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Are you familiar with telemarketing? Maybe you are, and maybe you are not. In either case, from my perspective, you can never know too much about anything that can help you or your company generate more revenue.

Telemarketing is an age old marketing practice utilizing the telephone that is commonly used by lots of businesses which have a planned approach to marketing and selling products with the aim to generate a higher volume of leads or sales from these services. To put it simply, the term “telemarketing” refers to a way that businesses can advertise their products and offer their services via the telephone.

Telemarketing Basics

There are a number of operations involved in telemarketing. Most of the companies utilizing this kind of sales and marketing technique often employ professional telemarketers or establish call centers to make telephone calls or send faxes to the potential customers on their behalf, hence the name Telemarketing. Who is going to be contacted by the telemarketers? And where will you get that information? telemarketing lists are available to be purchased for this purpose. The lists of the potential customers are available from vendors and credit reporting agencies based on a preset list of conditions or requirements for your product or service. Once you obtain your list, you can have your staff or third party companies call these contacts in order to generate the so-called “telemarketing leads”.

Another thing that is common in the telemarketing field is a “dead air” or “hang up”. This is actually the situation in which you may receive a telephone call where no one is on the other end. It can be annoying and frightening on the part of the customer. But, understand that these calls are often the result of something called “predictive dialing”. Many of the telemarketing organizations these days employ automatic dialers to place telephone calls or send faxes. Thus, a dead air or hang up call often occurs, especially if the representative of the business is not available when the call is answered. In other words, the person calling you is not yet available to speak. It is further worth noting though that companies generally allow sufficient time between calls for a representative to be available. But, there are some instances, especially when the representative is on another line longer than expected, that the result of the operation is the so-called “dead air”.

Main Categories of Telemarketing

There are two major categories of calls involved in a telemarketing operation. The first is Business-to-Business, and the second is Business-to-Consumer.

Business-to-Business – This actually refers to the operation in which the company tries to look for other companies interested in high quality business to business calling in sales, appointment setting, lead generation, customer service, and even technical support.

Business-to-Consumer – Like the call center programs, business to consumer telemarketing needs the special service capabilities as well as considerations necessary to make it cost effective. One thing to note when it comes to this kind of operation is the recent “do not call” legislation which requires that your call center must be very vigilant about the lists they use for their business to consumer programs. There are, however, some companies out there that accept business to consumer programs simply to extend their calling hours.

Note that within these two categories of telemarketing are two broad divisions: the lead generation, where the main purpose of the call is to obtain information; and sales, where the main objective is to convince someone to buy something. Both of these operations are usually done by professional telemarketers.