Can you really sell a B2B product or service over the phone? Can you make a B2B sale through outbound phone calls, talking to decision makers who are probably unfamiliar with your firm and actually get a PO or credit card number to complete a sale on the spot?
It’s a real challenge to secure payment for B2B telesales on a cold call, with no prior relationship. But, here are some other ways to use the telephone to drive B2B sales.
Hire a telemarketing company to call your former customers, those who have not made orders in the past 6 months, and have the callers transfer any interested clients to your inside sales team to take the order! If you don’t have an internal team, the call center can take the order directly.
VSA has been quite successful with this approach. As an example, we have a client who sells supplies to physicians’ offices. These offices would normally call our client directly and place orders. As soon as our client notices that offices have not replenished orders, VSA calls the offices, sends faxes announcing “specials” and when we are able to connect with decision makers, we transfer them to our clients’ inside sales team. If we cannot reach decision makers, we leave messages and the customers call the client’s team directly. Our caller ID line automatically forwards return calls to our client. We have helped our client save numerous clients and increase sales greatly through this approach.
Another method of telesales is to hire an outsourced prospecting team to identify qualified opportunities and schedule web demos. You, the client, would perform web demos over the phone/computer, and ideally generate orders. This approach works best if you are trying to upgrade existing clients from one version of your product/service to a higher level.
For example, our pharmacy equipment client hired VSA to call existing pharmacy clients and introduce the next version of its immensely popular calibrator. We set webinars where a member of our client’s sales staff demo’d the next generation calibrator. This way, we helped our client generate new sales from existing clients, who were completely unaware that an upgraded product was now available.
There’s an incredible power when B2B call centers work effectively with a company’s inside sales team to push “ready to purchase” leads to the internal staff. The company’s sales team talks only to highly qualified opportunities, uses its strength to close sales, and can be confident that an outsourced telemarketing company is working hard to constantly produce are more opportunities. Of course, the outsourced call center is using its own strength in finding and qualifying leads. A true win/win!