If you’re an IT company, say a networking service specialist or a hardware company, it’s not enough just to be popular in your particular area. Read on to learn more.
If you’re an IT company,
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say a networking service specialist or a hardware company, it’s not enough
just to be popular in your particular area. True, being in the IT market provides some advantages to
those from other niches, but grabbing sales from target consumers can be a pain, especially in the US
and other countries with service-oriented economies where the competition can be pretty stiff. Yes,
there are a lot of big fishes in the pond, but there are a lot of fishermen prowling the same waters
too.
Being ahead is well and good but what you do as a company to stay ahead or go even further is what
truly counts. And in these times, no other statistic is as vital, or as damning, as sales and
profits. Selling and promoting your company may seem a pretty straightforward affair with time-tested
media advertising but if you think that’s enough, then you got another thing coming. Advertising is a
vital part of IT lead generation campaigns but there are other components that are catching up in
terms of importance, one of them being telemarketing.
Telemarketing has been around for decades but, until as recently as the new millennium, it has been
used almost exclusively for hard selling. One of the more important contributions of telemarketing is
in business lead generation, where people call businesses with the intent of trying to get them to be
interested in a particular company’s catalogue of product or service packages. This technique is
dubbed cold-calling and, in many instances, the companies being called on don’t expect being called.
Cold-calling also accomplishes one more important task: the task of verifying whether a business
exists, its current address and a point of contact’s contact info. Calling lists are updated
regularly in this manner, and qualified or interested prospects are singled out for follow-up
protocols, which in this case is setting up the target company’s point of contact with the IT
business representative. This, in turn, could result into sales for the IT company, depending on the
rep’s ability to close the deal.
IT lead generation through telemarketing isn’t the walk in the park that many people believe. It
takes a lot of smooth talking or guts to get the information needed from the company being called. A
lot of times, it takes luck and timing as well, since receptionists are oftentimes instructed not to
give up any info about their bosses. Considering this, it should be safe to assume that only about 1
in 6 companies called actually give out any pertinent details about qualified points of contact or
decision makers, given that most IT companies in the same area are using the same cold-calling
technique. And wouldn’t that just grate into a receptionist’s, or decision maker’s sensibilities.
The payoff, however, is potentially great so whatever the consequence, many IT companies are
expanding their lead generation campaigns to include buying calling lists and outsourcing the
telemarketing aspect to call centers. It means shelling out a significant sum, but considering the
success that the technique brings to aggressive companies, it’s more than worth the risk.