Introduction
For the last two years Ant Marketing has been providing an outbound appointment generation and database build function for one of the largest worldwide financial institutions. Essentially, Ant Marketing is tasked with generating sales appointments for a variety of business-to-business banking divisions, including invoice finance, asset finance, business banking and business mortgages.
Objectives & Target Audience
The campaign is an ongoing contract management programme. The objectives are as follows:
- To generate appointments and sales leads for the various divisions, based upon agreed criteria.
- To generate a comprehensive database for both re-contact and direct marketing activity
- To increase the awareness of the brand, specific product offerings and messages within the marketplace
- To provide the direct marketing team with market research information The primary target market is SMEs within predetermined vertical and geographical markets.
The Challenges & Solutions
The First Challenge
To ensure each of the appointments presents the sales team with a short-, medium- or long-term opportunity to generate business.
The Solution
Ant Marketing use a variety of mechanisms to ensure the challenge is met, including:
- Ensuring the team are fully briefed on each of the divisions
- Agreeing and adhering to predetermined criteria for a qualified appointment, i.e.
- Decision-making capability
- Timescale of decision to purchase
- Financial level of purchase
- Utilising a robust quality control procedure that ensures appointments meet criteria
The Second Challenge
To ensure that Ant Marketing report comprehensively and accurately (this is essential as the process includes a high degree of testing of different data sources)
The Solution
Ant Marketing has devised a comprehensive but flexible database. This ensures comprehensive but flexible weekly reports.
The Third ChallengeTo facilitate diary management
The SolutionEach salesperson provides their diaries on Outlook, thereby providing for immediate access and updating by Ant Marketing.
The Fourth ChallengeTo ensure the highest level of product knowledge
The SolutionHere the solution has been as follows:
- Providing (often via the client) extensive initial and ongoing training
- Creating a stable, dedicated team for the project
Undertaking ongoing product knowledge assessment (independent of operations, every month Ant Marketing's Training Division makes an assessment of each operative and, dependent upon the results, provides additional training)
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