Your guide to Telemarketing 101 is here! Telesales businesses across the US and Canada know that good telemarketing lists are crucial to their success. Included below is everything you need to know about how to make the best calling list for telemarketing.
If you are new to telemarketing, check out our beginner's guide to telemarketing before you get into your calling list.
The Advantages of a Good Telemarketing List
If you have a good call list, telemarketing is a cost-efficient, direct way to connect with a vast group of prospective customers across geography and time zones. If your call list is outdated, contains irrelevant information, or targets the wrong audience, telemarketing is phone SPAM and frustrating for everyone involved.
For small businesses, telemarketing can be an invaluable tool as it saves a considerable amount of time and money that would have otherwise been spent sending a team to conduct door-to-door selling. Closing a sale through telemarketing can be five times more cost-effective than sending a salesperson in person. With effective telemarketing, businesses can sell their products from any geographic distance and expand their sales territory.
What Makes a Cell Phone Number List Good?
Although telesales is considered to be one of the most effective ways of converting leads into customers, all of your efforts will be wasted if your telemarketing call list is insufficient. Your efforts will be costly in money and human resources.
Whether you decide to create a telemarketing list on your own or seek help from a third party, priority number one is the quality and validity of the list data.
A good telemarketing list will be “fresh,” meaning up to date, and have the call leads you to know are most likely to convert into your customers. A good list will also enable you to filter, sort, and retarget your calls for a higher conversion rate.
Buying Telemarketing Lists From Trusted List Brokers
Finding a reliable list broker is essential to attain a good list. When you source your telemarketing list from a reliable third party, the chances of getting a more precise list increase.
List brokers can provide lists with specific demographics to suit your needs. Some of them even have Online Leads Portals that give the customer access to the phone number database and a wide range of filters, so the software can filter their list from them! Wherever you get your cell phone list from, do your research and be sure the listing broker is reliable and understands your needs out of the list.
Many brokers sell good data but if the data doesn't target the leads you're after then it's useless to you.
Scrubbing Your Cell Phone Number List
Since its inception, the Do Not Call Registry option has had a profound impact on the telemarketing industry in Canada and the US. Making a telemarketing list on your own isn't easy, especially when there are chances of getting penalized if the customer registered for Do Not Call makes a complaint following your call. You do not want to end up paying a ridiculously high fee all because you didn't scrub your list. Do your research and know the telemarketing sales rules before you call.
While the DNC list is an important telemarketing rule, it isn't the only guideline you need to follow. Don't worry, you don't need to go internet surfing to find the answers. We have a brief guide to outbound telemarketing to get you up-to-date with the rules and regulations.
Segmenting the Telemarketing List
Segmenting your data makes your list more manageable and helps to organize the leads. It will also help the sales team with making the sales because they will have more information on the lead.
For instance, if the salesperson starts calling the segmented list by job role, they will be able to focus on selling to the person's job role. Job roles are just one way to segment a list, but there are 7 other segment criteria you can use such as.
Having the segment to focus on when calling gives the salesperson something specific to talk about with the individual and allows them to focus their mind on that selling technique instead of switching methods for each call as you would in an unsegmented list.
Validating the Customers on the List
- Target Market
- This can vary for each product
- Data Composition
- How much information or how little information do you have on a lead.
- Value Proposition
- How much value you can offer to potential customers.
Targeting Your Consumers by Location
When offering a product or service, it’s important to decide where you want your campaign geared towards. By using targeted consumer lists we can help you develop your own unique list. There are many different areas that businesses market to; these may include some of the following location demographics in our consumer lists:
- Zip Code or Postal Code
- Area Code
- City
- State or Province
Resonating With Your Buyer Personas
When you think about it, you can only purchase a leads list that will help you be successful with your sales effort if you know who you’re going to target. To identify the pool of people or businesses you’re going to target, you need to identify your ideal client. You can do this by examining the characteristics of the existing clients you’ve sold to most successfully in the past.
Using these traits, you can create a profile of your ideal client. The individuals or organizations that match your profile the closest will make up your target market. Once you know who will be included in your target market, you need to find a leads list provider that will enable you to sort sales leads based on the factors you used to identify your target market. At TelephoneLists.biz, you can sort your leads lists based on a wide range of factors, such as:
- SIC code
- Revenue or income
Tips to Make Your Telemarketing List More Effective
Once you've got your list, there are steps you can take to improve its effectiveness. Below are just a few of the best practices you can adopt.
Deduping the Telemarketing Call List
When you buy telemarketing lists it is always a good idea to check for duplicate numbers. Occasionally, you will even come across multiple numbers for one person. To avoid this, there are two options.
The first is using software, like the Dolphin Dialer, that will remove the duplicate numbers for you. The second option is to filter them out yourself in excel. Either way, you'll want to remove the duplicate numbers, so you don't risk calling the same person multiple times.
Updating Your Telemarketing List
Numbers, addresses, and other contact information change daily. People will move, change job positions, and switch phone numbers, therefore, you will need to update your list frequently to ensure the accuracy of your cell phone number list.
Four times a year is the recommended amount that you should update your list, however, you might find that you need to update more or less.
Re-Using the Cell Phone List
Of course, you will want to re-use the list for telemarketing. This is to be expected, however, you don't want to call people over and over again within a short period of time. You need to create a frequency to how often your salespeople call and keep track of the people you have already contacted, so when you call them next, you know it's been enough time for them to consider your offer.
How to master the sales follow-up? Here is the frequency at which we recommended following up with your leads:
- 1st call: wait 2 days to follow up
- 1st follow up: wait 4 days to follow up
- 2nd follow up: wait a week to follow up
- 3rd follow up: wait two weeks
- 4th follow up: wait a month
- 5th follow up: wait a month (from here on out call once a month)
Turn Your Phone Leads into a Personal Relationship
In order to develop your phone leads into a secure business relationship, you must first understand how phone leads can enhance your business. Direct mail and flyers can be a pricey, impersonal way of advertising, not to mention hard to measure when it comes to conversion rate. These types of marketing are rarely economically smart and are often disregarded by the potential consumer. It’s easy for a customer to toss a flyer without even glancing at it.
This is a waste of your advertising dollars, and it’s time for you to look into using phone leads to help you generate successful business relationships between you and your customers. Speaking with someone personally on the phone makes it easier to establish some rapport. Having the opportunity to speak freely and really get the chance to know your customer is important when building quality relationships. This added touch is just what a client needs in order to get to know and trust your business; it helps to speak to someone rather than to get a basic, automated email or flyer that has no personal touch.
How Do You Buy Phone Numbers in Bulk?
When you’re looking to buy telephone numbers, it’s important for you to research the sources you plan to buy lead lists from. Even though this requires more time upfront, it’s more efficient and cost-effective in the long run because it will ensure you’re buying high-quality leads from a reputable company. This will provide a hedge against your team wasting time calling large numbers of leads that are outdated or simply uninterested in what you’re selling, saving you time and money overall.
Before you buy phone leads from a broker, you should ask for a list of references you can contact to see how satisfied they were with the lists and services the broker provided in the past. Ideally, these references will be in an industry similar to yours, but you should still contact them even if they’re not. The idea is to get a feeling for the broker’s track record of success before you buy a list of leads.
Whether you want to buy leads online for the USA or you plan to buy a leads list for Canada, you should ask several questions of the broker you’re considering before you make a purchase. Here are some questions you should ask prior to purchasing phone leads:
- What is the minimum purchase I have to make?
- How much more will it cost for you to filter the lists I purchase?
- How do you collect your contact information?
- How often do you update your telemarketing lead lists?
- How complete are the individual records on your sales leads lists?
- Do you rent or own your lists?
- Will I own the list I buy from you? If so, can I resell it?
- Can I get a refund for the inaccurate and incomplete leads on my lists?
Knowing the answers to the questions listed above will help you choose the right broker. For example, if a broker doesn’t update their records at least once annually, you’ll probably want to continue shopping for another source to buy bulk phone numbers from.
What Other Telemarketing Tools Do You Need
Telemarketing tools, specifically software, are worth the investment. They will pay off in no time. A good telemarketing software for business has these features:
- Automated Calling Solutions
- CRM Tools
- Predictive Analytics
- Monitor and Whisper Coach
- View Live Reports
- Create Campaigns
- Assign Leads to Agents & So Much More!
Put Your Telemarketing Lists to Work
You now know how to get a good call list, now you need to know how to optimize those numbers to get the most sales. It will all come down to your cold calling script. The three most valuable pieces of advice you'll receive are to (1) keep it short, (2) make the introductory shocking or intriguing, (3) in the follow-up call/email remind them of your offer, and be consistent with your follow-ups.
Works Cited
Brandon, L., 2021. 5 B2B Telemarketing Golden Rules for Campaign Success. [online] Telephonelists.biz. Available at: [Accessed 12 March 2021].
Montgomery, J., 2021. Sales Follow Up: How Can Agents Master It? | EVS7. [online] EVS7. Available at: [Accessed 12 March 2021].
Gsa-marketing.co.uk. 2021. Telemarketing – The importance of knowing your target market –. [online] Available at: [Accessed 10 March 2021].
