Whether you’re part of an internal marketing team tasked to perform cold-calling prospects or you’re the team leader of an outsourced telemarketing services company, the agenda is constant: lead generation.
However, this process doesn’t just involve a handful of telemarketers poring over a list of decision-makers. The overall campaign is typically orchestrated by a number of pertinent people, such as marketing manager, a quality assurance analyst, a sales coach, an account manager, and of course, the client itself.
The presence (and sometimes, direct involvement) of these people can affect the flow of control a telemarketer has over his or her own cold-calling strategy.
Depending on the nature of the campaign, the “big bosses” can often dictate a certain preferred approach to cold-calling which they think is best for the task at hand. The problem is that there are times when these directions are not suited to the telemarketer’s style or the type of target market. This causes a disconnection between the perceived solution and the actual situation.
For instance, your client, the CEO of a vendor of IT products and services, thinks that a perky, feature-oriented approach to prospects is the best way to go. However, you, as the telemarketer, learn that being perky is actually inappropriate when talking to tech-savvy people such as IT Managers and Chief Technology Officers, and that being feature-oriented is counter-productive, since they are natural experts of their respective fields.
That puts you in sticky situation wherein you have to follow a client directive and sacrifice the quality of your calls. Or, you could, if you choose to, disregard the coaching and go for what you think is suitable.
Being in command doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to choose between the two. All you need is to be assertive in letting superiors (and other concerned people) know that your perspective is more valid that theirs, since you’re the one who’s actually on the phones talking to prospects.
Without exercising this power, it would be a lose-lose situation, as you would fail in your telemarketing efforts and your client, too, will not get the desired numbers. For some campaigns to be successful, certain traditions need to be broken and necessary adjustments must be made.
Again, it all boils down to communication. As long as there is an open line between you and those who are overseeing the campaign, everyone would be on the same page and the operation will run smoothly and productively.
