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While telemarketing may seem to many companies as a tactic left over from a bygone era, some of the most successful sales organizations in the world still employ telemarketing as a technique, particularly in a business-to-business environment. Why? Because it works. It may not work all the time, and it may not even work most of the time, but it works often enough to pay for itself and then some.

The South African sales and technology website Gadget recently spoke to Louise Robinson, Sales Director of CG Consulting. She noted that while telemarketing can be intrusive or invasive to some prospects, it can still be a highly successful marketing tool.

“For every 10 calls you make, you can expect approximately one positive response,” she said, noting that while this may not seem like much, that’s 10 successes for every hundred calls made, or a hundred for every thousand. “This is more than enough to keep a company in business.”

According to Robinson, if you have 50 prospects on your list, maybe half of those, some 25, are worth your time. “Of these, 12 will result in a conversation with the correct person, and of those 12, maybe seven will result in a proposal being submitted, and two or three will lead to an actual sale.”

Companies can boost their chances of success in business-to-business telemarketing by following a few guidelines:

Be professional. If you’re going to make outbound calls, ensure you’re using up-to-date and relevant lists. Nothing puts off prospects more than being called for inappropriate reasons or at the wrong times in their buying cycles.

Use scripts wisely. Have a loose script so you don’t end up rambling, but don’t stick to it so closely that you sound like a robot. Nobody likes to talk to a robot.

Use a telemarketing solution. Nowadays, cloud-based telemarketing solutions are easy to use and don’t require a huge upfront capital investment. These solutions can help you tie your critical processes together, keep track of leads and appointments, pull information from the customer relationship management (CRM) database and collaborate with other key personnel.

Use a dialer. Many cloud-based telemarketing solutions have built-in dialer capabilities, and these dialers allow sales personnel to connect with many more prospects each hour, raising the chances of a sale. 

Robinson noted to Gadget that “Sales is just a big numbers game, so the way to win is to raise those numbers.” She’s correct. Each wise step a company takes toward improving their outbound sales efforts will improve the odds of success, and each corner cut will reduce them.