High Level Business to Business Telemarketing

B2B telemarketing

Things to consider before choosing Integrity as your B2B telemarketing partner

Integrity was created to make Business to Business telemarketing campaigns simple to commission, easy to understand and consistent in the results they deliver. Integrity strives to provide a reliable, risk free appointment making (b2b lead generation) service to businesses.

Integrity specialise in working with professional firms and large corporate clients, notably Chartered accountants, insurance intermediaries and consultancy firms. Integrity currently work with 20% of the UKs top 40 chartered accountants including RSM Bentley Jennison, Kingston Smith and Saffery Champness. We also work with several insurance intermediaries including two of the largest, Jardine Lloyd Thompson and Willis as well as working for consultancy firms Ceridian, Penna and CACI.

We work in partnership with our clients to ensure the success of their campaigns. As with any partnership, in order for this type of campaign to be successful it is very much a two way process, there are certain requirements that  your company will need to consider in order to ensure the campaign delivers the volume and quality of appointments that  you would expect. You will need to consider the following:

Ratios - IBC currently deliver a slightly better than average number of appointments per day across all mid market campaigns. IBC will expect to make a certain number of calls per day. Of those calls IBC would expect to speak to a healthy percentage of decision makers (this is only possible if the quality of the data is high in terms of the accuracy of decision maker names, and, the target prospects are mid market and below). Of these decision maker contacts (DMCs) we would again expect to convert a better than average number into appointments (this is only possible if the message to be conveyed is strong and targeted at the most relevant prospects). DMCs will drop if we are calling large corporate/strategic prospects. This is mainly because, as you can probably imagine, getting hold of the Financial Director of ICI, for example, is no easy task.

Campaigns - One of the key reasons we are able to maintain consistency in the delivery of high quality appointments is the way our campaigns are designed. All our campaigns run for 10 or 20 days. There are 4 main reasons that we tend to recommend 10 to 20 day campaigns:

1. One of Integrity's strengths is our ability to build an effective pipeline, this is a flow of appointments produced as a result of building a relationship with a prospect over the course of several phone calls and emails. A pipeline will take several days to develop before we are able to see the benefits through increased appointments. Many b2b telemarketing organisations will only make appointments from the first contact they make with the prospect (‘smash and grab'); if an appointment isn't forthcoming the prospect will often not be re-contacted. Frequently scripts created by other organisations are not developed in such a way as to achieve both immediate appointments and an effective pipeline.
2. Secondly we often recommend putting two people on a new (20 day) campaign; this way we are able to adopt differing styles of sales strategy and selling technique. Using two people on a new campaign allows us to explore the most effective sales approach. This also allows us to identify an individual who is having a 'bad week' as opposed to concluding that there is something wrong with the campaign.
3. The third reason for recommending 10 to 20 days is that it will normally take one day for an operative to reach 70% efficiency on a new campaign and 3 to reach 100%. This is due to building familiarity with the script, gaining an understanding of the sort of objections the campaign generates, and, the most effective method of dealing with them. In addition to this we can use this time to enhance the script and supporting marketing material by acting upon the initial responses to our calls.
4. The fourth reason, the most important. Is the biggest management problem facing internal telesales units, burnout. Keeping an individual on a telesales campaign for longer than 20 days (1 month) will result in ever decreasing performance through fatigue and repeating the same message over and over again. The message will begin to sound tired and the operative ultimately looses the sense of what they are saying, performance dips in tandem with morale, ultimately resulting in high staff churn.

Data - A 10 day campaign will require approximately 350 records ideally. Using significantly less data will result in falling conversion rates by the 6^th day. This is because as we work through the data many prospects will be difficult to get hold of. With fewer records these people become concentrated at the back of the campaign resulting in reduced contact rates and ultimately fewer appointments. Each 10 day campaign will result in about 150 records being 'closed' (not to be contacted for at least 6 to 12 months) which means there will still be approximately 200 records that can be reused on other campaigns.

Our Fees - Our fee is per person per day and includes;

• System and adaptation
• Script writing
• Campaign planning
• Training
• Appointment setting
• Management & development
• Telephone calls
• Relationship management with prospective clients
• Management Information

The current average age of our callers is 35, which enables them to have far more credible conversations than most other companies who employ far younger callers as a rule.

The key factor that enables Integrity to succeed with professional firms when others struggle is our ability to develop and deliver sophisticated marketing messages in a manner which is consistent with our client's brand image.

Further reading

• B2B telemarketing
• Telemarketing tips
• B2B Lead Generation
• Telemarketing companies