Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Hello again, Mike.

I believe that you must quickly resolve why you are not getting answers from 90% of your calls. The first guess I have is that your call time is not right. In other words, you need to find the prime calling time for your audience. To determine this, you will want to keep records by time. Keep track of answers, hang-ups, and success getting appointments, as a minimum. Analyze periodically (weekly at a minimum) to determine the optimum times to be calling and adjust your techniques to optimize your effectiveness.

Other than that, from a statistical standpoint, if you know nothing else about the prime times for your prospects to be home, the probability to call a person and have them answer is 10% regardless if they have been called before and didn't answer or if they have never been called. So the strategy or moving on or staying until you reach 90% doesn't matter.

There are many books on telemarketing techniques out there. I found a website that had a few tips "for free" that you might find useful.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

https://www.strategic-alliance.com/Telemarketing.htm#tips

By the way, I don't take B2C (business to consumer) clients - I'm a business to business guy - but I'll offer the best advice I can.

When you say, "run a telemarketing team" - what do you mean? Are you managing the folks in-house, or directing an outside company?

Telemarketing is very hard to do. If you don't know what you are doing, you will have a tough time running a telemarketing team. You should outsource the function to a proven firm with experience in your specific industry.

However, if you are a "Marketing Manager" tasked with this job, you are in a tough spot. If I were relatively inexperienced and responsible for this effort, the best way to do it (you may not have the budget for this) I would try to find a way to split the project into 2-3 smaller projects, retain firms with specific experience, let each work the project in their own way, and see who produces results.

Regarding saturating ZIP codes vs "moving on" - you will get your highest response rate on your first dial. If you are a marketing guy under pressure for immediate results (duh) you will want to ignore geography entirely (although demographics are another matter). If you are a service manager or sales manager concerned with travel costs, etc. then the geography of appointments is clearly an issue.

Hi Mike

Like telemoxie, we have no direct experience of B2C telemarketing and unlike him, a lot less direct experience of B2B telemarketing, except from being an expert in the fact that every member of Unimax Solutions would rather clean toxic sludge from behind their refrigerator than pick up the phone to make cold-calls!

That said, we get a lot of requests to specify CRM (Actually PRM – Prospect Relationship Management) systems to execute client’s B2C and B2B telemarketing software requirements, and being “Mr Statistics” with some experience of both managing and interpreting the results of telemarketing, maybe I can offer some insights or ask some questions which might help you to understand your quest.

Firstly, you have a list of 10,000 Zip Code segmented telephone numbers. Is this a good quality up-to-date list and do you have confidence in its integrity?

If so, your 90% failure rate to get a contact call must be telling you something.

Are you logging your calls on a CRM system or database, so that you can analyse the dialled numbers and the time of day that the calls are made?

Are there any patterns as to the calls where the phone is answered or not answered, correlating to the time that they are made?

For the calls which go unanswered, do they ring out, give number unobtainable or go to an answering service? Are you recording and analysing the numbers here?

If it’s the latter (Answering service), are you dialling from a displayed number or do you hide your call centre number? Many domestic customers in the UK, if they have “caller display” on their phone, will let an unidentified number go to the answering service rather than take a sales call.

Are the unanswered calls predominantly occurring at a time when the recipient may well be expected to be out of their house? If so, have you tried to set up some control calls to see if there is a higher contact rate at other times in the day? If you’ve done this have you logged the calls and analysed them? What are the statistical differences between your 3 different teams calling at different times and on different days?

Do you have the socio economic demographics of the zip codes associated with the telephone numbers? Again, is there a correlation between the no-response calls and their ABC/123 scoring?

If you are truly unable to contact 90% of your list, at any reasonable time in the day, then I would presume to think that there is something wrong with the list!

For the 10% of calls where you get through, how do the responses you are logging break down? How many consent to further action or a sale?

From the successful contacts, is it politic to ask for a referral so that you can approach their friends and acquaintances?

From your subsequent comments, it sounds as though you have a trustworthy and motivated telemarketing team. What are their feelings about the reasons for the non-contact calls?

If you are making your sales targets of 2 sales from the 10% of the calls which get through, it sounds as though your sales approach is working, so the key to improving your success must be to beat down the 90% non-contacts. If some quality control work on the contact failures replicates the problem, then I would hazard that the list is suspect. If they have a phone and the phone works and your number doesn’t cause a danger-alarm to ring on the householders phone, something is wrong.

They’ve got to be in at home at some time and if a reasonable sample of control calls can’t establish a contact at some time in the day from say a control group of about 100 calls picked from a random 100th of your entire list, which is in excess of 10% of the control group, then there’s a list problem.

Until you can establish why you are getting such a poor hit rate, the only reason I can think of for moving on to another list would be in the hope that the next one actually has numbers pertaining to households where there are actually some occupants.

Could that be the nub of the problem? Is it possible that you have somehow gotten a list of phone numbers of properties where the occupancy in normal calling hours is only 10%? I know it’s unlikely, but if you eliminate the other things I’ve mentioned, its one of the few conclusions I can come to!

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions