How to Improve Your Dialers

Think if you are in the B2B, B2C or telesales business then certainly are familiar with automatic dialers or other telemarketing dialers and the associated autodialed software. For those who aren't familiar, automatic dialers are either hardware or software that will call a preset list of numbers, or numbers at random, and transfer any live callers to available agents. The software can distinguish between an actual human answering or fax and answering machines. The problem is that the software cannot always know when agents will be free which results in calls that are dropped because they can't be answered. An improvement on the ordinary dialer is the predictive dialer.

Predictive dialers solve the problems of the standard automatic dialer. Instead of a "shotgun" approach, calling numbers, transferring live calls and dropping those which don't have enough agents, the predictive dialer tries to predict how many agents will be free to handle calls. The dialer takes into account the current agents sitting idle, and the number of calls that go through. It can log how many fax or answering machines pick up, how many calls are being answered and how many numbers are disconnected. It derives a percentage from this data, and compares it against how many agents are idle at a given time, and how long each call is taking. It then calls only as many numbers as is needed. Because it can predict how many agents will be ready to receive calls at any give time it can make calls even if all agents are busy, based on the amount of agents likely to be idle when the call goes through.

Is executive telemarketing effective?

As we all are know the marketing world changes very fast and adopt the new technology very faster new tools such as social media websites is coming a new hope like Twitter, Facebook and others emerge one has to wonder whether the marketing and lead generation tools of the past are still relevant in the new electronic age. Recently, I was asked whether the "old standby", telemarketing was still considered to be an effective lead generation tool for professional service firms. I thought it would be interesting to analyze the telemarketing process to determine if it still can be effective for professional service firms, and if so, how specifically the process should be structured.

Let us think about the what telemarketing in this context means. When we speak of executive telemarketing we are not talking about professional business to consumer telemarketing. We are speaking of something very different. This type of telemarketing has a bad reputation and for good reason. It is characterized by someone from an organization calling to solicit money or subscriptions from you right in the middle of dinner or the middle of weekend when the last thing you want to discuss it making a donation. Executive telemarketing is vastly different from the description above. It refers to the process of a company calling a C level prospect in another company to educate them on service offerings, discuss their situation and offer to be of assistance in the future. A key difference is that the calls are being made to businesses and are done so by educated professionals familiar with the industry, service and are able to professionally represent their organization.

The executive telemarketing process is as effective a lead generation tool as any other components of the marketing mix. In fact, I would argue it is more effective than many traditional lead generation tools because it provide the opportunity to directly interact with the prospect. No other lead generation tool I can think of including email marketing, direct mail marketing, social media marketing or pay per click advertising provide the opportunity to engage the prospect in a conversation about the issues and challenges they are facing. The tools mentioned previously provide a flow of information that pushes out, delivering a message to the prospect but does not provide a forum for interactive communication. Now these methods may eventually lead to a phone call especially if the prospect has an immediate need, but the initial flow of information is still one sided. The interaction component is critical and sets executive telemarketing apart from any other tool to generate leads.

The role of the executive telemarketing professional is to identify qualified prospects from a prospect list. Essentially they open the opportunity by asking pointed questions to uncover issues, problems, challenges or opportunities. The goal is to document as much information as possible so when the conversation ends they can share the details with others in the firm. Although this sounds quite straightforward there are a number of areas where issues arise which ultimately reduces the effectiveness of the process