From telemarketing to LinkedIn prospecting

Published 17 June 2019

This year, Truesilver celebrates its 16th birthday! And it’s fitting that this has been the year of so many changes: new employees, moving to a larger office plus the development and realisation of new services for some of our clients – one of which is LinkedIn prospecting.

Our company started as purely a telemarketing business, due to the fact so many people asked me how I found new customers back in my days as a sales person, and I told them I’d always made my own appointments through telemarketing. Sixteen years ago, this was the best way to get great results for a business to business industry (I’ve never been a big fan of residential business to consumer telemarketing).

Realising that there was a market for telemarketing on behalf of small businesses, Truesilver was born. Over the years the marketing world has changed significantly. Websites are essential to any professional business. Social media has slowly taken over as the primary source of new customers for small businesses. So much so that you may have heard that a business with an active social media following is now worth more than one without!

So as telemarketing has declined and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn have taken over, our business has adjusted. The key with all these platforms is to make sure you’re continually reaching new people in the same way that telemarketing helped to.

For Facebook, we get your posts to reach more new people. For Twitter, we’ve written software that finds relevant local followers and recently we’ve developed LinkedIn prospecting which fills the gap left by the declining ROI (Return on Investment) of telemarketing.

Using similar data management processes we generate a database of your ideal clients, connect with them; getting them to the point where they would like to have a meeting with you.

The advantage of this, of course, is that these connections aren’t short term in the way that telemarketing calls were, they are connections that could stay with you for years – seeing what you do and staying up to date with your business for the long term.

Is telemarketing now dead? Probably not. In my opinion it’s still got its place, but the cost effectiveness needs to be constantly reviewed if you’re a small business trying to keep a good flow of appointments. Also, with GDPR and TPS meaning that customers, especially corporate ones, are even more aware of what’s happening with their data, the sourcing of telemarketing contact lists is becoming more of a minefield.

LinkedIn and other platforms thankfully take care of all GDPR concerns with their own GDPR and data policies within their terms of use; if a potential customer doesn’t want to be connected with you they can just disconnect.

While there are still over 180 ways to market your services, for business to business marketing it may be time to rethink your telemarketing strategy and try something new.