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It takes the fusion of different departments, personnel and skill sets to bring a successful B2B Telemarketing campaign together. When done right, you can expect to see qualified leads being brought in, increased appointment bookings, boosted brand awareness and your pipeline being filled up. 

Unfortunately, many campaigns are doomed to fail from the beginning, simply due to lack of thorough preparation, setting unrealistic expectations, insufficient training, and several other reasons. When laying the groundwork for your campaign, there are many key factors to take into account, such as effective targeting & segmenting, data sourcing, having the correct supporting materials, ensuring the sales and marketing departments are aligned, and more. 

Whether you are preparing for an upcoming campaign, or looking for ways to boost success levels for an ongoing campaign, it’s important to carry out thorough preparation for each of the following stages to significantly reduce chances of failure:

• Clear and concise objectives: 

• • • • When scoping your campaign project, it’s important to settle on clear and concise objectives that all campaign members are aligned to. It helps to regularly review the objectives along the way to ensure they remain realistic and achievable.  

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  • • Realistic KPIs: 

• • • • Setting Key Performance Indicators from the beginning will help you quantify the progress and achievements of the campaign. These should be reviewed and managed along the process. Examples of KPIs can include contact rate, conversion rate, cost per lead and more. Set your KPIs to be relevant to your campaign goals
        
        

  • • Don’t try to achieve everything:

    • • It can be tempting to widen the scope of your goals and aim to achieve everything during the campaign. This can result in you losing focus of the bigger picture while you try to achieve things out of the scope of the campaign.
         

• Segmentation & Targeting: 

Once you’ve carried out your market sector research and analysis - segmenting, targeting, and profiling your data and audience is critical to ensure you are sending out your message to the right people, who will want to hear from you and benefit from what you have to offer. Doing your recon on each target and persona will take you a long way. 
 

• Realistic timescale:

The timeline for every campaign can look different. It’s important to remain patient and give sufficient time for the campaign to flourish and mature. As time develops and business relationships are steadily built, you will develop a pipeline of both short-term and long-term quality opportunities, as well as a clearer picture on what works, and what doesn’t.

2. Pre-campaign

• Data sourcing & segmentation: 

• • • • Your data can make or break your campaign. With the right data, you can further segment it to receive a much clearer indication of your target personas as well as the right ways to approach them. You will need to ensure the data used by your team has been cleansed, appended, and is up to date to be able to conduct a focused campaign around relevant targets 

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  • • Clarity of messaging: 

• • • • Your messaging to prospects needs to be clear and concise. Can you clearly articulate & define the proposition and USP in a way that works best with a phone-based approach? It helps to be well-prepped and ready to handle pushbacks and objections by preparing constructive sales battlecards, pitch decks and competitor analysis beforehand. 
        
        

  • • Supporting assets:

    • • It can be tempting to widen the scope of your goals and aim to achieve everything during the campaign. This can result in you losing focus of the bigger picture while you try to achieve things out of the scope of the campaign.
         

• Training: 

Ultimately, it’s your outreach team that will be representing your brand and products to prospective clients. It’s critical to ensure they are effectively trained with the brand messaging, approach, sales style to be used, and are engageable, pleasant to converse with and have the right tone and energy. 
 

• Timing:

Timing is everything. Knowing when to reach out to prospects can massively boost your chances of success. This accounts for the time of day or week, season as well as time of the year. You will need to ensure you have an appropriate macroenvironment where your message will be well received, as well as prepare for factors that may be out of your control during the campaign.

3. Intra-campaign

• Measure: 

• • • • Once the campaign has kicked off, you will need to regularly monitor and measure the results coming in to understand the overall performance of the campaign. This can be done by analysing the KPI’s set, measuring the results of leads nurtured, CPL, MQLs turned to SQLs, pipeline development and more. 

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  • • Test, adapt, refine: 

• • • • The next step is to use the measured results to be able to adapt and refine your process accordingly. This can apply to either improving processes based on negative results, or using positive results to amplify your efforts in areas where success has a higher guarantee. 
        
        

  • • Governance:

    • • Having regular governance calls allows all team members involved to be well informed of the proceedings of the campaign, and clearly defines expectations of the campaign. Regular review and checkpoints will help ensure the campaign is on track, allows for open dialogue, and creates room for any issues to be raised and suggestions to be brought forward.

4. Post-campaign

The value of the data gathered and measured throughout the campaign does not drop once the campaign is over. Be sure to carry out an analysis of the overall performance of the campaign and reflect on what have you learned, what worked and what didn’t. These are valuable lessons that can be applied to your next campaign to optimise it and ensure the same mistakes are not made twice.

5. Marketing channel integration

Every marketing channel has its own strengths. Alongside your telemarketing campaign, make use of other marketing channels that would be most beneficial to your campaign, to significantly amplify your results. This can be done by integrating email marketing, running events, social media marketing and more, into your current strategy, to get your message out to a broader audience.   

6. Sales & marketing alignment

One common reason why campaigns fail is not having an aligned sales and marketing team. From the very beginning, campaign objectives and processes should be made clear to all relevant stakeholders. The process should be streamlined well to ensure appointments brought in via marketing are appropriately booked into relevant diaries. 
 
The sales and marketing team should work together to maintain momentum and ensure a seamless transition is made for prospects moving from a MQL to SQL status. This can be done by having more internal touchpoints to improve the hand-off process and significantly reduce prospects drop-out rate.    

In order to hit the ground running and eliminate chances of failure as much as possible, ensure you have thoroughly carried out all the necessary legwork pre-launch, and are sufficiently prepared for each stage of the campaign. With the integration of additional, relevant marketing channels, as well as an aligned sales and marketing team, you can expect to elevate your campaign towards much higher levels of success.  

If you would like to have a conversation regarding your B2B telemarketing requirements, reach out today for a free road-mapping consultation with one of our Account Directors.