There is a misconception that telemarketing sales are best suited to markets of individual consumers, and to products or services with relatively low purchase thresholds. The fact is, telemarketing can be a vital part of the sales cycle in the business-to-business market, no matter how complex the sale.

To understand how this works, its best to think of the sales cycle as a manufacturing process. At the beginning stage of a manufacturing process, when raw materials are first introduced, equipment has to be heavy, durable, and able to handle masses of materials. As the manufacturing process moves toward completion, the equipment involved needs to become more sophisticated, with more emphasis on detail than on brute force.

Similarly, in the early part of a sales cycle, the emphasis should be on volume--working through large numbers of basic cold calls. Only later in the process, when the prospect field has been refined, should the emphasis switch to sophistication and detail. Just as it is unrealistic to expect a telemarketing representative to close a complex business sale, its also inefficient to have high-level sales representatives making a large volume of introductory calls.

Adding Telemarketing Capacity
By adding capacity for high-volume telemarketing calls, a business-to-business sales operation may succeed in shortening the sales cycle for its high-end representatives. A company can try to create this telemarketing sales capacity by building its own internal team--which could serve as a farm team for up-and-coming sales representatives--or it can gain that capacity more quickly by outsourcing to a telemarketing sales operation.

In either case, it is important to be realistic. Automated calls, or ill-trained, unprofessional telemarketing callers are not going to make any headway with a business audience. However, a well-trained telemarketing staff can make some progress way through the sales cycle, in the following ways:

1. Cleaning up bad data. Publicly available databases invariably have some outdated or incorrect information. It is best to have lower-level callers make the first pass through the data, and clean up what they find to be incorrect, rather than having top sales people waste their time.
2. Adding proprietary data. Besides cleaning up data, an early pass through the prospect base is a good opportunity to add proprietary information, such as when equipment is due for replacement or who the real decision-makers are.
3. Establishing name recognition. Even if early telemarketing calls dont yield much in the way of leads at first, they will help establish name recognition. Consistently calling on the same prospect base establishes a sense of continuity that suggests the company is committed to the market.
4. Passing along leads at the right time. Again, telemarketing sales dont close complex business deals, but they can help by passing a lead along at the right time. Piquing a prospects interest just as they are coming up on a replacement cycle can create the ideal opening to pass a lead along to someone who can get into the complexities of the sale.

High-end closers will always be at a premium. The more an organization can leverage its time to focus on the latter stages of the sales cycle, however, the more productivity it can get out of those closers.

Sources
BusinessWeek
New York Times