Professional B2B Telemarketing

If you want to get in to meet with a business owner or other high-level decision maker, reading from a script simply won't work. Just to get past gatekeepers and voice mail requires extemely sophisticated sales skills, the right strategy, and more than the "gift of gab". And engaging the decision maker in a meaningful conversation - one that might result in him changing the way he runs some aspect of his business - requires that you use professional selling techniques of the kind taught in the leading sales schools, not a GED. You simply can't find this level of skill, training and experience in a call center.

Call centers are designed to pound out many thousands of scripted calls (often using predictive dialers,) to consumers who are usually tricked into buying something they don't need. When you use these same callers to call businesses, the best you can hope to do is persuade low-level buyers (i.e. like a purchasing manager who usually has an established need for the product,) to consider you if you can save him a couple of dollars. At best, all this does is lower your prices. Usually, it just makes you "column fodder" so he can beat up his current vendor a little.

A professional B2B telemarketer, however, makes fewer, but better, calls that are designed to uncover latent needs, reach high-level decision makers, and create qualified prospects out of unqualified suspects.

If you think people are simply waiting for you to call, use a call center. If you think you have to uncover needs and convice people to be interested, and maybe even change the way they do business, you need a professional B2B telemarketing.

A boutique shop is a professional B2B telemarketing firm that specializes in executive appointment-setting, using lead generation specialists who have many years of field sales experience, and training in professional selling techniques. Boutique shops tend to be small because there aren't many telemarketers with the skills needed for the job. Also, most projects are relatively small scale because the dollar value of the sale, and the margins, tend to be high, so it doesn't take a lot of resource to generate a lot of sales, or a lot of profit. And, in fact, it is not uncommon for a boutique shop to generate many more leads than the client can handle.

Boutique shops tend not to be centralized, with most operating "virtually," using home-based professionals. This means that they don't have "positions," predictive dialers, "listen-in" capabilities, or incentives for high dial rates. Thus, while a call center might expect a telemarketer to make 30 dials-per-hour and talk to 10 people, someone calling executives might make 8 dials per hour, and talk to one person - albeit for 30 minutes!

While you might expect a boutique shop to emphasize quality over quantity, and a call center to emphasize quantity over quality, such a distinction is generally not valid. Call center calls can be good or bad depending on the call center, just like with a boutique shop. The numbers, however, are the result of the prevalence of the need: If you're selling office supplies - which everybody needs - use a call center. If you're selling complex IT systems, or something where the decision is made by a CXO, use a boutique shop.

The following table illustrates the differences between B2B applications that should probably be done in a call center, versus campaigns that should probably be done by a boutique shop.

The rules governing whether to use a call center versus a boutique shop are not absolute - since one issue can tip the decision over. But these guidelines can help. If you have any questions, though, we'd be happy to help you decide what's best for your unique situation.