Our client, a wholesaler, wanted to establish contact with potential resellers who otherwise carry the product lines our client offers.
They had an existing list of the new leads they had their eyes on, with two caveats. First, these potential customers resided in Germany and France, two countries where our client had no operation. Second, the dataset was small.
In such cases, deploying a full telemarketing agency for the calls can be an overkill. Setting up a cold-calling system and training callers in the two target languages would most likely take up a lot more time than the actual calls. Many telemarketing agencies would even turn down the assignment upfront, considering this overhead.
Our outsourcing services can prove to be the right solution for such conundrums.
At Broadstone.io, we always assign virtual assistants who are best suited to the projects. While cold calling may seem to be a dreaded activity for many people, there are others who enjoy chatting with strangers on the phone. Of course, B2B calls are generally characterised by professional courtesy on behalf of the called party. These calls have nothing to do with the perceived annoyance of your landline ringing late in the evening or on a Saturday morning related to an insurance offer.
Our virtual assistants (Vas) can tackle even relatively small-scale tasks for our clients. Since each of our VAs is a highly educated professional with versatile experience in various business tasks, it is enough to provide them with the campaign brief and some explanation related to the products. There is no need to force them through one of those prewritten scripts that tend to make call centre calls famously rigid. All this reduces your overhead and makes your preparation for the campaign quick and efficient.
Two of our VAs were interested in the cold-calling project and had the relevant language skills. Following a brief discussion with our client, we all agreed that the VAs would use their own telephones to do the outbound calls. It would of course have been possible to log into the client’s systems using VoIP or other methods.
Even with the small datasets consisting of just about a hundred companies for each country, the pace was slow with just an hour of calls scheduled for each working day, spread over two weeks. This allowed ample time for any repeated calls whenever a contact was not available. It also enabled the client to provide more information should any questions arise. Any such client input was then relayed to both the callers, ensuring that a question received when making calls to France eventually also improved the work of the German caller and vice versa. At the same time, the pace was fast enough to work through the datasets relatively quickly.
The outcome of the campaign was positive. Most of the calls resulted in establishing contact with a potential customer, with our callers quickly being directed to the relevant contact person, to whom they were able to submit our client’s offer package, including their product line-up and descriptions, prices, delivery terms, and contact information for future cooperation.
