Telemarketers : The Key to Successful B2B Sales

Finding and keeping quality telemarketers is a very important part of turning a profit in business-to-business marketing. One can't expect to just throw someone on the phones and acceptable results will soon follow.

After first gaining a clear understanding of the main goals of your phone marketing campaign, next you'll have to define the specific role which they will need to fill in order to reach the objectives. It's imperative that you determine the skills and traits needed in each role and how this combination will yield success. Begin to ask yourself some important questions:

Do you mandate a particular level of maturity from your marketers? Do you need energetic people, multi-taskers, or calm and collected people? Will they need to have experience using MS Office or the CRM applications which you use? Will these marketers possess the prerequisite experience with the product? Do they need to be up to speed at time of hire, or will they be trained into the specific position?

The five key traits for excellent sales staff, according to Workplace Today:

1) self-esteem
2) drive
3) service
4) conscience
5) empathy

Initially you'll need to begin with the right group of candidates. If placing ads, be sure they are well written and honed to the audience. There are plenty of examples at websites like monster, careerbuilder and jobs.com. You can post a list of open positions at the career center at the local university as well.

Pay attention to service-oriented people you meet as you go about your daily tasks. Friendly and articulate service-oriented people often have the skills which be useful for successful telemarketing. Of course, other employees may be a good source of candidate leads, especially if offered an incentive or award if their recommendation turns out to be a successful new telemarketer - that is, if they are still productive and profitable after a ninety day evaluation period.

Try to avoid words such as "telemarketer" in the ad, as terms like "sales" and "customer service" draw a larger pool of qualified applicants.

Although in most cases you'd first ask for applicants to send in resumes, for telemarketing sales positions it could be helpful to ask candidates to phone in to a special number. The outgoing message can ask the caller to leave their personal contact info, then ask that they spend up to a minute or so to describe why they're the ideal person for the job. By listening to the person speak on the message, you'll get a better sense of how they present themselves - this can be a good indication of who should get a callback to go on to the next hiring step.

Those that give a good impression and seem to 'get it' should next be offered the opportunity to phone interview. Callers who are thoughtful enough to ask questions about the job, company and product are often motivated and savvy enough to gather leads on the phone. The best won't just re-hash a script, but instead take a genuine interest in how things work.

Those candidates who remain after the telephone interview should be requested to send in a resume, allowing you the opportunity to give closer attention to the person's employment history and background. Final interviews should be arranged with your top candidates.

To avoid failures and headaches, make the appropriate investments in your new hires in the form of good training. When provided training, new employees gain confidence and attain the resources necessary to attain success.

The amount of training needed depends on their past experience and what they will be doing in this new role. Supply info about the industry, your business' role, and the field of competition.

Next discuss details about the products or services that they will be selling, including info about the benefits which purchasers can expect. They will also need to know how pricing works, along with the incentives of the selling process they will participate in.

Go over the most effective way to use the software, as well as relevant policy, expectations, and job responsibilities. Next, define some targets, such as calls per week, sales numbers, and other indicators which they can use to measure their performance and improvement.

These valuable employees will become the leading factor in the success of your business-to-business marketing campaign.