Telemarketing in Perspective
Bill Warner Monday, February 25, 2008
What is marketing all about? It’s all about generating qualified sales leads with whom your sales team can proceed with the sales process. Marketing gurus will tell you a dozen more things that marketing is about, but they all boil down to generating sales leads. That’s it, and it’s very important, and the measure of marketing success is how many qualified sales leads are generated for the effort applied to the task.
Telemarketing is an effective and efficient way to generate sales leads when performed correctly by the right people. Let’s focus on what it takes to do this successfully.
Positioning Telemarketing
Telemarketing is a sales lead generation activity conducted over the telephone. The outcome of a successful telemarketing campaign is a list of qualified sales leads that meet established criteria for level of interest in your product or service. This is not telesales, which is the activity of selling products and services over the telephone; particularly devoted to low cost sales needs. The intent of a telemarketing campaign is to qualify the level of interest of potential customers and to set up a sales meeting with representatives of the sales team. The selling process is then executed by the sales team, not the telemarketing team.
Of course, the sales team can do telemarketing itself and often does. However, if you find yourself in a situation that you are spending a lot of time, and therefore money, in having highly paid sales people on the phone performing telemarketing, you should consider having that task performed by a much less expensive telemarketing team. This has the effect of giving the sales team more time to perform the sales process, the task they were hired to perform and for which they are uniquely qualified, by providing them qualified sales leads by a less expensive and professional telemarketing team. The sales productivity should improve in the process, offsetting the additional expense for telemarketing.
The Elements of a Telemarketing Campaign
The main elements of any telemarketing campaign are:
- A telemarketing script that is derived from the marketing messages of the product or service being sold. This script is quite short, lasting only a couple of minutes, which introduces the company, its value proposition, an offer of something in return for the potential customer’s time and a series of questions that qualify the potential customer’s interest in the product or service. It is important to design this script in a way that quickly gets the main messages across and makes it easy for the potential customer to respond positively.
- Qualification criteria that narrow down what a qualified lead really is. These will be put in the form of questions to the potential customers as part of the script. Positive answers to these questions are the basis for determining if the potential customer is more likely to buy your product or service than those potential customers who do not have positive answers.
- A list of potential customers that will be used by the telemarketers. This list can be created from many different free and for-fee sources that can be used to generate a targeted list of potential customers in your industry. The quality of the list is an important factor in determining the success of a telemarketing campaign. Take the time to make sure you have a current list else you will be spending a lot of time on calls that go nowhere.
- Qualified and trained telemarketers that are trained on the script and the business you are in. You need to find telemarketing resources that are mature people who have relevant industry experience and who excel in communications skills. They have to be able to follow the script but, more importantly, successfully handle all the off-script questions and objections.
Selecting the Right Telemarketing Assistance
There are a lot of choices for telemarketing help. You can find call centers throughout the world that have very inexpensive services to make calls for you. They will use your script and report leads back to you. But, that’s about it. More often than not, the quality of the leads is low and the results are poor due to language issues and their inability to handle questions and objections. These are the people who call you at dinner time.
You can buy leads off the internet. Just let them know what industry you are in and they will send you more leads than you could ever handle. It’s very inexpensive. But, the quality of the leads is usually poorer than the international call centers because the qualification effort is not effective.
You need to find a firm that will try to become a part of your team as a partner in the marketing and sales processes of your company. You should be looking for telemarketing firms that:
- Have many years of experience and are familiar with the industry that you are in, and can demonstrate that they have gotten good results in generating qualified leads.
- Have highly qualified telemarketers who have the experience, confidence and know-how to handle both the scripted communications as well as the off-script questions that always occur.
- Take the time to learn about your business, so they will be able to respond to potential customer questions and objections more effectively.
- Help you put together an effective script by sharing their extensive experience in knowing what works and what doesn’t.
- Can help you generate a list of potential customers if you need that kind of assistance.
- Will provide ongoing reports on their results and work with you to modify your campaign based on its performance.
Manage the Process
Telemarketing is a process like any other, requiring focused planning, execution, monitoring and management action. Like any process, taking shortcuts on the basic elements of a successful campaign will lead to poor results. Done properly, telemarketing can be a very cost effective way to generate qualified leads and improve the productivity of your sales team so they can focus on selling, selling and selling.
Filed Under: Marketing Plans & Strategies
Bill Warner is the Managing Partner of Paladin and Associates, a business consulting firm in the Research Triangle Park area of central North Carolina, and is the Chairman of the Triangle Accredited Capital Forum, an angel investor network with over one hundred members throughout the southeast.
Bill Warner is the Managing Partner of Paladin and Associates, a business consulting firm in the Research Triangle Park area of central North Carolina, and is the Chairman of the Triangle Accredited Capital Forum, an angel investor network with over one hundred members throughout the southeast.
Thanks for the thorough analysis of effective telemarketing. What types of fees can one expect in outsourced telemarketing services? Are there any performance-based pricing models (per qualified lead) or is it typically hourly/flat fee? Several years ago at a IT services start-up we sought out such services and backed away as the retainer fees seemed more expensive than hiring/building an in-house team.
Nice to hear from you Scott.
I see two common models for these engagement. One is a simple per hour rate for all the hours spent on the telephone. The provider should give you reports on the hours spent and the results of each telephone call made against the list they are using. The other is a rate per qualified lead. In this model, it is very important to have a clear definition of what a qualified lead is. In either model, the effective hourly rate is going to range from $40 to $60 per hour. A retainer based fee is pretty loose and would have to be managed with good reporting so that you would know what you are getting for your money.
The variablity in this is very wide mainly driven by the ease of delivering the marketing messages and offer and the quality of the list. If the list is poor, the number of hours will rise accordingly. If your script is not effective, you will get more rejects which then drives up the number of hours as well.
Yes, if you are making a large number of calls over an extended period, you will reach a point where it will cost you less to hire your own telemarketing people. But, it’s not as simple as that. You really have to have people who know how to do this well. They have to be good at creating the messages for the script, know how to create high quality lists and they have to be very good on the phone in handling off-script questions as well as objections.
I meet a lot of people that have had a bad experience with telemarketing. Most of them are a result of not managing the process well and engaging people who are not professional telemarketers.
Hope this helps.................All the best................Bill Warner
