1. Generate leads. Telemarketing along with direct mail and e-mail marketing is currently the best 1-2-3 combo for generating and maintaining awareness among business-to-business prospects.

2. Find hot opportunities. It's the best way to find out what opportunities exist right now inside your prospects and clients companies. Telemarketing experts say they are almost always able to find active opportunities that the company didn't know about -- no matter how big or well-known the company is.

3. Communicate one-to-one. Telemarketing allows you to put a voice to your marketing and sales efforts long before the prospect is ready to meet with a sales person. It's easy to customize the message and to adapt to special needs of the specific prospect.

4. Qualify prospects. Telemarketers can follow-up on inquiries from your website and other marketing activities and determine fairly quickly just how qualified the prospect is and whether or not ? and when ? this company is likely to become a customer.

5. Engage at the top. Many experts agree that telemarketing is the best way to get through to and start a dialogue with top executives.

6. Increase sales team effectiveness. Telemarketers can take a load off your sales people. A Gardner study called Inside Sales: Selling More at Lower Cost found that adding a teleprospector to support a direct sales person can increase that sales person's closing revenue by from 50% to 150%.

7. Advance the sale. Telemarketers are often able to identify hesitation in a prospect. By handling questions or objections that might not otherwise be voiced, telemarketers can eliminate friction and move the prospect along sales cycle.

8. Promote other marketing activities. Telemarketing can increase webinar participation, trade show attendance, white paper downloads and many other useful methods of interacting with your prospects.

9. Build and clean your database. With each call, a telemarketer can add to and confirm information in your marketing database. This is critical to reducing waste and expanding your reach within a given company.

It's not uncommon to find companies assigning telemarketing duties ? particularly cold calling ? to the field sales team. This may seem to make sense; after all, sales people must be good on the phones, right? But in reality it's a bad idea. Sales people get paid to close and that means they have little patience for finding and developing prospects who may or may not become an opportunity a year or two from now. That's the job of marketing.

Once you've made the decision to try a formal telemarketing program, you'll have to choose an implementation strategy. Some companies prefer to handle telemarketing with an internal staff. Others outsource it to one of many telemarketing services. Either approach can be successful, and the decision more often than not depends on the culture of your company.

If you want to learn more about what how to develop your own telemarketing program, visit the resources section at www.tatummarketing.com to download a free report called Secrets of B-to-B Telemarketing.

? The Tatum Group 2006