A telemarketing script is a great way to did your toe in the water in telesales by giving yourself a structure to follow and not end up with the awful situation of silence with you not knowing what to say

Telemarketing is, for many company’s the first contact they make with new clients. Done correctly, it can be the fastest way to build a business from a standing start. Done incorrectly it can alienate many potential clients and create a not so welcome reputation.

Telemarketing scripts are best used as a framework, a way to structure a call to provide the route to your goal by simply following a few simple steps

Know your Goal

A goal, is the end result you wish to achieve. Do you want to sell a product or service directly over the phone or is it to set up an appointment. Like a map, knowing the final location allows you to plot the best path.

Talking to the correct person !important

When you have made contact you need to be talking to the the right person if you are not, you are wasting selling time. The correct person is known as the decision maker, the decision maker is the person that can authorise you to get paid.

Names

Find the persons name and title depending on the context of the call you can either address them as Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms. or by there first name. As a rule of thumb try to gather how they would be addressed in the organisation

Step One

Assuming you are speaking to the correct person you should introduce your self and your company this can simply be,

“Hello Jenny, My name is Bob I’m calling from ABC Marketing”

Step Two

The reason for your call. Why are you interrupting these busy people. This is the hook part of the call, It needs to be punchy and concise; the reason why they should listen to the rest of what you have to say.

“Jenny ABC Marketing help businesses like yours to get more clients.”

There may be times when you have been given the contact name by an existing client so you can work this into the conversation.

“Jenny ABC Marketing help businesses like yours to get more clients. Bob Proctor gave us your name as we have done such a great job for his marketing he thought we could do the same for you”

Step Three

Open Questioning
Open questioning is about asking questions that can not be answered with one word answers such as yes or no.

Open question examples

“Jenny how do you currently market your company”

“Jenny how successful has your marketing plan been in the past”

Questions that can be answered with a single word are known as closed questions. In the opening stages of a call they can kill it dead by giving you no-where to go.
Using open questions you will get your prospect chatting about the company giving you a more rounded overview prompting you to ask better questions to establish a need for your product or service.

Active listening
To be interesting you have to be interested, show you’re listening to what your prospect is saying be repeating back key terms and delving further in.

Building Rapport

Building rapport is about being liked and liking who your talking to. People buy people, building a business relationship is as much about personalities as it is about the product or service. I find the best ways to build rapport is to be interested in the other person not just pretending but to have a genuine interest in people and what they are doing. I work with someone who has an amazing knack of building rapport with someone very quickly by doing this she increases her sales without even trying.

When you write your telemarketing script use these pointers to build an effective framework to hang your personality on and make it yours.

Before you go off to battle this foe in the search engine rankings, you need to figure out if the battle is worth fighting. Firstly do you have a chance of winning without wasting large amounts of your resources. Secondly is the battle worth your time. By choosing your battles with a clearly defined criteria you can save your self many hours of wasted effort.

Is the term you are targeting profitable
Are your competitors well established in the market
Is your target term specific
Are you being led by ego

Lets deal with the fist on the list “Is the term you are targeting profitable”. Profitability is a major factor in your keyword decision in regard to SEO. A key phrase is profitable when its product or service led, non generic and hints at the user intention. In plain English, the end result is money changing hands

The phrase “health and safety consultant” is a prime example of a phrase that hints at what the user is looking for when they search via the search engines. The intention being that they wish to find a person to help them with health and safety. If the user had typed in just “health and safety” then the intention is not that well laid out.

A well established market can be hard to compete in if your a late comer to the party. To establish how entrenched the top ten sites are here are a few points to look for.

High PR(page rank)
Lots of indexed pages (found by typing in the search engine “site:thedomain.com”)
Domain age (old domains rank better then young ones)
Dmoz listing
Yahoo directory listing

If you find a few sites in the top 10 that are young with little or no PR then you should be able to compete.

Are you being specific in your target, similar to profitability a phrase that is more specific will convert to a sale better then a generic term.

Ego is a flew in the competitive SEO or web marketeer. We like to be number one and the search engines are the place to do it. I have fallen into this trap of targeting a competitive term with little profitability value to prove how good I am. Don’t do it it is wasted effort. Its just ego, your ego doesn’t put food on the table. To be a web marketeer you need to be pragmatic and look at the bigger picture.

Once you have the habit of looking at the bigger picture and only take on projects that are winnable you will find you have more time for the more important things.

Companies want to pay you money to find out what you think

What you think is valuable and many market research companies help large corporations plan ahead by feeding back your thoughts and views in the shape of a plain old survey. Once this data is sorted and analysed it can give information such as consumer trends or  how satisfied customers are with a particular company.

How much can you get paid taking surveys

The amount you get paid is not set per company but is worked out on a case by case basis the amounts range from 20 pence up 20 – 25 pounds per survey

Coming next

We are going to research the top five paid survey companies