Member Article

Toucan Telemarketing Creates Opportunities Through Exploration

Manufacturers can have fixed ideas about their customers and their markets, but could this be holding them back

With many specialist manufacturing companies having an emphasis on the technical aspects of their products, this can lead to a more limited approach to sales and marketing, as Paula Bates of Toucan Telemarketing points out.

“To an extent this narrower view works in securing certain niche markets, but it can restrict the potential for expansion and, importantly, exploration of fresh opportunities.”

One of telemarketing’s key advantages, and benefits, is that it covers a range of communication skills, which makes it ideal for exploring and probing for new prospects and markets.

The Personal Proactive Approach

“Skilled telemarketers are explorers. They are willing to persevere in making new contacts and building relationships with them.”

It is this quality of meaningfulness that sets professional telemarketing apart.

“Personalised interactions are what drives effective telemarketing, along with a large degree of tenacity. It boils down to relationship-building, on the back of that initial approach.”

This approach is proactive rather than reactive.

“While you may think you know the limits of your customer-base or your market, there will always be someone willing to buy from you who you are not aware of. The role of the exploratory telemarketer is to find that someone”

The Perfect Preparation

Manufacturers may express a degree of scepticism about outsourced telemarketing when it comes to the technical knowledge of their products.

“There is a received wisdom that using outside specialist support won’t work because of not knowing the product inside out. However, what telemarketing offers is a different set of skills to purely technical sales.”

This form of marketing communications is not designed to supplant technical sales teams but to complement them.

“Think of an expert telemarketing service as preparing the way by expanding the boundaries of your market, where they are not there to make the sale, but to spark interest through careful personal interaction”

“This is about empathy and understanding how people respond.”

Even specialist niche manufacturers can benefit from this approach, because it broadens their marketing and communications capabilities.

They have their own added value through focusing on a particular niche, but, in turn, telemarketing can add value to them.

“Even a niche market will have unexplored areas. Telemarketers are ideally positioned to map out these territories and build more opportunities for technical sales teams.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by M3 Media Publishing .