Determine Your Target Market (Series – 2/3)

Determining the decision maker, or your target market, also largely depends on the product or service you are offering! A marketer will consider two things when looking for their target: age group and employment status. Your prospect may fall under one or more of the following categories:

• Students
• Old Age Pensioner
• Homemaker
• Unemployed
• Shift Workers
• Employed

For example, if you’re offering Life Insurance, are you going to focus on contacting senior citizens? Maybe in some cases but more likely you want to contact prospects between the age of 25-55 that have mortgages or dependents. If you are selling warranties for gadgets or appliances, will you be selling them to College students who tend to keep up with the new gadgets released? Or will it make more sense to offer it to a more stable individual who would rather have an appliance for as long as possible? If your answer is the latter, the age of your target market is from 45 to 75 years old.

Once you know your target market, you need to make sure you have a good contact rate throughout your working day so you have more chance of hitting sale targets. Basically, you need to have a strategy in place to make sure you’re selling all day rather than just a few hours each day due to contact rates.

In the UK, telemarketers can only make calls between 8 in the morning to 9 in the evening. Let’s divide and label this time frame into three parts: 8AM – 12NN falls under AM, 12NN – 5PM falls under PM (Afternoon), and 6PM – 9PM falls under EVE (Evening).

Here is a table of the time period one would expect certain consumer groups to be home, and hopefully free to take calls.

You already know that during the evening period you will get good contacts but that only covers 3 hours if you’re calling up until 9pm at night. What you need to do is make sure you get even contacts throughout your whole shift and not just a few hours..

Scenario 1
You make a call to a fresh batch of leads at 8pm in the evening and get to speak with a retired person. You immediately get asked ‘why are you calling me so late? Don’t you know what time it is?’
This person has been in all day long but your first attempt at calling them was at 8pm. They would have been fine speaking to your earlier in the day.

Scenario 2
You make calls to a fresh batch of leads at 8pm at night and end up speaking with homemakers, retired people and unemployed. The next day you call the same batch of data at 12 noon and you get a terrible contact rate. Why is that? Is it because you already contacted the daytime contacts at night the day before?

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

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