Business Articles

Telemarketing is a specialist type of marketing which is very popular with many UK businesses in generating new sales enquiries, handling incoming calls (for incoming telemarketing), generating appointments and boosting business.

An excellent form of marketing but there are down sides to telemarketing as well as up sides.

Positives of telemarketing
Looking at the plus sides of using telemarketing companies (for outbound calling):

With telemarketing you can target an audience in a way that other forms of marketing are not able to. For example, if you attended an event and had a list of 5,000 people that visited your stand - a telemarketing company would be able to follow all of these leads up and try to arrange a meeting. You could e-mail the 5,000 but e-mails can be ignored.

With telemarketing you can get a more or less instant response. There is chasing involved in telemarketing as people can be difficult to catch out of meetings, but once you catch them you can get to the nuts and bolts quickly.

Telemarketing offers a control that other forms of marketing do not offer. Kind of like turning on a sales tap telemarketing can be switched on and off as the business requires.

Negatives of telemarketing

Looking at the downside of using telemarketing (for outbound calling):

Telemarketing can be expensive, depending on the agency that you decide to use and also the experience of the caller it can cost anything from £150 per day up to £600. For many businesses investing hundreds or thousands a week (sometimes up front) is a very expensive exercise.

With telemarketing there are no guarantees of results. You could have calling going on every day and be faced with no meetings being booked (or no sales). For many companies this is a risk that is too great or they have had had an experience previously in an unsuccessful campaign that resulted in no tangible results.

Although one of the benefits of telemarketing is speed, this can also be looked at from another angle. If you are investing £100's a day you do not see results after 2 or 3 days. The reason is that there is a 'sales pipeline' which needs to be followed. It takes time to prospect sales leads, chase down a contact (when they are in the office and not in meetings) and then introduce, explain the reason for calling and solicit a response.

Is telemarketing a viable form of marketing?

Based on the above points, telemarketing has both good points and bad points.

Each company would need to look at their market, look at the risks and assess on a case by case basis as to whether telemarketing is viable for them.