B2B and medtech professionals most often associate a call center with sales, customer service or technical support functions. However, a call center can also benefit the marketing department in a number of ways, especially in a lead generation environment.
Working with professional outbound callers helps marketing work efficiently by performing the following tasks:
Gather target audience insights
Market research drives effective marketing campaigns. The more you know about your target prospects and customers, the stronger your messages, offers and communications will be. Digital surveys and online tools collect only a small portion of the information available. A one-to-one conversation with your medtech or B2B audiences can reveal far more valuable information.
That’s because professional callers know how to ask the right questions, probe for details and gather actionable intelligence. With this data, marketing can quantify various audience segments, understand real-world customer pain points and align brand messages. A professional call center can quickly gather this data—typically as part of a larger lead-generation or appointment-setting campaign.
Clean up the sales database
A comprehensive, accurate prospect list is critical. It’s easy for sales people, customer service reps and others to enter information into your database or CRM system; it’s much harder to ensure that vital customer and prospect contact information remains up-to-date. An outsourced call center can continually improve your customer and prospect data, either as a stand-alone project or as part of an ongoing inside sales effort. A single conversation typically can obtain decision-maker names, titles and phone numbers, gather opt-in email addresses–and more. This effort creates a solid foundation so budget dollars spent on marketing campaigns, lead generation or lead nurturing pays off with solid ROI.
Respond quickly to inbound leads
When a B2B or medtech prospect contacts you, a fast response greatly increases your likelihood of a sale. Separating valuable sales leads from the wasting-your-time variety is key to managing your internal resources and coordinating effective follow-up. Outsourcing keeps the in-house sales team focused on strategic activities and uses their time wisely. Timely, responsive follow-up ensures every lead that marketing generates receives appropriate treatment.
Measure marketing success
Few marketing teams have carte blanche in how they deploy their budget and resources. Executives and stakeholders expect measurable results and regular progress reports. Outbound calling is one of the best marketing and sales techniques for delivering measurable performance that proves marketing success.
Nearly every touchpoint in an outsourced call campaign produces tangible metrics, from calls completed and decision-makers reached to opt-in email addresses collected and appointments set on sales rep calendars. And, because outsourced calling is easy to scale up or scale down as market demands require, there’s less risk and less expense compared to setting up and managing full-time callers in-house.
At Volkart May, we bring 30 years of experience representing leading medtech and B2B brands in the market. Check out our case studies to see real-world examples of how we’ve helped other marketing teams succeed.
