Telemarketing, or telesales, is a form of direct marketing, where individual sales agents contact leads and solicit the prospective client to buy their products or services. It is a form of remote, or inside sales, which means the lead interacts with the company over the phone and not in person. To support this industry a wide range of useful telemarketing software has been developed. Telemarketing software solutions offer different usability to sales teams, and not all solutions are necessary to create a functioning sales operation.
A Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) is one of the most useful forms of telemarketing software. The CRM stores and tracks all of the data and processes associated with the sales process. A CRM allows many of the needed tasks associated with taking care of current or prospective clients to be automated.
A telephone dialer is another one of the most basic and useful telemarketing software. A phone dialer takes a list of phone numbers and automatically makes those calls for sales agents. It then patches those calls through to the available sales rep. Dialers are able to retrieve phone lists from a customer relationship manager, or it can be programmed in some other way.
Email or fax marketing software is another option. These give many options to a remote sales team. For example, a number that is not reached may be sent an email or fax message instead, ensuring that the lead receives some sort of contact. Also, a sales rep on the phone with a customer can instantly send an email or fax when they ask for more information. The agent is able to immediately follow up on his offer and not waste time fulfilling it later or potentially forget about it.
Another useful example of telemarketing software is web form callback. This software solution is intended to make sure that new leads generated by web forms from the company’s site are contacted within minutes of that form being submitted. This works by automatically creating a lead from a submitted web form, creating a task in the CRM for that lead to be contacted, and instructing the dialer to complete that task as soon as it can. With this tool an agent can be calling that prospective client back in minutes.
These are only a few of the many different telemarketing software solutions that have been designed for the expanding industry of inside sales. Each serves to improve the sales processes, and give more customer satisfaction.