By Sherry Wheat, TeleSales, Inc.

Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing methods for generating qualified leads and new prospects have changed dramatically over the years. The growth of digital methods used to touch customers and prospects including interactive websites, paid search, web analytics, search engine optimization, permission-based email marketing, give businesses many marketing strategies to apply. Varying the communication channels in a drip campaign has the potential to exponentially increase your business development results by touching your markets regularly.

As a Business to Business telemarketing agency, we recognized that these methods offered opportunities that when coupled with tele-prospecting, could potentially increase marketing results if more integrated approaches were applied.

There is an ongoing argument about the benefit and ROI of business-to-business cold calling. This is largely due to the fact that sales people don’t like to cold call. However, tele-prospecting still generates some of the highest returns when used consistently and properly. There are many companies with services that are easily promoted over the phones, and strong ROIs are generated.

But what happens if we increase our strategic approaches?

If your products and services reside in highly competitive markets, becoming more strategic, integrating your digital approach with tele-prospecting can be the ultimate strategy for creating demand and generating more value from your marketing initiatives. Today our prospective customers have many ways to buy. Our job is to make sure we are hitting as many of their buying points as possible.

Combining pro-active strategies and tactics moves members of untapped markets to prospects and then to customers. Testing and measuring outcomes, adopting and implementing the strongest tactics results in captured market share. Nothing new here. But what is new is the combinations of tactics used over time to generate more.

Some of the older strategies might include tele-prospecting, mailing, and follow-up calling. Today we can improve this campaign by including website update and search engine optimization. Companies that used to easily set appointments over the phone, now receive the same kind of qualified leads through a well designed and optimized website. Companies may initiate email blasts to targeted markets, should track the positive behavior and tele-prospect to prospects that open the emails, generating qualified leads.

What happens when we update the website, and optimize for the search engines, add pay per click, and do a calling campaign to a targeted market? We have a client that put all of these channels in place as well as advertising on a well-positioned billboard. Qualified leads started coming in almost immediately from multiple directions; website, billboard, tele-prospecting, etc. All of these new prospects are then added to the email list to start receiving quarterly newsletters.