CRM: Bridging the Distance Between Clients and Telemarketing Firms

CRM or Customer relationship management is a commonly used strategy for managing a company's relation with its customers, clients or sales prospects. In the most basic sense, it utilizes technology to catalogue, automate, and integrate business processes - primarily sales activities but can also be used for marketing, customer service or technical support. Its overall goal is to appeal to possible clients and to nurture current ones, and reduce costs of marketing and client service.

Pipeline CRM is one good example of a CRM tool. It is specifically created for outsourced telemarketing businesses. It is just like your everyday ordinary software. It offers the standard functions of a modern CRM tool. It offers real time view of the sales pipeline, enabling managers to track the progress of the campaign in real time and so many more. It was developed through years of development through discovery and client feedback. Different options and processes evolved through careful sifting of usable suggestions not only from the telemarketing firms, but also from the clients themselves.

Outsourced telemarketing campaigns are of the ordinary nowadays. It offers cheap and efficient alternatives to other traditional marketing companies. These campaigns offer a myriad of services to different businesses like business to business or b2b appointment setting, business to business or b2b lead generation and as a contact center. One problem encountered by outsourced telemarketing firms is the connection between the firm and the client. Because the campaign is no longer in-house, some clients find it hard to track the campaign from overseas and in turn, they find it hard to entrust their business to other people. Clients also realized that not having a real-time report on the campaign also endangers the whole operation.

CRMs solved this problem by becoming a bridge between the telemarketing call center and the client. An updated CRM proved to be a good way for the telemarketing call center to reach its client. Managers can check the dashboard and sales pipeline of any sales agent, from any region, or the whole campaign, at any time, from anywhere, and get an up-to-the-minute report on both closed sales and forecasting in any format. In a sense, this is everything that a client could ever ask for in a system. But is this all that this tool can give?

Some of the benefits that clients will get with the help this software are as follows:

• Up to date announcements of every business to business lead generated or any business to business appointment set.
• Scheduled appointments proactively show up in the individual sales calendars of the clients sales force.
• Unlimited number of calendars/sales territories.
• The sales process is carefully tracked by reminding both the prospective customer and the sales force agent prior to the date of the appointment.
• All the reports present in the CRM reflect real time progress.

CRM has made outsourced telemarketing a very viable alternative to traditional marketing strategies. By contradicting the past negativity that surrounded the strategy, it showed the business world that the outsourced telemarketing industry is indeed a very plausible alternative to all the other traditional marketing methods. This is coupled by the fact that telemarketing call centers overseas are the cheapest way for go about with telemarketing campaigns.

The introduction of Customer relationship management paved a way for the boom of contact centers overseas serving as telemarketing call centers. Not only did it make the business easier for both the client and the firm. It also strengthened the relationship and camaraderie between two different companies from different continents who have one goal in mind, progress.