An appointment setter is essentially a telemarketer whose aim is to arrange appointments for you or your team to follow up on. They start with a database of contacts, ideally developed from your own lead generation strategies, and phone to arrange an appointment.
They serve as the middle of three stages in your sales process:
Lead generation is an important part of marketing your business, but setting business appointment is an equally important part of actually selling your product or service – especially where you have a more complicated product or service which requires a personal selling approach.
Using a telemarketer to schedule appointments leaves the sales people free to focus on closing sales. Skilled telemarketers are well trained to weed out unqualified prospects or those who are not in a position to buy. Provided they are given the right instructions, they can be used as filters – putting individual prospects into the right groups based on their readiness to buy.
Some prospects will require a sales visit. For others this would be a waste of everyone’s time. A skilled telemarketer can, instead, arrange for further information to be sent to this prospect or move them into a file for future contact.
If your existing database of prospective clients is a little thin, you may consider using a rented or purchased list of contacts. These lists can be tailor made to your industry and target customer. Make sure to buy from a reliable service that has taken the necessary legal precautions in putting together and managing its lists – a good telemarketing company can advise you.
In short, if you want to improve the productivity of your sales efforts, try using an appointment setting service for your next campaign.
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Can Telemarketing Services Really Increase Sales?
Telemarketing services can help improve sales and increase leads generation,but you probably don’t want to turn your business into a call center.
Inbound Marketing Calls
In most cases the telemarketing that you’ll be considering will be outbound (i.e. you contacting the customer) as opposed to inbound (them contacting you). However, if you are not prepared to handle inbound calls, you may be wasting your hard-won marketing dollars. So you should train and prepare your staff to handle inbound calls effectively and keep them up-to-date with the marketing efforts that may lead to calls.
You may choose to incorporate phone contact into your current advertising, which may include:
Using a dedicated, toll-free number can be a great way to encourage prospects to get in touch, but your staff needs to be ready and prepared to handle those calls, answer questions and effectively funnel these initial leads into your sales strategy. For example, your advertising could promote a free report that customers can claim via a phone number.
Each call therefore represents a qualified, interested prospect, motivated to lift the phone.
Outbound Telemarketing
Outbound telemarketing (you contacting the customer) can be an effective tool in either:
A follow up call after a direct mail campaign can increase the open rate and also increase the number of sales. Outbound telemarketing also gives you the opportunity to up-sell your existing customers or target them with special offers.
Outsource or In-house Telemarketing
Few business owners look forward to getting on the phone and cold calling prospects (or even calling warm leads). It’s not surprising then that an industry has grown up to handle telemarketing services for small businesses. But hiring a telemarketing company is not an inexpensive exercise.
With that in mind, a good rule of thumb is for small businesses to avoid outsourcing telemarketing services- except where the value of a new client hits at least four figures.
For most businesses however, telemarketing will be done internally.
If it’s your own list, then the purpose of your call should be two-fold. Ideally you’ll have a product or service that you would like to sell.
If you have bought or rented your list then you can add an alternative goal: get them to agree to join your mailing / contact database. This will allow you to market to them again in the future.
Of course, you never started your business to become a telemarketer so ask yourself whether or not this is the best way to spend your time. If it isn’t, and you can afford to bring in some help, do so.
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List Building Strategies & Setting Appointments & Telemarketing
Does having permission to email really make a difference? Effective email marketing is at the heart of any good lead generation program online.
But…
Emailing people who have not requested your information is spam and can land you in trouble with potential customers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and even the law. Permission or opt in email marketing is the only kind of bulk email marketing you should be considering. But what kind of permission do you need? What does permission mean? And once you’ve got permission what should you do with it?
Permission means that a customer has actively said that they would like to receive more information from you. For example, if you ask people to download a special report by providing their email address you need to make it clear that you will then send them further information. This should be done with a clear statement and what is called a ‘double opt in’. A double opt in is where the customer first signs up for information on your website. They then receive an email to confirm that they would like further information and a link to finalize it. Using double opt in ensures that your customers really do give their permission.
Forgetting to tick a box to ‘opt out’ is not the same as opting in.
Once you’ve got permission you can safely contact your prospective customers by email. You should bear in mind three points of good permission-based email marketing; your communications should be relevant, personal and expected.
Permission is dependent on you living up to your end of the bargain. Prospects can easily decide to stop receiving your message (and you need to make it easy for them to do so) or simply ignore them when they arrive. There’s no point in having a huge list if nobody reads your emails.
In the same way that a customer can take away their permission they can also increase it. As a marketer your job is to increase permission over time – from getting permissionto send email, to getting the OK to show up for a sales call, to closing the sale, to offering new products or services to existing customers.
This all takes time – which means you need to plan your permission based email marketing campaign as an ongoing program.
Your Opt In Process: Your opt in process will usually start with a simple form on your website. Keep the initial information to a minimum – email and name will usually do.
You can and should use an auto-responder (a piece of software that sends out pre-written emails) to handle the sign up process. It’s not a great idea to try and send bulk email from your normal email program. A professional solution is best and there are plenty to choose from.
For a small list you should be expecting to pay as little as $20-30 a month ( some examples include constant contact, i contact, get response). Most professional services can help you manage multiple lists, will have email templates for you to use and provide good tracking tools so you can see how each email you send performs.
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Do you want to develop leads online? The Internet can be a great place to develop and grow your business. In particular it offers a perfect opportunity to attract customers, build your prospect list and ultimately help you close new business. The good news is that internet lead generation is not all that different from traditional offline lead generation.
Yes, the Internet changes the way that people look for information. Yes, the Internet allows you to automate lead generation. But, ultimately the steps involved in good lead generation are the same:
Let’s take a look at each step:
Imagine your website as if it were a store. Your first job is to attract people to your store using effective marketing techniques. You can’t sell anybody anything until they’re in your store. Some of the marketing techniques to consider include:
It’s also worth remembering that you can still use effective offline strategies like direct mail to drive traffic to your website as well.
Once you have started to generate traffic to your website then the next step is to turn some of that traffic into a list of prospective new customers to follow up with. Usually this will involve you creating an incentive for them to provide their contact details, the first part of any good permission based marketing campaign. That incentive could be a special offer, or, more likely, further useful information.
What form this information takes is up to you. You could consider a blog that people can subscribe to, a free newsletter, or a webinar that people can take part in, for example.
Once you start building a list the next question becomes, ‘what do I do with this list?’. The goal has to be to move people from being interested to being willing to buy your product or service. Of course not every prospective customer on your list will end up becoming a customer.
That’s fine.
However, it is important for you to find ways of separating those with a genuine interest from the ‘tire kickers’. Tools like newsletters and autoresponders can help you automate much of this process.
Of course the final step is to close the sale. You can create online marketing tools that will encourage customers to buy from you. But unless you are actually selling a product via your website, you will almost always have to close the sale through direct contact with your prospective customer or client.
However, if you set your lead generation program up effectively; the advertising you use, how you build your list and what you do with that list can all help ensure that the people you actually spend time selling to are the most qualified prospects you could hope for.
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You do have a list don’t you?
It is often said that your profit is in your list, but many companies simply do not take the time and effort to build a prospect list effectively. A good prospect list is a goldmine of future sales – and built and used effectively, it can become your first source for new business.
List building is particularly effective online – even if your business is done offline. Building a list online allows you to target people with similar needs – based on the information that they search for online. Prospects with similar needs are more likely to respond to well-targeted campaigns.
A useful prospect list is ALWAYS based on permission – permission for you to contact a prospect in the future. If you don’t get their permission, it’s spam. Your first consideration should therefore be how to encourage prospects to give you that permission – how can you encourage them to subscribe to your list?
The simple fact that you have a form on your website is not a guarantee that everyone that visits will give you their details. So, how do you go about it then?
Given the amount of spam and other junk email that people receive, the permission to contact your prospects with further information is a valuable asset. Call it a permission asset. To gain a permission asset you need to offer something valuable in return. Usually this will be useful information – a special report, ebook, white paper or newsletter for example. You should keep the information you ask for to a minimum and make it extremely clear how you intend to use their contact info.
If you take the time to build and use your list effectively it can become your greatest marketing asset.
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Are your lead generation techniques working for you?
Have you tried different lead generation techniques, only to fall short of your goals for inquiries and new business?
If so, here are our top ten techniques to increase sales and new business inquiries.
1. Market and Advertise Offline and Online
A lead generation strategy is useless without a way of getting prospects to the first rung of the ladder. This means successful advertising and marketing of your business. A good marketing strategy can motivate cold prospects to become warm leads and take the first step in doing business with you. Read my FREE eBook for more information on this.
2. Build a List
Your list is your most important asset. Most prospects aren’t ready to buy the first time you come in contact with them, but they may be ready at some stage in the future. A well developed list, packed full of prospective customers allows you to see better returns, cut marketing costs and maximize the returns from the money you do spend.
Of course good list building is not just an excel sheet with everybody’s email address. A good list is detailed, segmented into different types of buyers and is regularly updated with new information. It’s the backbone of every good lead generation system.
3. Schedule Appointments
For those businesses with a more complicated sales process that requires a personal approach, the next step after a prospect shows interest is to arrange for a meeting. Depending on your business and resources, you might consider using a professional appointment setter to do the legwork.
4. Close the Sale
If your prospect expressed an interest or met you for an appointment, they’re interested in what you have to sell. How interested? Ask them to buy it. They can either say “yes”, “no” or “not now”.
Whatever the result, by closing the sale you’ve moved the process along. You may have a new sale. You may move a prospect along your sales system towards a future sale. You may have eliminated a prospect that could have cost you time in the future. Of course you don’t want to come across as pushy, but don’t make the common mistake of shying away from asking for the sale.
5. Build a Follow Up List – Clients and Prospects
As your list grows you’ll want to split it into two (or more) kinds of follow-up lists. One is for current and past clients. You’ll ask them for future business, sell new products and services and ask for referrals. For existing customers you’ll also need to use effective customer retention programs because these are the people you need to pay the most attention to. After all, it’s always cheaper to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones.
The second is for prospects who aren’t clients – yet. From that list you’ll want to implement Step 6.
6. Identify the Most-Qualified Prospects
As your list grows even more you’ll want to segregate it to make more money by spending more energy and time on your “A” prospects. Spend less time and energy to your “B” and “C” prospects. The first step is to create profiles of who the A, B and C prospects are.
The next trick is to starting using your automated systems to make C prospects into B’s and B prospects into A’s (and A prospects into paying customers.)
7. More Closing
If your prospect didn’t buy from you the first time, you should have put him on your mailing list. Find ways to follow up with him so you’re there when he is ready.
[Alec Baldwin - Best Performance On Closing]
8. Keep in Touch with Prospects
Keep delivering useful content to your prospects, keep making offers, closing, and asking for the sale with all your prospects who haven’t bought yet. You never know when they’re ready to buy. But when they are, you want to be there.
9. Keep in Touch with Customers and Clients
Once you convert a prospect into a customer, don’t ignore them! It’s more profitable to do business and keep in touch with clients who know and trust you. Advertising and prospecting for new business, in the cold marketplace, is the most expensive kind of business development.
10. “Rinse and Repeat!”
Turn your long-term lead generation techniques into a repeatable cycle. Turn lead generation techniques into a system. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
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Insurance lead generation for most companies is a straightforward process. You start by buying leads or generating them yourself through advertising online and off. Then you start selling.
Simple!
For the consumer however, buying insurance is confusing, time consuming, and tedious. They are afraid to ask someone like you for more information because they believe it will lead to a sales pitch. That means that you don’t get as many leads as you would like. This is unfortunate, because you’re probably the one person most qualified to answer their questions and help them make an intelligent decision.
In short, if you want to place more customers, you need a way of generating insurance leads that sets you apart from the other insurance companies who are targeting those very same prospects. So how do you do that? How do you make yourself stand out?
Starting with the customer in mind, the best method of insurance lead generation is to make it easy for prospects to contact you and find the information they’re looking for – without fear of the dreaded hard sell.
It might sound crazy but if you want to generate more insurance leads the smart thing is to…
… give your prospect the information they want, with no strings attached.
Providing content that answers your prospects queries will attract more prospects – the ones who are put off by the hoops that other agents make them jump through. Secondly it will make you a trusted resource that they will return to. Of course, you’ll also want to gather prospects’ contact details where possible. This is your permission to continue to market to them over time. To encourage prospects to give you this permission you’ll often need an incentive.
In your insurance lead generation process, the first step could be to create a special report that covers the key points your prospect should be aware about before buying your kind of insurance (life, auto, income disability, home, etc). The report should cover basic dos and don’ts and give him advice about what to expect when purchasing your insurance product. Then, at the end, you should include a simple way for them to get in touch.
Many times he will call you to finish what he set out to do – buy insurance. If not, you can still go back to route one and call them. Even if this does not lead to an immediate sale, you’ve started a relationship and are now one step ahead of your competitors.
Many prospects still don’t buy immediately, even if they need what you’re selling. Things happen. They get busy. Other life events take attention away from buying insurance. So what else should you do as part of your insurance lead generation process?
Simple. Follow up with them. By joining your mailing list the prospect has given you permission to keep in touch. You want to stay top-of-mind and ask for the sale as many times as needed until they become a client or ask you to stop contacting them. Depending on what contact information you have, you can stay in touch by phone, email, mail, or a combination of all three.
Ideally, you will automate this communication to save you time and allow you to focus on fresh leads as they come through. You’ll find by being consistent and communicating with lukewarm prospects over time, those that don’t buy now often buy in the future (or do other good things like refer business to you).
Now that you have a mailing list of prospects interested in insurance, you can cross-sell them other lines of insurance. For instance, if the first reason they contacted you was about information on Life Insurance, you can now offer information on purchasing Income Disability Insurance. Also, if you only focus on one line of insurance (for example, Business Owner Policies), you can partner up with another agent that specializes in a different line of insurance and split commissions.
Many agents use the leads they buy poorly. They buy them and wait days to call the lead back. When asked why, many say that they were busy or at appointments when the leads were emailed to them. Don’t let these leads go stale.
Have an assistant or sub-agent call them back immediately. If too much time passes the prospect’s enthusiasm dies and their level of interest disappears, making a sale harder or impossible. Chances are they’ll also be contacted by other agents. If you don’t get a sale right away, remember to encourage them to join your mailing list (again using free info as an incentive). This can provide a long list of prospects to contact in future with new offers or simply keep in front of until they’re ready to buy.
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Health And Life Insurance Lead Generation
How to Buy Leads & Lead Generation & Lead Management & List Building Strategies & Target Marketing
Health insurance lead generation or life insurance lead generation can be difficult. It’s a very competitive market and it’s difficult to distinguish your insurance products from those of your competitors. In some cases you’ll even be selling the exact same insurance products as your competitors. So how do you set yourself apart from the others and generate more insurance leads?
Actually, the answer is in the question. You need to set yourself apart TO generate leads. Let me explain. When someone is looking for health insurance or life insurance there will be no shortage of businesses and agents lining up to take their business. From the customer’s point of view it can be very confusing. They want to make sure that they get the best possible coverage at the best possible price.
You’re in a good position to advise them but they have no reason to listen to you over anyone else – to them it’s all just a sales pitch. They don’t know who you are. They don’t know what you know. You need to create trust.
Trust is important in any business but in an industry where the customer is confused by contradictory claims and jargon, it’s essential. Trust is based on a relationship – either with you personally or your brand – but you don’t have the time to go out and build relationships with every single prospect individually. You’re still going to buy leads in. You’re still going to do all the things that you usually do. But, to generate more trust — trust that leads to leads — you should consider the following three ideas:
People are confused. Ideally they want a simple, unbiased answer to their questions: what is the best coverage for me and what is the best price I can get that coverage for. To generate trust and build leads for your insurance business, you should look for ways to answer those questions, minus the sales pitch.
You could start with a few introductory articles on your website, covering general insurance topics. People searching for this information online are good prospects. Providing that information means that they will find you before they find your competitors – and trust you more because you’ve helped educate them.
People like doing business with other people – especially people they know. Again, it’s down to trust. There are plenty of opportunities to bring your own personality into how you market your business. You could start in your local market by being an active networker.
Online you should make sure that your website – and all marketing communications – display elements of your personality and include things like personal biographies, contact details and even photos. Finally, you can use any number of social networking tools to help build your personal profile online.
Referrals are great business because they come with an endorsement attached. Accountants, solicitors, financial planners or any other professional could well be able to refer business to you. When they do, your job is simply to uphold the trust they’ve put in you and do a good job for the client. Customers are also an excellent source of referrals in the same way.
However you choose to generate leads for your insurance business (health insurance, life insurance or any other kind of insurance), finding ways to build trust is an excellent way to set yourself apart from your competitors and encourage people come to you.
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How to Buy Leads & Lead Generation & List Building Strategies & Small Businesses & Target Marketing
No budget? No problem.
Try these five free lead generation strategies on for size.
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of making the information on your website easy to find via the search engines and improving the position that it gets displayed.
You will find a great introduction to SEO in our free report. It covers five basic SEO techniques that every business should know:
When people are in search of solutions to their problems, their first choice is normally not a company’s sales brochure. They want simple, informative and largely unbiased information. Writing articles on your industry – specifically how customers can solve common problems or improve the results they achieve – cannot only get you found, but also positions you as a trusted resource. Articles can be written for your own website, for popular 3rd party websites or for offline use like your local paper or industry trade magazine.
Networking is a great way to build contacts, get yourself known and develop new leads. Attending networking events should be part of your ongoing free marketing strategy. The first tip for networking events is to make sure you network – there’s no point in standing in the corner talking to people you already know. Go with a goal in mind to meet certain kinds of people – they may be your customer type or they may be people who come into contact with your customer type. For example, if you target students then they are not likely to be at a networking event – but teachers from the local university might be. This could lead to their support with your project. Go with an open mind, a willingness to meet new people and plenty of business cards.
People looking for solutions like information. However, written content is not always the best way to present certain information. Live events are also a great opportunity to meet people in person and include more of your personality in the information you deliver. Consider working with a community group, business groups like the Chamber of Commerce,or other businesses to help save costs and ensure a good turnout. Make it easy for attendees to opt in to receiving more information.
Referrals can come from satisfied clients and customers, professional and personal acquaintances and even arranged referral partners. Referrals are generally free but you need to put some time into increasing the chances that people will refer business to you:
Generating leads for your business doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, with a little thought you can create a great free leads program but you’ll still need to put the time in to make it work.
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Lead Generation & Lead Generation Techniques & List Building Strategies & Referrals & Small Businesses
Are you looking at buying leads for your business? If so, you might be asking yourself some of these questions:
If you are considering buying leads for you business, there is no shortage of people who are willing to sell them to you. A quick search on Google will give you over 45 million results.
Lead brokers (i.e. the people who sell leads) come in all shapes and sizes. In short, lead brokers market themselves in general terms. For example, they may advertise to people in search of insurance. They will provide general content and advice, and encourage people to provide their details for someone to follow up on. When people do provide their details, these leads are then sold to businesses that can actually provide the service or product.
Some of these lead generators will be tied to a particular company and others will sell leads to anyone who wants to buy them.
The benefits to you as a business that buys leads are clear. First and foremost you can get leads on demand.
If you know that you can convert 10% of the leads you get into new customers, buying 100 leads should result in 10 new customers. So long as you have done your research, there is no reason that you can’t buy as many leads as you want and grow your business that way.
To buy leads also gives you a fixed cost. If you market your business in the hope of generating your own leads, there are plenty of costs to consider – from creating your marketing and advertising to paying for advertising space, sending out direct mail or using a telemarketing company.
Depending on how good you are at marketing your business, this overall cost for each lead you get can vary. Buying leads can be a great way to build your business with predictable costs and predictable outcomes – once you’ve done some testing, that is.
Of course, buying leads does not come without a few drawbacks – otherwise that’s all anyone would do.
The first consideration is whether the leads you buy are of high enough quality for you to convert them into actual paying customers. If a lead costs you $10 and you convert 10%, then the cost of getting a new customer is $100. But if only 1% become customers, then the real cost is $1000 per new customer.
Before you buy leads you need to find out where the leads are coming from and how qualified they are. You should know what makes a lead a good prospect for your business – when you buy leads you want the best match you can get.
Here are a few more questions to ask before you commit to buying leads:
Even if you do get your hands on high-quality leads, there is one major problem that may be difficult to overcome – the prospective customer doesn’t know you or anything about your business. To them you are just another faceless company – exactly the same as all the others. You will need to find ways to set yourself apart from the competition before they are willing to buy your product or service.
Buying leads can be an effective way to build your business but the quality of leads can vary greatly. So do your homework, test new lead sources in small batches before you make any big commitments, and always follow up with your leads quickly. Of course, developing your own leads through a high-quality lead generation program will usually offer a better long-term solution.
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How to Buy Leads & Lead Generation & List Building Strategies & Setting Appointments & Telemarketing
