The right way to generate telemarketing leads for merchant services – #Focus2015Live

Telemarketing leads just keep getting worse and worse in our industry.  It is no mystery why.  Merchants get called 10 to 20 times per day and everyone always says the same thing, “We can save you money on merchant services!”  This was a great pitch 10 years ago but now it is just white noise and I don’t even want my brand associated with it.  With predictive dialers, overseas telemarketing centers have become very good and making lots of low quality contacts and converting a low percentage of these contacts into slightly interested leads.  This leaves independent reps running all over the place to follow up on junk leads.  This is an outdated model that we have tried in the past and it just doesn’t work anymore.

So, what are we doing differently with our marketing platform to make telemarketing an efficient process that helps, rather than hinders our sales partners?  Here is a sneak peek at our telemarketing lead generation program which will be rolled out this Thursday, Jan 8th at 7pm EST.

CLICK HERE to register if you haven’t done so already!

• US call center about 20 feet from my office!  Let’s work together to create some US jobs.  I don’t have a problem with overseas workers, but I am convinced we can get a lot more value out of this process if we operate it in house using W2 employees.  Our first batch of full time outbound callers start next week and we will be scaling this call center quickly so that every outbound call is placed from our office.  We ran extensive trials with our own employees and with overseas call centers in 2014 to test out various concepts.  We learned a lot and we are ready to build our call center!  If you sign up for our marketing platform and join our team, you will know you are contributing to the creation of new jobs right here in the good old USA!
• Lead generation, not appointment scheduling.  Every so often we may get a business owner that is interested in an appointment and that’s great!  95% of the time, we will instead be requesting something much easier to get.  This might include asking for an email address for our free email newsletter with helpful tips for local business owners, or a request for us to email them an online presence analysis at no cost.  These leads will then go into our sales partners CRM database so the sales partner can watch the prospect interact with us online and decide when to go and pitch something to them based on their interest level.  Wouldn’t you rather walk into a prospect’s business the day after they made a choice to attend a live event on “How to Read Your Processing Statement” rather than walking in blind with no information?
• Ongoing telemarketing involvement.  Because of the unique “pay when qualified” model we will be discussing on Thursday’s live event, it is in our interest to follow up for you.  Think of our telemarketers not as “telemarketers” but as your prospecting assistant.  Each telemarketer will be working with the same sales partners on a daily and weekly basis.  They will be looking for ways to help you make more sales and because we don’t use predictive dialers and encourage independence throughout our organization, they will be free to think creatively and make follow up calls on your behalf to help move the prospect through the sales pipeline as well as give you the appearance of having a well established local office with an assistant.
• Always staying true to our mission.  For most of you, this goes without saying, but if you are new to our company, understand that our inside telemarketers are not allowed to make sales or rather “steal” sales from you because this doesn’t help us accomplish our mission of enabling committed independent sales partners for success.  Any lead, new client or new revenue in your territory, goes to you, end of story.  This way you don’t have to worry about which leads to put into the system and which to leave out.  We want to help you develop all of your leads and convert them into new client relationships and then partner with you to increase the monthly value of those client relationships over time.

If you want to learn more about this amazing new telemarketing resource and how you can leverage it, make sure you take a moment right now to register for our live event!  CLICK HERE to attend our live event this Thursday, Jan 8th at 7pm EST.

I am getting more and more excited to roll out all of the details of this incredible new program!

James Shepherd