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Double Duty: Eight Ways to Use Telemarketing Calls as a Market Research Opportunity

Telemarketing calls are not just sales opportunities, but also a means of learning something about the marketplace.

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A good reason for outsourcing telemarketing calls is that there is so much trial and error involved in this phase of sales. The vast majority of calls do not result in an appointment or other indication of interest, and yet it is necessary to work through all the rejections to find the occasional prospect. Still, the portion of that effort that does not result in leads does not have to be wasted. A company can use its telemarketing calls as an opportunity to learn something about its products, marketing approach, and target markets.

After all, companies routinely do market research in advance of launching a product, but considering how fluid marketplace trends are today, market research should be a continual process. Also, while traditional market research can be too much of a theoretical exercise, there is something to be said for conducting market research the same way a company sells its services.

Using Telemarketing Calls for Market Research
The process of using telemarketing calls for market research should start with a conversation with the telemarketing services provider. The provider will be able to assess its capabilities for providing this dimension of service and may even have some experience with market research. Here are eight possibilities that are worth discussing:

Create different pitches for different telemarketing teams. Rather than guessing at the most effective pitch, a company can try different ideas and then concentrate on the most successful one.
Assign different target markets to different telemarketing teams. While most brands aspire to go up-market, sometimes going down-market makes up in volume what it sacrifices in margin.
Adjust the value proposition for different telemarketing teams. Using segmented telemarketing efforts is a good way to find out what difference it would make to adjust a price point here or credit terms there.
Track reasons for rejection. From a sales standpoint, leads are gold and rejections are trash. However, from a bigger-picture market research standpoint, there is much to be learned from the reasons behind rejections.
Find out who is getting the business. In the course of a telemarketing effort, a key thing to learn is who has what business. This can be valuable for competitive analysis and for targeting specific competitors in the future.
Be sensitive to declining demand. Telemarketing callers could try to discern if rejections are based on choosing someone else, or simply on waning interest in the product or service.
Watch out for substitution trends. Similar to the above point, be aware if there is a type of different product or service people are turning to as an alternative.
Be alert for possible new offerings. Find out what people want, and it might help guide product development efforts.

Note that the first three of these techniques can be managed from above, with no special effort required on the part of telemarketing callers. The remaining efforts would require additional capabilities on the part of the telemarketing services provider.

Conclusion
Because of the possibilities for using telemarketing calls to gain market research insights, this should be kept in mind when choosing a telemarketing services provider. While lead generation remains the primary goal, telemarketing services which can include asking for, recording, and tracking additional information should be considered a plus.

Source
BusinessWeek