The Telemarketing Company is pleased to once again sponsor B2B Marketing’s annual telemarketing survey. As ever, the results have great value because they capture the views of client-side marketers – the people who are tasked with delivering opportunities for their colleagues in sales and who live or die by ROI.
Early in 2012 both Circle Research’s B2B barometer and B2B Marketing’s lead generation survey confirmed that telemarketing was rated as a ‘top three’ lead generation channel for both quality and quantity. A year or so on, the position hasn’t changed, with the vast majority of respondents saying telemarketing is either an important or critical part of their marketing activity, and the majority having increased their telemarketing activity over the last year.
We live in an era of ingenious marketing automation systems, content marketing, social media and all kinds of other inbound and non-disruptive marketing options. Everyone seems to herald the end of proactive, ‘push’ marketing, of which telemarketing is arguably the most extreme example.
However, high quality telemarketing complements all of these new channels. It’s used to research and profile organisations, to engage with contacts found on social media platforms, to generate the marketing-qualified leads to feed in to marketing automation platforms, to follow up on digital events or content downloads and to nurture leads. Believe it or not, telemarketing is also still used to great effect in a classic ‘cold’ calling model.
Even if the average B2B buyer is 57 per cent of the way through the purchase decision before engaging a supplier sales rep (CEB and Google 2012) this does not mean they can’t be identified and engaged with on the phone, before and after this stage. B2B buyers remain approachable and responsive to the right kind of call at every stage of the cycle.