Phase 1

Every project starts with the development of a Telemarketing Plan. The Telemarketing Plan is a document that we put together, often using material that you provide as well as the results of our own research, that articulates your product's (or service's,) features, benefits and value, and the strategy we're going to use to sell or promote them. Telemarketing Plans usually take a week or two to put together, depending on the availability of material and the complexity of the problem. To get right to the heart of matter though: We don't make any money writing Telemarketing Plans. They are a necessary part of the process that we try to do as inexpensively and as well as possible, so that we can get to the business of selling for you as quickly and effectively as possible.

The Telemarketing Plan usually contains script elements (remember, we don't do any hard scripting, but we do provide our telemarketer with key ideas and phrases that he or she can use to stimulate interest in meeting with you.) It also includes copies of your collateral material, cover letters, references, case histories, initial benefit statements, openings, suggested objections handles, qualification questions, probing questions, closes, and examples of how your company's value proposition can be communicated. Obviously, The Telemarketing Plan includes your goals and objectives, budgetary, scheduling and logistical information, as well as the criteria that will be used for measuring success. In other words, we try to put, in one place, all the information we need to sell effectively on your behalf.

Remember: Success takes more than a script!

The Telemarketing Plan also often includes the calling list, or the instructions to build the list that will be used in the test. And for this, we use a wide variety of sources to develop call lists, including our clients' in-house lists, as well as Dun+Bradstreet, Hoovers, and many other commercial data bases. (We may also conduct an entire project just to compile a good list, if necessary.) The Telemarketing Plan identifies data sources so our research staff can go get the data.

And most importantly, The Telemarketing Plan includes the strategy and tactics that we're going to use to generate business for you, whether it's cold calling, pre-qualification, direct mail with a telephone follow-up, or executive appointment-setting. Often The Telemarketing Plan also includes a discussion of why the strategy was chosen, as well as instructions and contingency plans for how to deal with whatever we encounter once we start calling. Consequently, it also sometimes deals with the subtle sales issues, customer needs, hot buttons, competitive issues, market trends, and other factors that will impact success.

The Telemarketing Plan serves as a tool for the telemarketer to become familiar with your business quickly and effectively, so it is, more than anything else, a training document. Because of that, though, one thing that we're often asked is why we don't just bring the telemarketer into your office for a training session? Or why not skip all the writing and just get right on the phone? The answer is that The Telemarketing Plan serves one other purpose, and that is to solve the turnover problem. Because to be sure, when we take on a project, we have the same problems that you have: finding good people, motivating and making them effective, and keeping them on the job. The Telemarketing Plan not only enables us to get our people up-and-running in a day or two, it lets us get someone else on the job and performing effectively if the first person leaves, isn't successful, or needs to be replaced for some reason. In other words, we don't have to rely on your availability to train the new person; we can get a replacement telemarketer on the job in a matter of hours by just handling them a copy of The Telemarketing Plan.

Also, as you can see, The Telemarketing Plan can end up serving as a compendium of information on how to sell for your company, so it provides a useful way for us communicate with a minimum of misunderstanding, since all of our assumptions are written down. It is often updated with new information gathered during the course of the trial, and so it can be used as a source document for your general sales program. But for us, it is what we use to launch the trial, and insure that it is successful by making sure that the person who's doing the calling has as much information as possible to get the job done, and done right.

If you would like to speed the process of developing the Telemarketing Plan and assure that the quality is as high as it needs to be, we have provided a list of questions here that you can answer to help us develop the document. Remember, the more information you can provide, the better job we can do for you.

Our goal is not to sit around writing Telemarketing Plans all day. (As we said, we don't make any money on them anyway.) Our goal is to increase your sales by getting on the phone, and finding or creating prospects who need your products or services. The Telemarketing Plan is a tool that gets us going, and keeps us going, quickly, reliably and effectively. For as little as $800 (and rarely more than $2500,) it's a steal.