Ask a few people what outsourced telemarketing firms are. Most will they say they’re companies hired to call possible customers and sell them a product over the phone. They will mostly be right but have you thought about other ways small businesses get a boost through telemarketing campaigns?
There are quite a few! Today, we’ll talk about 12 of them together. You may be surprised to learn how many areas in which a cold-calling service helps small businesses.
12 Surprising Ways You Can Use Outsourced Telemarketing Firms
1 – Recruiting New Employees
If you are a small company, you know it’s not easy. It’s quite hard to balance overflowing workloads and search for a new employee at the same time.
Most interview processes will require your involvement, but why spend your time speaking to unqualified candidates? Outsourced telemarketing firms can take on the initial dialing and qualification steps.
This way, you’ll then be able to attend to your business’s demands and continue the search for your next rockstar employee.
2 – Executive Search Firm Sourcing, Screening, or Full Desk Recruiting
Seasonality, confidentiality, and unpredictability are issues that executive search firms face when serving their clients. They often hire independent recruiters based on current needs.
Working long-term with independent contractors can be a sweet deal. However, it also often comes with issues over reliability, consistency, and payments.
Getting help for searches or recruiting agency business development from an outsourced telemarketing group instead can resolve these issues.
The reason is that outsourced telemarketing firms are run by outreach specialists that often have executive search and sales expertise. Additionally, they will have a proven process and need little to no training.
This background fosters better communication, accountability, and clear expectations.
3 -Client & Applicant Database Management
Are you an employer or a recruiting agency with a database of thousands of contacts deep? If you, you know that being able to find the right person at the right time can get hard. It’s imperative to go through your database regularly. This helps you stay in touch with seasonal clients, top talent, and keep their contact details up to date. Not doing so can mean thousands of dollars in missed job orders or hiring placement opportunities.
The ebbs and flows of your company’s regular workload may prevent your full-time team from staying on top of this. Plus you may only need to do it occasionally. Outsourced telemarketing firms can help.
Since telemarketing firms specialize in cold-calling, reaching out to contacts on behalf of your firm will be intuitive. They can ensure your database has current contact information, titles, phone numbers, and email addresses. They can also ask if there is anything your candidates or employer contacts need. If so, through this touchpoint call, you are increasing the chance that they’ll work with you instead of someone else.
4- Supply Chain Sourcing
At times, companies will have a sudden need for high-volume, urgent searches to fill supply chain gaps. Companies like ours can research, identify, and contact potential suppliers. Then, they can meet their needs while conserving internal resources and meet their customers’ needs.
When a business’s buying team is relatively lean, they may need help with other steps of the buying process. Working with outsourced telemarketing firms with administrative, negotiation, or other useful skills on their team can help with every step.
5- Partnership Searches
A telemarketing campaign can help you promote your product or service through sponsorship or other alliances.
Collaborating with well-liked brands for mentions and giveaways is a great way to build social proof for your blossoming business. A carefully crafted outreach campaign helps you get in front of internal PR representatives. It can also put you in touch with strategic marketing managers on your target partner list.
6- Approaching Influencers
It may seem counter-intuitive to reach out to social media influencers and bloggers by phone. Obviously, their whole (public) existence is online.
However, the reality is that any influencer worth their salt gets hundreds of notifications, emails, and DMs daily. If you want to get past the noise and get an influencer on your side quickly, what should you do? That’s right, pick up the phone and call them.
Outsourced telemarketing firms can approach influencers for you and get a considerably more enthusiastic response. After all, what do you think would be most compelling?
A. Receiving a bulk email saying that a growing brand is looking to work with influencers – OR –
B. Receiving a call from a strategic partnership representative that says their brand wants explicitly to work with YOU?
It doesn’t take much thought.
7- Event Coordination
What if you provide a sponsored service, and all you need is an audience?
Your service may not be sales-related, but you may still need the support that outsourced telemarketing firms provide. Even if a third party is funding the events you run, you are responsible for keeping your calendar full. If you alone facilitate the events, it’s hard to keep up the momentum of setting dates with new groups continually.
8- Real Estate
Real estate investors and agents are always to be on the hunt for new deals.
They typically need help with few parts of this hunt. Research, inbound, and outbound call handling when seeking new properties to buy is a big one. Another is attracting new clients. Having a partner they can work with on an as-needed basis makes their job easier and more profitable.
The level of ease increases when their outsourced telemarketing firm’s team understands the US real estate market. The ability to relate to homeowners across the nation, regardless of varying regional accents and cultural references, also helps.
9- Managing Closing or Demo Appointments
Many telemarketing firms are only capable of handling simple tasks. The majority train their agents only to read from a script. They are limiting to taking information, passing on messages, and typically don’t provide support through the entire sales process.
Other outsourced sales firms do a lot more than reading from a script. Some hire talented account managers that can learn a plethora of industries and products.
They will likely understand sales principles, be trained in educating customers, and even closing. In this case, you can feel comfortable handing them other parts of your sales process to handle. These steps in your process can include managing inbound leads, demo appointments, or other mid-to-end of funnel steps.
10- Servicing Multilingual Customers
Due to geography or other staffing restraints, smaller companies sometimes cannot find local candidates that meet their language needs.
If they have many customers or vendors that speak a foreign language, they may work with outsourced telemarketing firms. The outsourced agency will usually have the time and expertise to source and train employees that meet various language needs.
This expertise allows small businesses to expand sales to different cultural backgrounds or countries with more ease and less expense.
11- E-Commerce Support
Here’s a common frustration that e-commerce customers have:
Their favorite online shops often lack live phone support when they have a problem or a question.
According to an article shared by RetailDive.com, about 77% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts. Uncertainty about products and complicated checkout processes are a couple of reasons for the unfinished purchases.
Another issue that can prevent a web shopper from ever revisiting your site is poor customer service. If your customers have a grievance or special request, speaking with a live person can make a big difference. This can improve their willingness to return or refer your online store to a friend.
12- Customer Success
The same is true for paid platforms, web apps, and other software.
Your SaaS product may be incredible, but that doesn’t mean your users won’t need some hand-holding. When your customer needs help with a technical issue, they need reassurance. Having to put in a ticket through your website, then wait for an email response can be frustrating.
Then there are the customers that quietly use your platform for months without ever contacting you. How can you be sure that they are getting the maximum benefit from it? How can you be sure that they aren’t on the brink of deleting their account any minute?
A simple call from a customer success representative can create opportunities for feedback and even upselling.
It can also be the deciding factor between your users staying loyal to you or going with a competitor.
It’s typical for software companies in today’s world to be very small. Sometimes, the whole company consists of just a few developers. This is not much different than the examples above. By outsourcing customer success, they can provide a white-glove experience just like the biggest, most successful companies.
Do you have outside-the-box telemarketing needs?
We’ll be happy to talk about them with you so feel free to contact us. You can also feel free to ask any questions or leave other ideas in the comments. Thanks for reading!