Virtually everyone has heard of telemarketing. Companies or businesses that have a planned approach to marketing products with the aim to generate a higher volume of sales from the services commonly use telemarketing. Essentially the term "telemarketing" refers to a way that businesses can advertise their products and offer their services.
The Framework
Telemarketing involves a number of operations. Professional telemarketers or call centers often make telephone calls or send faxes to the potential customers on behalf of companies that pay them to do so. Such companies usually purchases telemarketing lists that are available with vendors based on a preset condition or requirement in order to obtain a list of the potential customers. Once a list is obtained either the company's own staff or third party companies call these contacts in order to generate leads.
Phone calls featuring "dead air" or a disconnect are a common product of the telemarketing industry. This annoys or frightens many customers, but these calls are usually the result of "predictive dialing". Predictive dialing is the use of automatic dialers to place telephone calls and then route the successful connections to an operator. Thus a dead air or disconnect can happen if the business does not have a ready representative when the call is answered, or simply if the system itself does not function effectively. Generally, companies make a concerted effort to avoid such situations, as from their perspective such a dropped call represents a potential loss of income. However, in special situations such when the representative is on another call longer than expected, this problem can occur.
The Two Faces of Telemarketing
Telemarketing business encompasses two major categories. The most known is Business-to-Consumer, and the other is Business-to-Business.
• Business-to-Consumer - Recent "do not call" legislation which requires this kind of telemarketing business to be very vigilant about the lists they use for their business to consumer programs. Business to consumer telemarketing needs the special service capabilities as well as considerations. There are some companies that accept business to consumer programs simply to extend their calling hours.
• Business-to-Business - This refers to looking for other companies interested in high quality business to business calling in sales, appointment setting, lead generation, customer service, and even technical support.
Within these two categories of telemarketing are two broad divisions: lead generations, and sales. Lead generations has the main purpose of obtaining information, while sales is charged with convincing the customer to make a purchase. Professional telemarketers normally handle the duties of both divisions.
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