Is your telemarketing operation operating at peak efficiency and effectiveness, how well your telemarketing operation fares are based on four basic parameters: planning, people, process and tools, and success in each of these areas may well determine your telemarketing overall success. A good telemarketing professional simply needs to do things the right way to achieve cold calling success. There are few already tried and tested successful steps that will make a telemarketing program more efficient and successful. These steps are:

Preparation

Before any telemarketing professional calls a prospect, it is important to note how vital preparation is for success. Preparation covers many different aspects in telemarketing –organizing strong calling list, getting correct equipment to make calls, good script, having a thorough knowledge of your product or service which will help in having all the rebuttals you believe you will need, since at the end of the day, success of the call depends upon how prepared you are for your calls.

Prospecting

Prospecting is the single most important part of any telemarketers’ working day; it is the process which involves searching of the list of prospects within your market focus through the web and other means before making calls to those customers. Prospecting provides a controlled process that gives the idea about the prospective customers. Taking the calling activity further with well planned extended structured questions will enable you to take those prospects, develop them into customers, and then to identify specific opportunities for your proposition.

Qualifying

Best way to maximize your time and to achieve better success in telemarketing calls is that you need to qualify your prospect early in your sales call. Making sure that you have the right person on the phone is absolutely paramount in making the sale because it will be a total waste of time and valuable resource if it turns out that your prospect is not interested in buying or is not the real decision maker. It is very important that early in call one should try to build rapport and try to encourage your prospect to get more involved in the conversation and gain insight into the decision making process of the prospect's organization.

Trust and Building Rapport

Building rapport and gaining trust early in telemarketing call is an important part of the successful telemarketing process. To gain somebody’s trust, particularly you need to build rapport with your prospect. This can be done in a number of ways and important steps to follow in this regard are using right script, right tone to sound friendly and polite on phone, handle negative response effectively and show empathy with the customer.

Presenting and Overcoming Objections

Always use a script to get into presentation, and you should never attempt to present your product or service until you have built a rapport and have your prospects trust. The real challenge in selling begins when prospect starts throwing objections at you. The important part to remember about overcoming objections is that you shouldn’t use all your rebuttals at once.

Closing

One of the biggest difficulties comes from failing to close the deal. Closing a sale does not have to be so difficult. Look for the buying signal, one such sign is when customer starts asking questions on features of the product or qualities of the service. At this point you can entice the customer with free trials or get straight to the point and help the customer make the decisions.

Follow Up

Following up on the sale is as important as any other part of our telemarketing process. Keeping up to date information is critical to building better relationship with your customers so it is very important to make note of everything that came up during conversation. Follow up can also be done through other medium like email or fax etc.

Customer Service

In service related industry customer service is a lot more important and in a service related sale, you have to make sure that your client is happy. It is helpful in establishing long term relationship with the customers. It also opens the opportunity for addressing the problems which customers are facing and furthermore present with an upsell opportunity.

Managing and Motivating

Telemarketing operations can benefit from improving the people aspects of operations meaning how they manage and motivate the representatives. Guiding telemarketers for achieving optimum results and providing them with a desire that encourages them to improve performance can be defined as motivating the reps. It is important to understand the fact that without proper motivation and management the telemarketing group as a whole will perform less than the optimum level. Managing the telemarketing is simple as an idea but practically it can be difficult because it deals with that aspect of telemarketing operations which is predictable. However by defining job responsibilities, explaining the telephone reps about the criteria and measurements to gauge the performance and categorizing the operational procedures will help in managing your representatives more successfully.