What if there was one ingredient you could add to almost any B2B marketing campaign to multiply its results? Would you try it?
There is, and it’s amazingly simple. It’s the human touch.
Helio Fred Garcia, author of The Power of Communication, said, “Humans are wired to connect with each other. And we connect with one another by feeling, not thinking… Emotion is now increasingly recognized as the key to moving hearts and minds.”
As the marketing world has become increasingly digital, companies can set themselves apart by getting personal with the right message, at the right time to the right person. While you can personalize marketing campaigns to some degree by segmenting your audience and tailoring your email communications, there’s only one way you can ensure you’re addressing your prospects’ specific needs.
Talk with them. Yes – pick up the phone, dial a number and engage in conversation.
Compound Email and Direct Mail Success with the Human Touch
Email and direct mail are both important components of a marketing campaign, enabling you to reach a large audience quickly and inexpensively. But if you’re marketing a complex B2B product with a sales cycle of several months and a high price tag, you can’t expect them to do the heavy lifting alone.
Your campaigns will be more successful if you follow up after the email or direct mail campaigns to reinforce your message with a phone call. Talk with each person and learn about their specific challenges, level of interest in solving the problem with which your product or solution helps, and when they might make a purchase decision. During the conversation focus on finding ways to assist them in reaching their goals.
In doing so you’ll be appealing to the human, emotional side of your contacts. In addition, you’ll start to develop a relationship which gives your company a competitive edge. Plus, because you understand their situation better, you’ll be able to personalize follow up communications whether they are by email, snail mail, phone calls or in-person presentations.
How to Add the Human Touch with B2B Telemarketing
The problem is that in business we all want to reach our goals in the most efficient way, especially as marketing budgets and departments shrunk following the Great Recession of 2008. And on the surface it appears that mass communication is the way to go. It certainly takes less time. The key, however, is to look at return on investment. When you do that, the human touch of phone calls implemented in a methodical way will almost always win.
I stress that the use of telemarketing should be methodical because so often business managers conduct it in a haphazard way that is almost guaranteed to fail. Companies put junior team members on the phone who don’t have the confidence, skills or knowledge to generate results. Or, perhaps, the field sales force is enlisted to get on the phone, but their forte is not lead nurturing and follow up – it’s closing deals.
Whether you hire telemarketers internally or outsource the task to a B2B telemarketing agency, you need to enlist the support of trained B2B agents who have the ability to develop a rapport with prospects. When they connect one-on-one for two-way conversations, inevitably they develop relationships. And once they establish a personal relationship, they are more likely to listen to your message, trust what your representative is saying, and buy from you.
About the Author: Jessica Grahn, born in Sweden, pursued her passion for languages at university. After coming to Rome, she began working as a Project Manager at 3D2B. She manages teams of multilingual pre-sales reps. She helps information technology companies in EMEA with lead generation and nurturing programs to support their marketing and sales strategies.
