I ran into an old friend at a party last Saturday. He helps run a busy call centre, so telemarketing and cold calling are his daily bread and butter. It's a well organised operation with 8-10 staff, all reading from prepared scripts to sell their 'products'.

He casually mentioned that a few years back in Sydney, he had his minimum wage telemarketers selling print.

An astute businessman, he saw an opportunity to make some extra money as a Print Broker. He devised a simple small business print package comprising letterheads, business cards and complements slips, then assigned 3 staff to slowly work through the local yellow pages. 

The results surprised him...

The project itself didn't take long, but paid for itself many times over.

He wants to do it again here, but wasn't sure it would be as successful today. The biggest hurdle now he said, is that most businesspeople receive far too many calls from various organisations either wanting donations or pushing a product.

Taking on board Winston Marsh's comments last week, I mentioned how the internet could perhaps make telemarketing easier, more effective and less intrusive. The 'customer' would feel he/she had more control.

Even though many don't like those unexpected phone calls, telemarketing does work, especially when selling lower cost items (allowing higher-paid sales reps to focus on larger customers). If an order or hot sales lead can't be obtained, the fall-back position is to at least get a prospects email address, offering an appropriate 'teaser'. (Competition, referral voucher etc).

However it all needs to be properly planned and co-ordinated. Both targeted telemarketing and personal sales visits should work in with the company's marketing support systems being Google advertising, Digital Storefront, eMail, Direct Mail (using PURLs) and normal trade promotions.

And once you've built up a database of email addresses, it then becomes a whole lot easier to stay in touch. i.e. Promoting any specials via email marketing each week, sending clients or prospects directly to your Digital storefront to place orders, with a negligible sales cost - Exactly the same process used by Vistaprint and other high-growth, high profit Printers.

Telemarketing  - Okay for Print?

• For most of the customers you sell to, telemarketing (using existing in-house staff or outsourced), backed up by an interactive web site and regular email marketing makes perfect sense. It's very low in cost, effective, with a good sales conversion and retention rate.
• More importantly, this two-tier sales strategy allows your professional, higher paid salespeople to focus more on your larger clients and more complex deals - It's simply more efficient.

Comments (1)

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written by Andy, May 18, 2007

Can't fault the logic.