How to Get the Most From your Telemarketing Project Manager

When you out-source your telemarketing, make sure you maximise the use of the service and lean on the Project Manager, to ensure you achieve the best results possible.

If you take a step back and look at the reasons for out-sourcing your telemarketing, undoubtedly, the lack of skills internally and the lack of time to manage a caller will be near, if not at, the top of the list. So, use your PM properly and allow them to guide the campaign and the calling, after all, they do it day in and day out so they know what they are doing.

I am going to talk you through some of the things you can expect from your PM and the way in which you can work together to provide a seamless join between your sales team and your telemarketing company.

Telemarketing campaigns requires 3 key things to enable success – Measure, communicate and manage. With these three things in place the campaign can be adjusted on an ad-hoc basis to create the best formula to drive results.

Decide with your PM what your targets are and what success will look like. Remember, this is not just about producing 2 leads a day; it’s about laying the foundation for a sturdy pipeline too. So think about all the things that will help you achieve this and visualise your 6 month goal. Your PM will be able to give you examples of similar campaigns and techniques that were used that produced results. Learn from someone else mistakes and use this experience for your campaign, get a head start!

Once everything is ready to go, you have marketing material ready and you have the internal processes in place to receive the results – Put your 3 key things into play!

Measure – From the very beginning of the campaign your PM should put into place metrics on which to gauge the results; number of hours worked, calls made, warm leads etc. Alongside this they will be keeping an accurate record of the activities that were being undertaken to produce these results – which information was being sent out, and what collateral supported the message. Your PM should be able to provide you with accurate information about every activity from; number of calls made against meaning full conversations to time spent sourcing contacts to emails being sent out. This information is vital to enable you to understand what marketing activities took place alongside the calling to support your campaign

Your PM will record this information on a daily/ weekly/monthly basis to feed back to you in detailed reports. You will also see a pipeline unfold and see what is required to produce a lead/meeting. Without this information, it is impossible to look back and make adjustments to do more of what works and remove what doesn’t.

Communicate – To begin with, this information should be reported clearly back to you on a daily basis. The first few day of a campaign are crucial in making sure no calling time is wasted so, communication is vital. The smallest adjustment in the early days can make the biggest difference. Surprisingly enough just removing an exclamation mark from the subject line of an email can make a difference and your PM is focused on spotting these things right at the start.

Talk to your PM and your caller together! Understand what objections are coming up and listen carefully. Your caller has first-hand experience of the way in which your business is being received and this valuable information is what you can use to shape your campaign. When you are very close to your your business, sometimes it’s hard to take a step back and remember why you are doing what you are doing so, remember that it’s all about providing solutions to your customers pains and not just telling them how amazing you are. Use your PM’s experience to translate the information provided by your caller – is this the real objection or is there an underlying issue? On understanding this, marketing material or messages can be adjusted to conquer the objections head on. Lean on your PM to help with good responses. Remember though, nobody knows your business as well as you, so give your PM the tools and the information to allow them to help you and arm your caller.

Once your campaign is in full swing and the leads are coming in, often feed back to the caller and PM about meetings is forgotten. Tell your PM and caller how a meeting went and any problems that arose so that the processes can be adjusted and mistakes not repeated.

Manage – Your PM’s role, above all, is to manage all this information and ensure that there is constant reaction to any change required and also proactivity supporting possibilities. Your PM will have experienced all sorts of different scenarios with campaigns and will see familiarities across the different sectors and offerings and be able to adjust the campaign so that you are provided with the end result rather than the problems to sort along the way. Your PM should be able to come to you with the problem and a solution.

Let your PM take a ‘hands on’ approach and analyse the call results closely, let them question objections and rejections and filter out the important and relevant information so that when this is brought into a conversation with you, your time is not wasted sifting through every call and your caller is not spending an hour of your calling time preparing this.

Your PM’s experience is a valuable resource so remember to use this whenever you can. They are tasked with making your campaign a success and they will have a wealth of experience to make this happen and this experience is at your fingertips.

If you have an effective PM looking after you telemarketing campaign then you can focus your time on the tasks you have in house and simply liaise with your new manager, albeit external, about this extension to your team. Let your PM report back the results achieved and explain the challenges and give you the options to face these then, let your PM put these into play. Measure, Communicate and Manage!

For more hints and tips about successfully running and managing a telemarketing campaign see more of our articles , email us or call us on +44(0)1403-788 481