The business of selling products or services by making unsolicited telephone calls to potential customers. Telephone sales, or telemarketing, are an effective system for introducing a company to a prospect and setting up appointments.
Telemarketing (known as telesales in the UK and Ireland) is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits to prospective customers to buy products or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or Web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call.
Telemarketing can also include recorded sales pitches programmed to be played over the phone via automatic dialing. Telemarketing has come under fire in recent years, being viewed as an annoyance by many.
Model of Consumer Behavior Consumers make many buying decisions every day. Most large companies research consumer buying decisions in great detail to answer questions about what consumers buy, where the buy, how and how much they buy, when they buy, and why they buy. Marketers can study actual consumer purchases to find out what they buy, where, and how much. But learning about the whys of consumer buying behavior is not so easy- the answers are often locked deep within the consumer’s mind. “For companies with billions of dollars on the line, the buying decision is the most crucial part of their enterprise,” states one consumer behavior analyst. “yet no one really knows how the human brain makes that choice.” Often, consumers themselves don’t know exactly what influences their purchases. “Buying decisions are made at an unconscious level.” Says the analyst, “and … consumers don’t generally give very reliable answers if you simply ask them, ‘Why did you buy this?”
Developing the Research Plan Once the research problems and objectives have been defined, researchers must determine the exact information needed, develop a plan for gathering it efficiently, and present the plan to management. The research plan outlines sources of existing data and spells out the specific research approaches, contact methods, sampling plans, and instruments that researchers will use to gather new data. a) Secondary Data “Information that already exists somewhere, having been collected for another purpose”