Teleprospecting: An approach for qualifying accounts

Abstract This article describes how telecommunications can be used in lieu of cold calls to actively prospect for and qualify new accounts to increase salesforce productivity. Other articles have made reference to using telemarketing for selling, responding to inquiries, and account maintenance. This article defines and describes teleprospecting, identifies the market conditions favoring its use, suggests guidelines for implementation, and provides measures for assessing the benefits of the procedure to salesforce efficiency and sales volume. “The market is opening up more rapidly than my people can capture it. We are losing new customers to our competition daily. It will take too long to train new people and worse than than it takes ten cold calls to find a hot prospect. If I only knew where to send them each morning we'd increase profitability and really boost morale. What can I do?” —Regional Sales Manager