Telemarketing

If you are going to include telemarketing in your approach to new business - and you almost certainly should - you need to examine the options available for a small business to business company

Including telemarketing in your marketing mix

What are your options?

If the nature of your business passes the criteria of the Health Check on this web site, including professional outbound telephoning in your sales and marketing activities will, without doubt, increase your sales, but how do you go about it, who will do it and what will it cost?

Outsourcing

1. Use an appointment setting service

If you employ a new business appointment setting service you will be expected to provide and agree a tight brief as to what constitutes a qualified appointment. You are usually charged an agreed fixed fee for each appointment secured. The amount of the fee will depend on various factors but is usually not cheap.

This is a really "hands off" approach so the very least you should do is talk to some of their existing customers to satisfy myself regarding their credentials. I'd probably want to test the appointment setting out myself first anyway to get a realistic idea of the potential value of the service and assess whether the fee was fair to both sides.

2. Use a call centre

Unless you're very lucky, call centres that offer an outbound telemarketing service are unlikely to be part of the equation as far as you are concerned.

• Firstly they would probably require what would seem to you to be a high volume of calls to be undertaken on your behalf over an agreed time period to make it cost effective for them to work with you
• You would have to brief the call centre on your precise requirements - and agree upfront, for example, what constitutes a qualified appointment, so that there are no misunderstandings down the line
• Then you'd need to provide the telephone sales operatives with an induction course about your company: Brand, brand positioning, competition, etc. to ensure that they were able to make a good impression on your behalf
• You'd also need to be prepared to monitor progress (including quality) on a regular basis to check cost effectiveness from your point of view

Finally, in my experience, the calibre of telephone sales operative that you require just isn't available in a call centre. Anyone with good enough skills would get themselves into an environment where they would be better rewarded for them.

Keeping the activity in-house

If you keep the activity in-house you should really factor in a good telephone sales person's hourly rate of pay for several reasons, whether you or an existing member of staff performs the activity or you take someone on specifically to do it:

• It has to be seen as an important, regular, ongoing pursuit for additional business
• It should be allocated a budget
• Time sheets of telephone (and related) activities should be kept and time spent analysed and evaluated against results achieved

So who should do it?

1. Bring someone in specifically for the task

The cost of an experienced outbound telephone sales person (if you can find one) may vary depending on various criteria such as where you are based in the country and the available work force, the industry, target individuals, and the purpose and nature of the call. In my experience it's usually somewhere between 1½ to 2 times the rate of a good secretary.

As with the appointment setting service, you would need to brief this individual and give him or her an induction course about your company, industry, target market, decision making unit, decision critical factors, etc. before letting the individual loose on the telephone. It may be that the complexity or technical nature of your offer means that this just isn't a viable option for you.

2. Use the strengths of your own people

The person who makes the calls doesn't have to be you - there may indeed be very good reasons why it shouldn't be you - but it must be someone you trust to:

• Know enough about the business
• Project the right company image
• Stick with it and not give up easily
• Understand the importance of this role and be prepared to take it seriously and learn the techniques involved that lead to success

A little sanity check

You're not going to invest time or money on this activity without either believing, or at least being prepared to test whether, you would get a decent return on your investment. And to do that you must give it your best shot.

What you should never, ever do

Let's get this point out of the way right now:

You must never, ever, ever just "get (young) such and such, who's out of college for the vacation, or between jobs/acting parts, to come in, do some cold calling, and see what that gets us".

This is the worst thing you can do (and yet I've seen it done so many times that I could weep).

We will look at just ten common sense, practical business reasons why this might be so:

Your temporary telephone sales person may be a wonderful person/gifted actor/actress/whatever but he or she isn't a trained professional, and probably:

1. Has never heard of the pattern of the sale
2. Hasn't a clue as to how the call should be structured
3. Does not know how to adequately prepare for the call
4. Has no idea how to get past gatekeepers and talk to decision makers
5. Doesn't know how to qualify whether a person is a decision maker
6. Goes straight into the presentation of the offer without trying to establish any need first
7. Doesn't know how to handle objections without getting into an argument or giving up
8. Couldn't get a doting Mum to buy water in the Sahara desert
9. Wouldn't recognise a buying signal if it came up and introduced itself
10. Couldn't close a stable door after the horse had bolted

Does all that sound very harsh?

It's meant to. To put an untrained person in this position and then judge the effectiveness of using the telephone for profit by their results is

• unfair on them
• unfair on your business service/offer and
• unfair on telephone selling/telemarketing in general

What's more, and this is a cardinal sin in my opinion, you are placing the image of your company in the hands of a totally unqualified individual.

You may think that they are cheap, and they are in terms of how much they cost you per hour of their time, but think what they could be costing you in terms of your reputation and lost potential business...

You either pay a professional to do the job or you become one yourself. Having said that, there are very few trained professionals around. Those who are available will seem costly, certainly until they start producing results, and that may take some time.

The others, those provided by telemarketing and telephone sales agencies, often fall into the out of work actor category, and aren't trained professionals at all. As such the agency charge out rate will probably be in line with those of a temporary secretary but the individual you get probably won't perform any better than your untrained friend.

Summary

No company can afford to make bad calls that annoy customers or potential customers. Continue doing it and they'll either just avoid you or lobby for more legislation that stops you. Good telephone (and telephone sales) skills take time to learn and hone but the results they achieve, right across your company, and the profit they contribute to the bottom line of the business can be, quite literally, amazing, so it's worth the investment to learn them.

So there you have it - over to you!