“TeleScripts: The Good and The Bad.“

– Bill Kerth, Movere Teleservices

The following article appears in, Virtual Sales Limited

You’ve got your brand new telemarketing department, all the equipment is in, the staff are keen and ready, but one big question remains. Do you use a script?

Everyone knows scripts, we have all had those phone calls beginning ‘Hello Sir/Madam…’.  Scripts can remove all personality and humanity out of a telemarketing call, but they also can keep everyone on message, on brand and primed with the information your customers need.

So we shall examine the benefits and problems of using scripts, to help your decision making process.

The question of whether to adopt a script is not a straightforward one, nor is there a one-size-fits-all answer. The approach that companies take depends on a number of variables, including their industry, the cost structure of the organization, and the time and resources available to train the team.

So what’s the best method?

Reasons to use scripts:

Clarity of the law

The need to comply with legal requirements often leaves organizations with no choice but to provide scripts, at least for part of the conversation. Heavily regulated industries, for example, healthcare and financial services, can incur hefty fines unless they follow established guidelines, making it essential to coach your team members to make sure they say the right thing and don’t leave out any critical information.

Brand messaging & Consistency

Scripting can lead to better consistency across multiple channels of communication. With scripting, you can ensure that the branding messages are delivered in the right way. For example, a company might want its team members to use a particular greeting that gives customers the reassurance that they’ve reached the right place. For example, “Hello, you’ve reached Search SEO, fixing all your SEO problems since 2008“.

Cost-effective training

Using scripting as a training method is often more cost-effective and allows for higher productivity. It’s well known that call centres usually have high employee turnover, and scripts are a cheap substitute for costly training.

Product introductions

Following a script can also be useful when introducing a new product. The team member might not know enough about the product or service on offer advice to the customer. Also, it can be useful for companies that sell a multitude of products and services, as again the team member might not have enough familiarity with all the combinations of products to make the best recommendations. A script can help mask any potential knowledge shortfalls.

Structure

When talking to a customer, the conversation may tend to flow in a particular way, especially if the products are technical. You probably already know how to structure the conversation so the outcome is best for your business, so you will want to ensure that your sales team sticks to it. A Script can help keep customer conversations structured and on-topic.

Also, you may be talking to customers in various stages of the buying process, and if you choose to write a script, it should support every single stage of the conversation. If you are calling somebody who is familiar with your products, you do not need to include the same amount of detail in the conversation as if you were talking to someone who hadn’t heard of your company or products.

Script several versions  of the conversation to cater for a number of different customer profiles.

Reasons to not use scripts:

The personal touch

The most obvious benefit of not using a script is that it allows for a more unique and personalised conversation with customers. People are looking for an authentic interaction, and while some organisations tend to favour scripting because it can be cheaper, companies that choose to prioritize customer experience, like Apple, go a different route. They prefer to partner with their customers to deliver the best experience possible. They will listen to the customer and work with them to find an outcome. These companies will give the team more flexibility to do the right thing for their customer, increasing trust and customer satisfaction.

Being robotic

Scripting can give interactions a robotic feeling. In some cases, customers can feel more like a number than a person. In general, customers are looking for more genuine interactions, where they know that a member of the team is speaking with them rather than regurgitating a scripted reply. Scripting can leave some customers disconnected and feeling dissatisfied.

Employee / Customer Satisfaction

Another benefit of a script-free strategy is an increase in employee satisfaction. While reading from a script might make the job quicker and easier, regurgitating lines can leave members of the team feeling disillusioned and alien from the customers they’re speaking with, and the company’s products.

Companies that have scripted interactions in a bid to save money might find that this strategy is a false economy. Using scripts often frustrates customers and can result in repeat calls; while unscripted interactions cost more, they lead to higher customer satisfaction. It’s a longer term investment, but it may just pay off in customer satisfaction.

Is there another way? Using a hybrid approach

Companies aspire to find a balance between customer satisfaction and cost. But even organizations that value customer satisfaction highly might find it hard to get rid of scripting completely. Experts believe that a hybrid approach is the way forward. This allows organizations to use scripts for set interactions, e.g. regarding legal issues, while giving team members the ability to personalise the rest of the conversation. Another alternative is that you could train the team and give them answer samples, which they are then asked to personalize. You can use a similar approach for email communications, where the team are encouraged to personalize their message rather than copy and paste prepared answers. Such an approach also improves employee satisfaction since the team feel more involved with the organisation, brand and products.

A similar approach can also be used to train new team members, asking them to follow scripts until management is confident that they’re able to handle the conversation on their own.

Combining the best of scripted and non-scripted interactions helps to educate and support team members, as well as find a good balance between costs and customer satisfaction. A combined approach leads to a more effective team who are able to personalise interactions while remaining within regulation guidelines.

Conclusion

It’s an age-old business dilemma, but it ultimately comes down to what is best for you and your company!

General consensus seems to be that a mix of both is the best solution; if you manage to get a balance between structure and improvisation in your script, it will improve your prospecting results. Especially for cold calling or conversations where you are contacting the lead for the first time, structuring the conversation properly is massively important.

When you are closer to a sale or if you are calling existing customers, we prefer not to use a script as we believe in tailoring our services to meet our customer’s individual needs.

Whatever you decide to go with, we wish you luck in your telemarketing strategy!

Learn More about Movere Teleservices.

“Excellent advice for email marketing campaigns.”

– Glenn Baruck, The eDot Family of Companies

The following article written by: Jayson DeMers, Entrepreneur

There are over 144 billion emails sent each and every day. How do you separate yours from the rest? When it comes to email marketing, there are three key tactics you need to be utilizing to stand out, close the sale, and win the war of attention in the inbox.

Keep reading to learn each.

1. Vague, short headlines get the most opens.

When it comes to email marketing, headlines have one key objective — get the recipient to open the email. But that’s easier said than done. Email marketing software giant, MailChimp found that, across all major industries, open rates range from an average of 17 percent to 28 percent. That means only around one out of every four people even open your email (let alone read or click any links in it). As you can see, optimizing your headlines is key for making sure that your subscribers actually read your email. Doing so isn’t hard. Just remember two important elements when crafting your headline — keep it short and keep it vague.

Arguably, the best headline in email marketing history was sent during Obama’s first presidential campaign, which raised $690 million online (mostly through email marketing). It was, “Hey”. No, that’s not a typo. The headline of the email was simply, “Hey”. Why did it work so well? It all comes down to psychology. You’re more likely to open emails with headlines that are normally in your inbox from friends, family or colleagues.

For your next email marketing campaign, keep your headlines short and vague and watch your open rate soar.

2. Mix content with offers.

Email marketing has been declared “dead” more times than I can count. The truth is, it isn’t dead and it never will be. Email accounts for the highest ROI across the board in digital marketing because, dollar for dollar, it is the only inexpensive way to directly reach targeted consumers. In fact, the Direct Marketing Association found that email marketing has a return on investment of 4,300 percent. In my own business, email marketing has made my clients hundreds of thousands of dollars this year alone.

While email isn’t dead, the glory days of email marketing are. I’m referring to the time in the 1990’s when marketers would inundate us with every offer, coupon and deal imaginable. But it worked and marketers were making big bucks spamming their emails. Today that doesn’t work — we’re much less susceptible to spam emails, filters are able to keep our inbox clean and there are even laws (like the CAN SPAM Act) in place to protect us from unwanted emails.

Even with all of these barriers, how can you make email the most powerful tool in your digital marketing strategy? Simple. In addition to sales, coupons and deals, add value-driven-content to your email marketing campaign.

If your email marketing campaign is “sell, sell, sell”, you’re going to wear your subscribers out. They are going to get bored with your offers and eventually unsubscribe. This is known as email churn and statistics show that it can lead to a decline of around 25 percent of your subscribers each year.

The solution many marketers take to decrease churn is to increase spending when it comes to growing their list of subscribers. However, from a cost perspective, it’s cheaper to keep existing customers coming back than acquire new ones. To keep your churn rate down, you need to keep those existing customers interested. That’s where content can help. Use content as a means to educate and inform your customers, without selling. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Curate a top 10 list of interesting industry articles and share them with your subscribers. Moz, a SaaS company, does a great job of this with their “Moz Top 10” newsletter.
• Mix curated content and your own blog content in with your sales emails. HuckBerry, an ecommerce store, does this at the bottom of their emails.
• For certain emails, make education a priority over sales. Luxury skincare company Yon-Ka Paris uses this strategy to educate consumers about the treatment options they offer in addition to the products they sell.

3. Test everything.

When it comes to email, you have the ability to test nearly everything and get (almost) instantaneous feedback. This allows you to constantly learn and improve your campaigns based upon your findings.

The easiest tests to run are called split or A/B tests because you’re sending out two or more variations of emails to your subscribers and recording their reactions to each.

Here are the top three things you should be testing in your email marketing campaigns to get the most out of them.

1. Headlines: As mentioned above, headlines are very important. They’re the door to your email and if they aren’t optimized, no one is going to open it. Test different variations of length, capitalizing each word, using uppercase type, and even adding emojis.
2. Design: Recently, I tested a design for an email marketing campaign that heavily varied from the traditional email design we were using. Everything from color scheme to typography to verbiage was different. I was amazed by the results. The new design ended up selling an astounding 50 percent more products than the traditional design. Remember this — even if you’re satisfied with the design, your subscribers might not be. Test different variations of colors, buttons, typography, and graphics.
3. Send Days and Times: A study by Experian found that emails sent on the weekends outperformed their weekday counterparts. They also found that 8 p.m. to midnight is the perfect time to send emails. This makes sense because usual email volume is low on these days/times because most people aren’t working. However, every industry is different and you’ll want to keep that in mind when testing. Try to find days and times when the subscriber won’t be distracted by other things when your email pops up in their inbox.

The overarching theme of this post is this: don’t treat your subscribers like subscribers, treat them like real people. Talk to them the way their friends, family, and/or co-workers do, share valuable content with them, learn more about them through experimentation, and you’ll find email to be your most successful marketing channel.

Learn more about the eDot Family of Companies.

“Jayson delivers on good SMB advice.”

– Glenn Baruck, The eDot Family of Companies

The following article written by: Jayson DeMers, Forbes

I work with a ton of small businesses, and I love it. I love seeing different business models, helping entrepreneurs with limited resources and experience, and getting unique perspectives that you just can’t find in bigger, often more “cookie-cutter” business establishments. One-on-one, we can share information and insights, and build a strategy that’s helpful for their business.

I’ve been in the online marketing industry for about 10 years, so I can almost always help them learn something new. But sometimes, they help me learn something new as well. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the strategies you’ve found to be effective on your own, or in your own beliefs, and miss some of the less noticeable tactics that might have a significant impact on your strategy, either in terms of total results or in terms of efficiency.

These are just some of the marketing “hacks” small business owners have disclosed to me. Give them a try for yourself, and they might just turn your marketing strategy on its head:

1. Syndicate old content.

Once you create a piece of content, push it out to social media, and follow up with your initial rounds of commenters, most brands consider that source “tapped,” and never revisit it again. In some cases, this is necessary—especially if the article is news-based or otherwise temporary in nature. But if the article is evergreen, it will hold a permanent value. Why let this value sit idly on your blog when you could continue tapping it periodically for long-term dividends? Keep a list of your old evergreen content pieces, and re-syndicate them occasionally. This will generate new interest from new followers, and may be valuable to older followers who didn’t see it the first time around.

2. Segment your email list.

Most companies recognize the power of email marketing—it’s been claimed to be the highest-ROI online marketing strategy (though ROI’s a finicky measure to calculate, and my suspicion is that content marketing wins out long-term). But they try to tap into it with a single, massive email list of all their clients, visitors, readers, partners, and affiliates. Some small business owners I’ve talked to have segmented their email lists, sometimes splitting the list in multiple dimensions and have reported seeing better results. For example, they might keep different lists based on past engagements with the brand, or based on certain user dispositions. The bottom line is that this allows them to target their readers with more precision in the content of their email blasts, which reduces unsubscribe rates while improving open and click-through rates.

3. Earn and display landmark social proof.

Social proof is an increasingly important phenomenon in the online marketing landscape. The concept is simple—show that you’ve done good work, or that you’ve earned the respect of other people, and people will be more likely to engage with you. Most brands attempt to do this, to some degree, through online customer reviews or brief snippets of testimonials. But the real power lies in “landmark” pieces of social proof, which stand out as more significant and more powerful in the eyes of users. For example, you might earn a long testimonial from a nationally recognized brand—these can be hard to get, but they’ll pay off significantly. You might also write up an engaging and persuasive case study from one of your best clients. The key is to have some anchor piece that’s both recognizable and convincing.

4. Use custom landing pages.

Building a landing page takes time and effort, but they’re far more useful when they exist as a cluster. Each individual landing page should serve a highly specialized purpose, targeting a niche audience and serving one specific need; this allows you to refine the small details of your approach to cater to one specific type of conversion at a time. But beyond that, you’ll need to create multiple versions of each functional landing page, splitting your strategy even further into variants. The goal here is to compare and contrast how all your different landing pages perform, giving you more data and more user insights you can use to speed up the development of your campaign.

5. Cultivate brand evangelists.

Brand evangelism isn’t an entirely new concept. As with most items on this list, the premise is simple; find someone who’s going to be passionate enough about your brand to “evangelize” it, advocating it to friends and colleagues, and sharing material on your behalf. But how do you find such willing participants? You start by building individual relationships with some of your closest followers. Most businesses shy away from this, instead only investing time in messaging with mass-market appeal. They see it as a waste of time to target only one or two users in one go. But if you do this, and nurture those relationships with regular engagements, soon they’ll become evangelists in their own right without ever realizing it.

I’ve been using most of these “hacks” regularly, both for my own business and on behalf of my clients, and I have to say, I’ve been thrilled with the results. Some of them are more consistent (such assyndicating older content posts) and some are more like gambles (such as brand evangelism), but all of them have the potential to elevate your marketing campaign. I’ve always said one of the best approaches in marketing is to take risks and experiment—and now you’ve got some good tests to try!

Learn more about the eDot Family of Companies.

“In an Inbound world, outbound telemarketing is still critical to your success.“

– Bill Kerth, Movere Teleservices

The following article appears in, Technology Advice

If you run a B2B company, you may feel like you’re constantly trying to get more leads. Don’t worry; you’re not alone. According to a recent Placester study, 78 percent of B2B marketers say this is the biggest challenge they face.

No matter how many “thought leaders” declare the dawning of a new inbound era,B2B telemarketing is still one of the most effective (and most popular) lead sources. In fact, it’s ranked as the third most effective demand gen tactic, above SEO, web, and email marketing.

Telemarketing has its problems, and it’s easy to naysay — especially where “cold-calling” is concerned. Some people swear up and down that telemarketing doesn’t work, is dead, and should be abolished forever. But maybe the answer isn’t to get ridof telemarketing. Maybe the answer is to improve it. And what better way to improve than to be aware of the most common pitfalls — and have a plan for avoiding them?

Here are four to consider:

1) The Temptation to Cold Call

For years, salespeople have talked about the “numbers game.” As it pertains to telemarketing, the numbers game means you:

1. Get a large number of contacts.
2. Fail to engage a large number of them through cold-calling.
3. Sell your services to a very small number, who will hopefully become high-ticket customers and justify all of your low risk, low reward labor.

Telemarketing will always have an “element of machine,” as Zak Pines says, but calling strangers without permission and nothing to talk about — save your product — will be extremely unrewarding.

Hence, the numbers game.

What to Do Instead: First of all, don’t buy a contact list. Buying qualified leads is one thing, but buying just a contact list means you have no way of knowing whether the people you call will even be a good fit.

Second, use an opt-in or trigger-based process in which a specified prospect action moves them to a call list. For example, a prospect might download a whitepaper from your website; this signifies the prospect is aware of and interested in your brand and serves as a relevant conversation opener: “I see you downloaded our e-book on social selling . . .” Sound familiar? Marketing departments use the same kind of process to capture leads for drip marketing or to qualify leads before passing them to sales.

2) Telemarketing Monomania

It’s in the DSM-5, right after “hoarding disorder.” Okay, not really, but it’s a serious problem.

Telemarketing monomania happens when a B2B company puts all of their resources into outbound programs and neglects other important channels like email, web, social, and events.

It’s an easy mistake to make, especially if you’re watching your metrics and notice a preponderance of leads coming from outbound, while inbound (oh, humble inbound) squeezes out 5-10 qualified leads per month. Sixty percent of leads, on average, come from direct/outbound marketing, versus 40 percent through digital/inbound channels.

Obvious decision, right? Throw more money at teledemand.

Well, not so fast.

What to Do Instead: Your inbound and outbound efforts don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, they should complement each other. Use inbound tactics to increase brand awareness and keep the top of the funnel full, and use telemarketing to follow up and start conversations with potential customers. In this model, marketing is responsible for feeding the outbound department with a steady stream of qualified contacts.

A 2013 study by Aberdeen reveals a number of key benefits to marketing/telemarketing alignment, including higher annual revenue growth, higher percentages of accepted leads, and better ability to meet sales quotas:

3) Getting Hung Up on the Hard Sell

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with telemarketing is pushing for a commitment too early — e.g. trying to schedule a sales appointment or pitch your product on the first phone call, after a stilted introduction. You’re already asking for a person’s time, which is an imposition. If they feel you’re trying to sell something, they’re even less likely to stay on the phone.

In the B2B sector — where almost every sale is a “complex” sale —  it’s counterproductive for telemarketers to be “selling” anything. Buyers have a long, intricate decision-process to follow, and they want to be advised and educated, not solicited.

What to Do Instead: The best thing you can do is lead with a value proposition. That might be a relevant piece of content that addresses one of the prospect’s pain points and a follow up call to discuss further, or it could be something else —  an assessment, a free industry tool, etc. Over time and with multiple conversations, you can gather BANT information (budget, authority, timeline, need), determine if prospects are interested in your services, and then refer them to a closer or account manager.

Some refer to this approach as “teleprospecting.” Where traditional telemarketing implies pitching products to strangers, teleprospecting is about engaging in valuable conversations that identify and generate demand.

4) Forgetting to Be Human

It’s ironic that telemarketing accounts for such a large percentage of B2B leads, and yet companies invest so little in their telemarketers — invest meaning train, coach, compensate, etc. A team of poorly trained, lackadaisical phone reps will have a hard time starting meaningful conversations. The bad call scripts, the robotic voices, the agents that aren’t fluent in their prospects’ native language . . . it all adds up to a steaming pile of failure. And it’s no small wonder. People want to be treated like people, and that requires some basic call etiquette, like speaking in full sentences, addressing people by name, appealing to their needs, normal people stuff like that.

Many companies decide to outsource their telemarketing program, but for the wrong reason. They’re more concerned with cutting costs than with improving results. And as a consequence, they partner with a disreputable teledemand service, and their outbound revenue plummets.

What to Do Instead: Be human. Give your inside sales reps the training and coaching they need, and make sure they have an adequate understanding of not only your products and services, but also the motivations and goals of your prospects. If you decide to outsource, choose a lead generation service that cares for its phone reps and will work according to your needs.

Don’t Be Afraid to Get Help

A lot of companies simply don’t have the resources to teleprospect, or at least not to do it well. And really, teleprospecting is only one piece of the larger demand gen puzzle. If you want to keep a steady stream of qualified leads in your pipeline, you need a strategy that stretches across departments and effectively balances inbound and outbound tactics. You need good agents, good content, and the science/wizardry to make it all come together.

Learn More about Movere Teleservices.