer a compelling amount of integration between the sales process and a company’s CRM product. (The VanillaSoft solution allows customers to easily move data back and forth between their salesforce.com account and their VanillaSoft account, for example.)

In the end, says Symes, the ultimate judge of phone lead quality is whether the caller converted to a sales opportunity or a customer. By ensuring that insides sales teams are using more automated and standardized outbound telemarketing processes, companies can focus their sales efforts where they’re most likely to have a positive effect. 




Edited by Rory J. Thompson

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