How to Be A Powerful Telemarketing Presenter

Posted on November 29, 2012 by

Often times, you may be wondering why your telemarketing campaign is not getting you the results you expected. Such a happening can be the cause of either that telemarketing just isn’t your company’s strong point, or that your presentations lack the necessary power in them to get your targeted prospects to bite your bait.

So how does one create powerful presentations in doing B2B telemarketing? Isn’t my team competent enough to do lead generation for my business? The answer to that question may be yes, it’s just that your script may be the material you need to question. Telemarketing call scripts, unfortunately, sometimes limit our capabilities in performing lead generation telemarketing and getting our prospects to engage with us further. Continue reading →

Before Appointment Setting, Verify What Can And Cannot Be Done

Posted on October 17, 2012 by

Being honest about your limitations is important in appointment setting. Because, during the first few minutes of the meeting, the last thing you want to give a prospect is disappointment. More specifically, it is disappointment from being unable to receive the clear, accounting prediction they have been hoping for.

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The Cost Of Accounting Leads Shouldn’t Cost Your Sales

Posted on October 3, 2012 by

While your salespeople will say that accounting leads demand a quality of their own, that quality comes at a cost. But more than that, this cost shouldn’t go beyond more than the money your salespeople actually make. Ask yourself, just what good is it to spend so much just to attract attention when that attention earns you so little in the end?

Appointment Setting Strategies Should Contribute Instead of Cost

Make no mistake, getting the attention of a market is an established need. It does not matter whether you are a B2C or B2B firm. It does not matter whether your lead generation is done in-house or is outsourced elsewhere.

Doing it right does still come at a cost. But again, that cost shouldn’t undermine your business by using so much money that you scarcely had more than what you had prior to spending.

This is not even just exclusive to finances. The costs can also undermine your capacity to grow, your capacity to serve, and even your capacity to keep marketing!

Capacity to grow – Your marketers should go beyond what their own results show. They should be able to see how their efforts, despite their supposed success, translate into a more tangible success via growth of a business. Will the prospects they attract become long-time customers? Will the money earned from a close deal cover the cost and at the same time, give you enough improve your accounting services?

Capacity to serve – After all the money you poured in, does it leave you with enough to even maintain the quality of your services? Growing is one thing but daily operations and paying your employees are a more pressing needs because they are also your present ones. You can put the brakes on upgrading till you have found ways to save up enough. But if you cannot even maintain the current costs of running your business, you need to re-evaluate how much your B2B accounting leads are guzzling.

Capacity to keep marketing – Marketing costs can also consume marketing itself! At this point, you are looking at the worst case scenario. If the costs of, for example, a single click on your web banner ad eats up half of your online marketing budget, it is time to stop. That is the best thing you can do before the next click bites out the budget you have set aside to pay your resident tax advisers. If you cannot even see a way to keep the costs of marketing from eating itself up, then you need to seriously review cost-efficient ways for generating your leads.

Never forget that, at most, a quality lead generator only does half of what you need to keep your business running. Yes you need the attention of your market but that is for the purpose of gaining more opportunities and more customers. Those opportunities are lost if your campaigns do not leave you enough to spend to make it happen. The costs of B2B appointment setting should not cost you your sales!

Why Sales Leads From Customer Retention Need More Than Satisfaction

Posted on September 19, 2012 by

Don’t be confused by the title. Customer satisfaction still plays a key role if you want to use their loyalty and retention as a means of generating new sales leads. However customer satisfaction is never static (especially in financial planning and management). It can change over time so you need to do more than just determine whether or not a client is satisfied. You need to know what keeps them satisfied, how to keep them satisfied, and be on the look out for what could compromise that satisfaction before it hits.

On iMediaConnection, Tom Cates sums this up nicely, explaining three signs of customer defection. While his particular focus is on software companies, you’ll find it can easily apply to financial planning services and generating sales leads from your respective customers:

“You’re not on your client’s speed dial.”

“When your client has a support problem, a service question, or needs to talk over an issue, do they call your team first?”

This is perhaps even more critical in financial planning. Why would your clients consult anyone other than you? What’s the point of them maintaining business with your firm if you’re already losing out to a possible competitor? As Cates suggests, find out who that competitor is. But at this point, be careful. You don’t want to come off as jealous or overly competitive. Stay objective and determine if the specific issue that your customer wanted resolved should have been well within your expertise to handle or it could actually have been something else entirely.

“You’re client uses the F-word a lot.”

If you’re already dreading that you know this word, think twice. It could be the complete opposite:

“When a client says everything is ‘fine,’ nothing is further from the truth. This dirty four-letter word signals disaster and should be translated to, ‘Everything is not fine, but I don’t want to get into the details with you because it’s not worth my time.’”

Now there can be more ways to understand what a prospect means by ‘fine’ compared to what Cates is saying. After all, making assumptions will only compromise the interest and won’t bring you any closer to making financial planning leads. If you’re still afraid of no longer being considered worthy of your customer’s time then don’t just press for more feedback. Reflect on your company’s past actions and see if you’ve actually acted on the feedback they’ve given you before. Don’t waste the efforts of those who listened and recorded your customers’ concerns when you never made any significant response to what was said. Still, make sure you keep encouraging them for feedback. Don’t be afraid to contact them every now and then getting them to say anything beyond simply ‘fine’.

“Your client is uninvolved and disengaged.”

“But when a client begins to withhold important details, “forgets” to copy you on an email, or stops contributing their ideas, you should be concerned. Relationships are a two-way street, and if your client isn’t fully invested, they might be on the road to defection.”

As previously implied, don’t also forget to collaborate closely with your client. In fact, if you’ve already outsourced for your financial sales leads, then you should already know what collaboration entails. It means getting in touch. Speaking of which, it’s why there’s not much difference between outsourcing the process and doing it yourself. Either way, you need to constantly hear from your customers whether it’s through your provider or your own lead generator.

Customer feedback isn’t only for knowing their satisfaction, it’s to educate you on how to keep up that satisfaction.

How To Use Appointment Setting For Financial Services Targeting Small Businesses

Posted on September 5, 2012 by

At first glance, B2B financial planning sounds big. Therefore, some people would assume that appointment setting for those services will only demand high-paying clients The idea that it could target small businesses sounds rather remote. After all, businesses and professionals who are in this industry tend to give off an image of financial experts overseeing vast amounts of data and being on the look out for potential problems as well as positive growth. That doesn’t seem to fit the usual image of small businesses who approach financial planning at a comparatively simpler level.

But on the contrary, even small businesses can make possible candidates for your sales leads. The factors which appear to disqualify them are only misunderstood:

Budget – Their small budget doesn’t always rule them out. You just need to look at yourself first and see if there’s anything they would like that doesn’t warrant beyond their own capacity to earn. Try to see if you can promote a service which is a simplified version of your larger ones. Simple is your best bet when targeting small businesses.

Expertise – It’s not entirely they’re fault if they’re averse to complex solutions. Small businesses are small partly because there are humbler things to handle, finances included. Therefore, a simpler solution is also easier to understand compared to the ones you give to larger companies.

Needs – Just because their needs are clear doesn’t mean you can just make the sale over the phone or through online communication. These people could still be too busy for that. You need B2B appointment setting because it allows you both to set the best time and place to discuss a financial management solution.

Now as for defining your small business targets, simply look to possible reasons for why their owners could use some financial advice:

They might be starting out – Financial reasons always play a part on why start-ups fail. It doesn’t even take a lot to understand why. Mishandling money always results in having less and less of it to spend and keep up. Their desire for basic financial planning expertise is enough to make them possible financial leads.

They could be expanding – When an organization grows, so does the amount of money they earn and spend. This can even warrant more than just basic financial expertise. Approaching these businesses when they’re in the midst of changing sizes could potentially turn them into another high-paying client!

They can be prone to shady or bad business practices – First off, bad doesn’t necessarily mean criminal. It can just mean they’re committing a grave financial mistake they’re not aware of. Misconceptions always abound in money management. Shady practices on the other hand are a whole different story. It may not even be limited to your targets but also schemes that prey on gullible small business owners (e.g. investment fraud).

The above reasons are just the more popular ones but you could learn about a few more if you just take a shot at targeting small businesses. It’s only a matter of knowing how to simplify and share your knowledge. No matter how advanced your own services have become, there will always be those who still don’t know the basics. So what are you waiting for? Don’t be afraid to turn your sights to small businesses every now and then!