Use telemarketing calls for market research

Telemarketing does not often return an interested customer, or someone who will purchase your product. However, it can still be a useful tool for collecting market research, as you can learn something about your current products, market approach, and target markets.

Here are eight ways Vendorseek.com suggests to use your calls as market research:

1. Create different pitches for different telemarketing teams. Rather than guessing at the most effective pitch, a company can try different ideas and then concentrate on the most successful one.
2. Assign different target markets to different telemarketing teams. While most brands aspire to go up-market, sometimes going down-market makes up in volume what it sacrifices in margin.
3. Adjust the value proposition for different telemarketing teams. Using segmented telemarketing efforts is a good way to find out what difference it would make to adjust a price point here or credit terms there.
4. Track reasons for rejection. From a sales standpoint, leads are gold and rejections are trash. However, from a bigger-picture market research standpoint, there is much to be learned from the reasons behind rejections.
5. Find out who is getting the business. In the course of a telemarketing effort, a key thing to learn is who has what business. This can be valuable for competitive analysis and for targeting specific competitors in the future.
6. Be sensitive to declining demand. Telemarketing callers could try to discern if rejections are based on choosing someone else, or simply on waning interest in the product or service.
7. Watch out for substitution trends. Similar to the above point, be aware if there is a type of different product or service people are turning to as an alternative.
8. Be alert for possible new offerings. Find out what people want, and it might help guide product development efforts.