TMCnews Featured Article

--Carlyle

 

--Archimedes

 

-- Henry David Thoreau

 

The whole time of recorded history, man has learned to use the tools at hand to their greatest possible value.

 

This was true when the tool was fire, a stone ax, an animal, a V-8 engine, or even a fragment as small as an atomic particle.

 

Today, learn to take the telephone, probably the most familiar and reliable business tool we have, and fine-tune its usage from one of basic utility for communication, to a much more spectacular instrument for commerce.

 

A pioneer in the field of telecommunications, Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He moved to Ontario, and then to the United States, settling in Boston, before beginning his career as an inventor. Throughout his life, Bell had been interested in the education of deaf people. This interest lead him to invent the microphone and, in 1876, his "electrical speech machine," which we now call a telephone helped ignite the great revolution of technology that transformed our world into today's computerized, colorized, wired, networked, mass-communicative society.

 

With all this modernization, we businessmen are challenged with developing new ways to stay ahead of our competition-- to advance, speed up, or expand markets in cheaper and better ways.

 

Men marry women because they don't expect them to change, and women always marry men expecting they can change them. Neither of them is disillusioned in their thoughts.

 

Men change according to their pace and what they want, seek.

 

Women change according to their pace and what they want, and seek.

 

It's just a matter of finding the harmony in this change, or the path of the change, that if the pair is happy with it, good-- if not-- trouble on the horizon.

 

If you're not prone to change or if you believe telemarketing is only for the Ronco "gadgets and grooming" salespeople of this world, then break out your sales costs by this type of activity.

 

It used to be if you were out of the office that meant you were selling. Today it invariably means you’re stuck in traffic at 4 bucks a gallon. And if your company is like most Fortune 500 companies, you'll find you can no longer afford to continue to physically cold-call for new business with field sales reps unless they have set appointments with pre-qualified prospects.

 

When the cost of obtaining new business with belly-to-belly.)(. selling approaches or exceeds the list price of your product/service, then a new cost effective way of doing business must be found and implemented.

 

Well-executed and very sophisticated telemarketing campaigns have been known to actually increase sales yield far in excess of 200 percent, while examples of sales productivity increases ranging anywhere from 15 percent to 45 percent, are in abundance.

 

IBM (News - Alert) predicts that over 40 percent of its sales will be through telemarketing and catalog sales by 2007. Chrysler attributed a 37 percent increase in fleet sales in 2005 to telemarketing. ADT experienced a 60 percent increase in business from just one year of telemarketing use. Time/Life Books, which just celebrated the sale of its 600 millionth book, has 16 branches and a separate division established solely for telemarketing.

The list of success stories can go on endlessly.

 

Belly-to-belly.)(. sales reps have found that efficient use of the telephone can increase their total field selling time significantly. When field sales reps use the telephone to qualify their prospects and set appointments in advance, it stands to reason that they waste less time calling on "non-prospects" and devote more time to making sales presentations to those prospects that are more likely to buy.

 

Effective use of the telephone truly helps the field sales rep. to "broaden" the day by ever-increasing productivity and reducing the cost and need for additional field sales personnel.

 

Field sales reps calling on major accounts all too often, get "locked in" to doing business with only one or two individuals or divisions of a large multi-faceted corporation, leaving many prime selling opportunities unchallenged.

 

Usually, all it takes to get an appointment with buyers in other divisions is a copy of a corporate telephone book and a phone call introducing you as a vendor who has already been approved by the buyers company.

 

Aggressive managers with national sales accounts are also finding the telephone as an effective tool in expanding both their prospects and their penetration of major accounts.

 

 

The Predictive Dialer used alone or in combination with other supporting telemarketing programs, is the single most cost-effective and time-efficient marketing tool offered.

 

When company managers first begin pondering a telemarketing program, they ask such questions as, "Why the decision to do business over the telephone?" "Won't we begin to lose business?" "Won't our competition decimate our sales efforts?” What is the true cost (ROI) of doing business in this new way with “Predictive Dialers”, as opposed to doing nothing at all?

 

Sooner or later the question becomes: "What can I do in person that I can't do over the telephone?" If they approach that last question with a totally open mind, in almost all cases they have to conclude, "Nothing!” especially when combined with web based interfaces for meeting and demonstrations.

 

"Corporate cowards" are those managers who are lacking in courage--content with the status quo and who accept their field reps continuing to pound the pavement, knocking on doors as they have since their companies were initiated. They are satisfied with the results, usually not going out on a limb to protect what they have. Such untested managers should remember that their companies and attitudes were established in a long gone era.

 

--Socrates

 

Quill pens have been replaced with computers, the outhouse has been replaced with modern-day plumbing, and the horse and buggy have been replaced with trucks and automobiles. The time has come for the door-to-door peddler to replace his or her sample pack with a telephone line. He is instantly inside someone’s home, getting past the front door with little or no objection.