Dealing With Angry Telemarketing Prospects

When prospecting for potential B2B leads, looking over your old calling lists can be a good way to start your work. I mean, you already have a relationship with the people on the list, right? So why not give them a telemarketing call and ask if they are interested in doing business with you again? More often than not, these prospects would say ‘yes’, but there are also cases where the prospect would not only say ‘no’ but would probably have a litany of complaints against you, your offers, or probably to your company in general. These are angry business prospects that, while they may not bring business in, are worth every effort to assuage their temper. For the sake of your business, you need to handle this right.

You see, you can think of angry customers as those who were disappointed by your company. It could be due to a lot of reasons, like poor service, non-delivery of goods, or even fraud. These are just some of the ways to really earn the ire of such former customers. While they may not rank high in our B2B lead generation campaigns, what they say in social networks can bring down our business. So you have to deal with them quickly every time you have such an encounter. Anyway, for those tense moments, it pays to remember these useful tips:

One, do not take their criticisms personaly. They just wanted to get their resentments out of their chests. And in case that failure your company made is serious, then it is only natural that they would want to speak out to the first representative that calls them.

Second, leave the anger out of the equation. If you react to the negative outburst with an equally negative outburst, nothing positive will come out of it. Indeed, this will just end up escalating to higher levels of trouble for you and your company once this gets out of control, which will usually happen.

Third, apologize once things have calmed down a bit. Even if this is not your fault, you represent the company that caused the prospect grief in the past. Assure them that you are there to solve whatever problem they had with your service in the past. Usually, this would have mollified your prospects and make them more receptive to your B2B appointment setting efforts.

Lastly, concentrate on solving the problem itself. Take note, these prospects are unhappy because of some problem your business gave them. For that reason, you should ask them where things went wrong.

Yes, that would be an ugly process, but you need to know in order to iron your processes out in the future. At least you are getting more information. You may not be able to make a sale at this point, but at least you are fixing your relationship with your previous prospects. Once you have gotten this fixed, it will be easier for your lead generation campaign to do business with them again.