Hotkey transfers have been around for some time but surprisingly, some businesses are still unaware of their potential and have yet to appreciate their benefits. If a shortened sales cycle, increased sales productivity, improved customer experience and lower cost per lead are of interest to you, read on.

If “hotkey” isn’t a term you’ve come across, here’s a brief explanation to give you an idea. Picture the scene:

Telemarketers are busying themselves making phone calls to prospective clients generating leads on your behalf. They get through to a qualified decision maker who is giving off buying signals like they’re going out of fashion.

During a typical telemarketing campaign, we might book in a site visit or queue up a webinar with the interested individual. But, in a hotkey campaign, we just pass the warm lead straight through to your in-house sales team, or whoever is deemed most suitable to chat to a genuine prospect.

It’s such a simple premise, and, used in the right scenarios, a very successful one too.

Hotkey transfers are flexible. They can apply to inbound as much as outbound lead generation campaigns. If a customer calls in with a query, and we detect interest in a certain product or service, they can easily be connected directly through to your sales team.

Many companies we work with have relatively long sales cycles; that’s often the case when targeting larger organisations. With hotkey transfers, that cycle is markedly reduced.

Each lead is jumped on swiftly, there’s no cooling down between the initial call and the follow up. As the old adage goes: strike whilst the iron is hot and they’re still in your funnel. With a streamlined process such as this, speedy follow up has the additional effect of reducing the cost per lead.

During a B2B lead generation campaign, an in-house sales team can find itself spending a great deal of (labourious) time tracking down the right contact within a company, checking that the company has a need for your services and working out when the time would be right to contact them.

That’s fine if you have infinite resources and a knowledgeable sales team with the patience of saints. But, with hotkey transfers, when the phone rings, your sales professionals already know that the person on the other end of the line understands the product, has been qualified as the right person to speak to and, importantly, already has a need...

It means the sales guys can actually get on with selling, rather than bashing their heads against switchboards and voicemails all day long. Your team of salespeople get to use their hard-fought in-depth knowledge right from the off.

For companies with more specific qualification needs, such as available budget, size of company etc, hotkey leads mean you have your wheat and chaff separated before the call even comes through to you. It’s just another level of welcome streamlining to your processes.

If you are not already seeing the benefit of the hotkey process, imagine a world in which your telemarketing team is only one click away from your sales team, working hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder with your frontline team in perfect sync. One seamless transfer from telemarketer to sales person, without skipping a beat.

And, perhaps the most vital of all the benefits – a vastly improved customer experience. The contact isn’t left hanging around waiting for a call back or worse talking to your competition. Right from the initial contact, the process is smooth. It paints a strong image in the prospect’s mind of a company which knows how to deliver.

Find out more about how to optimise the sales process