How to Reduce Customer Churn

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How to Reduce Customer Churn

Do your customers have commitment issues? If you have a high churn rate, you may be wondering if it is something you are doing or if your customers are just flaky.

You may never know why customers decide to cancel an order or discontinue your professional relationship. However, if your churn rate continues to rise, you need to take a hard look at how you can reverse this trend. If you don’t, you may soon find yourself without any customers at all.

If you are looking for ways to boost customer loyalty, here are some ideas to help you get started:

  1. Communicate. While no one wants constant calls and emails, if the only time you communicate with your customers is when you want to sell them something this is a problem. Consider follow-up telemarketing calls after customers have made a major purchase to find out if they have questions or are satisfied with their purchase.
  2. Focus on Your Weaknesses. Always be on the lookout for ways to improve your products or services. Figure out what you can be doing better and make it your mission to improve. Further, make sure you are open to change.
  3. Look Over Your Shoulder. Always keep an eye on the competition. Check out what they are doing and see if you can incorporate some of those things into your business strategy. It is also important to remember that your competition is always looking to poach your best ideas so keep on your toes.
  4. Do What You Do Best. If you are known for your outstanding customer service, quick turnaround or flawless products, you need to work hard to make sure that you never ever let a customer down in the area where you really shine. If a customer comes to you because you always deliver faster than everyone else, the one time you don’t deliver on time may be the last.
  5. Find Out Why a Customer Moved On. When a customer returns a product or stops doing business with you, do your best to find out why. Consider calling the customer or sending them an email asking for their feedback. Many customers appreciate the opportunity to give you constructive advice. And even if they have nothing good to say, you can learn from negative feedback, as well. Finally, they may be so impressed that you care that they give you a second chance.

No one likes to lose a customer but the secret to lowering your churn rate is to find out why customers are leaving and make the necessary changes. Likewise, if your customers are happy, you need to keep them that way so they will remain loyal for years to come.

The Importance of Knowing How to Work a List

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The Importance of Knowing How to Work a List

Working a list for appointment setting purposes is not the most glamourous task but that doesn’t mean it isn’t vital to your bottom line. Working a list can be particularly daunting when it seems you have been making call after call with no results.

Of course, results ultimately do come. This is why people continue to work lists even when they can see no light at the end of the tunnel.

The fact is, after you have made what seems like endless calls, appointments start to fill in. So why does it take so long? It has to do with taking the necessary steps to create a funnel effect that gathers the best prospects together in one place. These steps include:

  1. Zoning in on decision makers
  2. Determining whether or not that decision maker should be pursued
  3. Warming up that lead

One of the biggest pitfalls to avoid when it comes to working a list is skipping steps to make the process shorter. This is never the right thing to do. Rather, the best appointment setters will always do the hard work necessary to make sure that they identify the decision makers who are ultimately most likely to convert into a sale.

Working a list is often best left to a professional telemarketing firm. This is because professional, experienced appointment setters always make sure they take the appropriate amount of time when cultivating a lead. They also will not give up too soon.

The right telemarketing firm also will make sure that they document every piece of information so that they have the facts about why a prospect is or is not worth pursuing. They also won’t give up in the face of adversity. If the phone number for a lead always goes to voicemail, or no one answers at all, they don’t just throw out the lead. Instead, a little detective work is in order. These professionals also know how to interact with leads once they are able to get them on the line. They are able to engage the person in the most appropriate way, taking into account different personalities.

Lists must also be constantly sorted into cold, warm and hot categories. The most experienced telemarketers understand the fluidity of such labels. A cold lead can quickly turn warm and vice versa.

Like anything else in life—and in business—persistence pays off. By the same token, giving up too early can do irrevocable damage.

Sales and Lead Generation are Just Two of the Ways Telemarketing Can Benefit Businesses

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Sales and Lead Generation are Just Two of the Ways Telemarketing Can Benefit Businesses

Telemarketing is an excellent way to grow your business while making it more efficient and profitable. After all, while digital marketing seems to get most of the attention these days, nothing can replace the importance of talking with customers and prospects and establishing a relationships built on personal interaction.

If you are looking to integrate more telemarketing into your business development strategy so that it goes beyond selling and lead generation, we have some suggestions for how to do just that:

  • Appointment setting is one of the best ways that companies can generate new business. There is no better way to sit down, in person, with a client to close a sale. Appointments are the way to make sure that these sit-downs happen.
  • Connecting with previous customers who have not purchased from you lately increases the chances of reactivating these customers. What’s best, information on these customers is already in your database so you don’t have to start cold.
  • Following up with leads is critical to making sales. Once a customer or prospect has had the opportunity to learn about your product or services through a direct mail piece, for example, a follow up call can help seal the deal.
  • Market research does more than just gather customer feedbacks and reviews. It allows you to gather the type of data that can be used for a number of important tasks, including how to best target prospects for your next marketing campaign. Further, marketing research conducted over the phone saves a great deal of money because you are able to gather information from people all over the country from a central location.
  • Seminar booking assures that seats at the seminars you hold are filled. Telemarketing offers an excellent way to make sure that your seminars are booked with the type of people that will respond to what you have to say. This task is particularly important because when your seminars are not well-attended, it doesn’t look good for your business or brand.

Telemarketing offers endless possibilities for businesses looking to grow. While selling and lead generation are two outstanding and proven ways telemarketing can work for your business, there are countless other ways to use this resource, as well.

Outsourcing the Key to Successful Cold Calling

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Outsourcing the Key to Successful Cold Calling

Ask any salesperson, and chances are he or she will tell you that the task they most dread is cold calling. This is unfortunate given the importance cold calling plays in filling the sales funnel.

Many salespeople will put cold calls on the bottom of their to-do list for no other reason than they want to avoid making such calls. In order for companies to reap the many benefits of cold calling, it may be time to consider outsourcing this task to a telemarketing firm.

While keeping your sales team happy is certainly one reason to outsource your cold calling, understandably there needs to be more compelling ones to make the change. Here are some of the biggest advantages:

Cost: Salespeople pay for themselves when they are closing sales. When they are cold calling and appointment setting, they are not. It is as simple as that.

Productivity: When you outsource your cold calling, you will have representatives making calls as many hours a day as you require. This ensures that your pipeline will not slow down when you don’t have staff available to make calls.

Reliability: Does your cold calling schedule depend on the availability of staff, vacations or even illness? When you outsource there are no schedules to work around.

Speed: If you need to begin a cold calling campaign for a particular product or service, outsourcing allows you to roll out this campaign quickly. That includes everything from creating a list to perfecting the script.

Data: For every call made, data is recorded and can be analyzed. This allows you to refine things like your script in real time.

Accountability: If a member of your sales staff sets up an appointment with a non-qualified lead, that is time and money wasted. When you outsource your cold calling and a non-qualified lead is identified, steps will be taken to make sure this does not happen again. Sales people are certainly not going to tell you when they are responsible for identifying non-qualified leads. They will, however, report these problems when cold calling is being outsourced.

Quality Control: Want to know how your sales people are interacting with cold prospects? That can be difficult. When you outsource, however, all calls are monitored for quality and you can even go back and listen to calls to make sure you like what you hear.

Allowing your salespeople to do what they are paid to do, and what they want to do, is a good reason to outsource your cold calling. Add in the reasons listed above and it is difficult to justify NOT outsourcing these duties.