After qualifying so many sales leads, you would normally want to get a closed deal out of every one. Your IT company needs as many chances to keep working and therefore, keep running. It would sound like a crazy idea to suddenly have them all your sales leads at each other’s throats and offering your software to the one standing at the top.

Sometimes One Worthy Client Is Better Than Numerous Sales Leads

However, what if your company has already reached a point that you are not looking for many sales leads but just the right one? Well, first, you need to know if you really have that right:

• You have plenty experience in the industry – You are not a startup anymore. You have been in the business of developing and implementing IT solutions for years now. Some of the sales leads you used to accept before are no longer sufficient now because your experience has taught you better on which ones to really work with.

• Your technology is nothing to scoff at – You may have exaggerated on occasion to acquire your IT leads but now, your products truly speak for themselves. Your lead generation strategy does not rely on cheap marketing tactics for attention. Attention is gained by simply presenting the product (and thoroughly qualifying your sales leads straight afterwards).

Relate Content: Real Financial Sales Leads Are Drawn With Real Offers

• You have something special for the winner – Another thing that attracts so many sales leads is the fact that you value the very thing the whole IT industry values: innovation. However, on the business side of things, sometimes your IT solution is the equivalent to a powerful weapon in sci-fi movies. A good inventor knows the right person to entrust it and having your IT sales leads compete for it is only natural.

• You are transparent with all the above reasons (and more) – Finally, all your prospects are aware of why you are having them fight over something. And even if it all starts as some secret contest, you eventually come out with the truth. These are all still sales leads after all and you have a responsibility to treat them professionally.

Related Content: Treat Your Sales Leads Professionally, Not Dramatically

To summarize, you have to make sure that you have generated enough sales leads before to present yourself as a credible industry leader as well as explain why you thought it was the best way to qualify this particular set of sales leads this way. It might not always be good to have your sales leads compete, but when it is, make sure it is for reasons of higher priority than just IT lead generation!

So who’s responsible for setting business appointments? Is it a phone call? Is it an email message? No, the answer is people. People are responsible for making your calls; people are the ones who send out your emails. So in order for your lead generation campaign to succeed, you need to have the right kind of people in your company.

Generating leads through appointment setting is one of the best ways to go about things in the world of B2B. As said above, your campaign is going to be better when you have the right kind of people working for you.

Here are the different kinds of people you want as part of your appointment setting campaign:

1. The hard workers – The title is pretty self-explanatory. These are the people in your team that come in real early and start prepping their needed tools. These are the guys and gals who go the extra mile and leave the office real late – even willing to go on overtime to meet production or go over the quota.

2. The problem solvers – These are the people that try their best to provide the best solutions to your prospects. As part of your lead generation program, these people are the ones who will try hardest to understand the critical issues that your prospects have within their company so that they can retort with an effective solution to the problem.

3. The relationship builders – Once again a self-explanatory title. These groups of people are the ones that focus on building relationships between you and your prospects. Well, it may not be your company that is establishing a relationship with your prospects but rather your inside sales reps are. Relationship builders are the ones who will be most beneficial when you do lead nurturing.

There are always different kinds of people in the workplace. We have funny ones, dull ones, and even ones that turn the whole office inside and out. Results in appointment setting can vary on your staff though so it is best that you have different kinds of people with unique traits as part of your team.

So what do you think about these kinds of people and having them as part of your appointment setting team? Want to see results? If yes, then look for these traits in order to make your campaign bloom!

Once prospects start trusting your software company it naturally becomes easier to attract new business as well as to generate new software sales leads, like SAP leads or medical software leads. But what about when you are calling prospects that hasn’t heard of your business yet? How are you to approach them?

The trick to successful software lead generation through telemarketing is to build your credibility when you make contact with your target prospects. Here are some tips to helping you do better in telemarketing and in sounding more credible.

1. Be ready all the time – Make sure that your telemarketers know everything about your product and your target market, as well as to what line of business your prospects are in. This helps your team be more confident when they are calling prospects because they have all the product knowledge and information they need to be able to have meaningful discussions with prospects. And obviously, this helps to make you sound more credible when you do cold calling.

2. Say your name and company name – We cannot forget the value that introductions have in telemarketing. I mean, why wouldn’t you mention your name and company name? That just makes you sound suspicious – less credible. Make sure that your inside sales representatives mention their names as well as your company name. This helps establish trust between you and your prospects, especially since they can just as easily look up your company through the Internet.

3. Improvise when calling – Want to know what prospects hate and what makes cold calls fail? Scripted telemarketers. A telemarketer that sticks word per word to what is on his/her call script is bound to make the call go down the drain. A call script serves as a good guide, however, sticking to it whole heartedly as the situation and prospect’s replies change isn’t going to help you win them over and sound credible. Prospects want to be talking to marketers who know what they are talking about and ones that can understand and control the situation.

4. Listen and empathise – One grave mistake that can cost you your call is to keep yammering away like a broken record. Prospects that you contact, especially those that have actual concerns, aren’t going to like it if your telemarketers are too busy talking to give them a chance to express themselves – and worse are the ones who don’t even get how the prospect feels. Give your prospects room to talk back and express their concerns, also make sure that you are able to understand their feelings in order to help you out with appointment setting.

Building credibility when doing telemarketing is about sounding like a professional. In software lead generation, your prospects aren’t going to want to work with your company if you aren’t trustworthy – you aren’t credible. As such, it is important that you build your credibility when you make cold calls to your potential customers.

]]> http://kickstartsalesforce.com/credibility-an-important-part-of-software-telemarketing/feed/ 1 http://kickstartsalesforce.com/top-3-b2b-telemarketing-heavyweights/ http://kickstartsalesforce.com/top-3-b2b-telemarketing-heavyweights/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:45:23 +0000 admin http://kickstartsalesforce.com?p=138 Read the full article...]]> Telemarketing still reigns supreme in the world of B2B and is among one of the most used direct marketing approaches. Although, we cannot say that it controls and is employed by all types of businesses in different sectors, we can still say that it is employed by a rather large percentage of companies over different verticals.

The usage of B2B telemarketing has grown widely ever since its conception in the early to late 90′s, but seems to have dwindled down in recent years. Could this be because of other forms of lead generation and the creation of newer marketing tactics? We now have all sorts of ways to find and attract potential customers and new clients, such as email marketing, Internet marketing and SEO. Nonetheless, when it comes to generating B2B sales leads, telemarketing still holds a strong position in the eyes of businesses.

According our own company data as far back as 2011, we have found that most of our clients fall within the industry of IT and telecommunications, making up 36% of whom we serve as a lead generation company. Our next most served sector is the commercial cleaning and maintenance services industry, coming in at 22%. In third place, we have the enterprise software solutions industry, placing third on our list at 17% (we gave them a nice and shiny bronze trophy).

When it comes to sales lead generation, quite a number of businesses still rely on the use of the phone. As such, we can say that B2B telemarketing, for these three mentioned industries, is a widely used approach to get more IT sales leads, commercial cleaning leads and software leads.

Here is more data to help complete our list for a total percentage of 100!

With a total of 100%, our list of industries that make use of telemarketing, based on our own client profile data of course, is now complete.

Where does your industry lie? Do you still use cold calling and B2B telemarketing to generate sales leads and close sales with your prospects?

Relationships are important for every business especially when they want to close deals with other companies. Why? That is because people build relationships with people, not businesses. Also, from the perspective of an everyday person, wouldn’t you be more inclined to buy from someone who you have a working relationship with? As such, it is best to nurture your IT services leads early on in your campaign so that they move down the sales funnel and eventually become sales ready in the future.

However, it is also important to remember that not all of your prospects can be nurtured into becoming sales-ready. Still, if this happens, do not lose hope in the capabilities of your IT sales lead generation program; you cannot expect to “win all your battles”, after all.

So for IT companies that are looking to have better results from their lead generation campaign, what approaches are the best to make use of?

Use approaches that foster communication.

Marketing is about getting your message across. Be it IT telemarketing, email or other medium, lead generation is about generating leads from your target audience, a group of people from which you know will positively receive your product and will have likely chances to buy from your company. Marketing, however, can either be inbound and outbound.

Inbound marketing is when you use tactics that attract prospects to your company. Outbound marketing is when you have to be the one to go out and interact with your target audience. It is when outbound marketing is used for lead generation that you need to make use of methods that spur communication between you and your prospects. As such, your relationship could all start with…

• … A single email. A short, brief message about your company, what you have to offer, and the benefits of working with you can often be more than enough to get a prospect interested. At times though, that single email may not be enough and you would need to communicate with them further in order to bring them closer and generate a lead. Still, email marketing exists to be a great method of generating leads and relationship building.

• … A single phone call. Sometimes you just have to pick up the phone and get a conversation going with your prospects. Introduce your company, what you do and what the benefits of working with you are and you may just get your prospect interested enough to have a discussion right there and then, or they may just book an appointment with you in the near future. Telemarketing usually involves much cold calling, but how else can you hope to effectively go prospect hunting? Telemarketing serves to be a great way to get in touch with your leads, nurture them, and build relationships until they become sales ready.

Both email marketing and telemarketing are great tools for lead generation purposes because they help you start communicating with your prospects. Since you are an IT firm, you sell a product or a service that comes with a heavy decision from your prospects. As such, it is important for them to get to know you and your company more before coming to a decision on whether or not to work with you.

Relationships are important in business matters. When you want to have an effective IT sales lead generation campaign, acknowledge the importance of building relationships with your prospects to achieve better results.

Without one, they would surely suffer from not being able to make enough of a profit to keep their business alive. As such, hitting a wall would be a bad thing when it comes to lead generation, especially when times look difficult and when the competition is fierce.

Having only a single method in generating leads is no longer enough for any business. Unlike back then when the market wasn’t so saturated with similar companies, a merchant services firm could probably get away with only pursuing and engaging their prospects through a single method. Nowadays though, it seems like there’s another firm just around the corner hunting for warm business opportunities – cash advance leads, payment processing leads or electronic processing leads.

When you have a lot of competitors, especially those who offer the same kinds of products and services you do, hitting a wall is seriously going to impede your progress. Once you run out of ideas, your marketing strategy is sure to go south.

The key to successful lead generation is to have other methods. Have you considered making use of other methods with which to attract prospects and generate business merchant services leads? Here are a few which you may want to take into account as part of your strategy:

Consider the use of email marketing.

Email marketing is a great tool for lead generation. A lot of marketers have switched over to the use of emails from that of direct mail because it is more cost-effective and faster than with its older counterpart. However, email marketing can only ever truly be effective when you have an email marketing list to use. Without a list of contacts to send your emails to, then this approach is quite useless, so to speak. Still, if you have a good list, then email marketing is definitely something to try.

Consider the use of telemarketing.

None has yet to eliminate telemarketing from the list of the most effective lead generation methods that businesses can use. Although some may argue that cold calling isn’t at all that effective at generating leads, telemarketing is still an indispensable tool for many marketers and sales people.

The capabilities of using telemarketing for lead generation are within its ability to put you directly in contact with your target decision makers, allow you to achieve communication in real-time, as well as allowing you to reach your prospects almost anywhere as long as they have access to their phones. You cannot ignore the power that telemarketing has when it comes to helping you generate more leads.

Consider the use of social media.

Although social media may not exactly be a lead generator like how email marketing and telemarketing get things done, social media helps you converse with your prospects. Remember: relationships are what help build good business between companies. If you’re looking for a way to grow your relationships with your customers then social media is a way for you to do so. Eventually, some of the people you connect with through social media may just convert into leads. In a way, social media also helps you generate more merchant services leads.

Don’t let your company hit a wall when it comes to lead generation; it may just be your undoing. Consider using other methods to help you keep those leads flowing in.