Tracking What Works in Sales

Coming up with the right approach to sales may be as important to your bottom line as developing a winning product. This can be a long and expensive process if you don't have a good tracking system in place. Outbound telemarketing allows you to systematically test sales approaches to ensure your customers don't end up missing that great product.

Telemarketing is one way to easily reproduce a sale scenario many times over and it's 100 percent trackable. This allows you to try a variety of different approaches and compare their results side by side. This works for business to business products as well as consumer products. Consider a company introducing a new brand of multivitamins. They may have a list of health benefits associated with their product and a range of potential customers they may want to target. With telemarketing you can target different age groups, different ethnic and language groups, or different geographic regions. You can easily vary the sales pitch call specialists use to determine which attributes of your product most people find compelling.

Some companies are hesitant to use telemarketing services because of perceived high opt-out rates. But consider the cost difference of working through a call list to buying TV or billboard ad space. The percentage of contacts who response positively with direct calling soars compared to those who see a billboard and choose to call in -- both as a percentage of impressions and in dollars spent on the campaign. And unlike a TV ad or billboard, a telemarketing campaign can change directions almost instantly as your relationship with your customers comes more into focus.

An outbound telemarketing campaign gives you a great deal of feedback even when the contact chooses not to buy from you. Once you learn what kinds of messages work over the phone you can use this collected data to create effective marketing material for other mediums you are pursuing as well.

Telemarketing is a relatively low tech, inexpensive, but incredibly effective mode of conducting market research and of making high volumes of sales.