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.

Around the UK there are hundreds and hundreds of telemarketing companies ranging from ex telemarketers that have decided to start up by themselves, up to large call centers that employ hundreds of staff.

Finding the right sort of telemarketing company for your campaign may be difficult as it will take time to find the right size agency.

With telemarketing, most agencies either focus on B2B calling (business to business) or B2C calling (business to consumer).

Consumers would be considered as people at home. This would be single mothers during the day or decision makers in the evening. Depending on who you are looking to target, will define when calling will take place and what sort of clientele are called.

Many people loathe telemarketing companies calling up at home (which can be understood as it is a little intrusive after a days work to get sales calls in the evening) sometimes 5-10 calls per evening for some homeowners.

Most B2C telemarketing companies are very selective on the sort of campaigns that they take on – as many campaigns can be very difficult.

Many companies (such as double glazing companies) look to outsource their calling to B2C telemarketing companies; however many will not do this sort of calling (leaving them to use internal staff and handle calling themselves).

B2C calling is quite difficult (due to the stigma and also the fact that people tend to be more hostile to calls at home) and considered intrusive – so many telemarketing companies are shying away from it now and going for B2B calling instead.

Choosing the right telemarketing company to handle your calling may be a time consuming process as there are so many telemarketing companies around to choose from. Most agencies in the UK focus on B2B calling, so finding one to handle day time or evening calling may be difficult.

There are a number of B2C telemarketing companies around the UK and the best way to find them (other than spending time trawling through search results is to use a price comparison site. This way you can compare a few different companies compare prices and do this over the course of a few minutes, freeing up your valuable time.

Telemarketing companies have now embarked to the trend of hiring home based appointment setter. Debates on the advantages and disadvantages of this unique approach have been discussed here and there. But the most practical question that all business owners should ask is: How do I know my home based appointment setters are working?

The following are various triggers to keep things in check among home based appointment setters, in order of importance

RESULTS

Simple yet effective.  If you know your campaign's result averages, keep your fingers on the pulse.  Keep daily, weekly and monthly averages to be able and detect variations in results.  Tracking conversions, dials, emails and other incremental progress allows for deeper and faster detection of a problem.  End-of-day and end-of-week reports are very helpful signals.

GOOGLE DOCUMENTS

Google has done it again, another "game changer".  We are able to post an Excel spreadsheet in Google Documents, share with client and agent allowing for live access to information. All clients are able to see as agents of our telemarketing services are updating comments real time.  Read: IN REAL TIME. Spot checking will help ensure appointment

SKYPE

Documentation of every call in Skype is the key.  Skype allow for 50 outbound phone calls per day.  $2.95 per month is the cost of unlimited (or 50 outbound phone calls) to US and Canada.  Our clients set up 2-3 accounts for the agent at a whooping $8.85 per month allowing full control.  Client's can access the account to review number of dials and duration of the call in account history.

GOOGLE TALK

Instant communication for telemarketing services made accessible.  Every agent is responsible for being on Google Talk for the duration of the shift or he/she must provide an explanation for the absence or being idle.  Although our team is monitoring Google Talk status during the day (we review status every 15 min) we ask our clients to install Google Talk Messaging on their desktops or mobile devices to open instant communication with your agent.  Being involved with you agent's activities helps to detect any issues at an early stage.

SCREEN GRAB

This is the final monitoring control.  Technology allows for us to install a screen monitoring software and randomly grab screen shoots from your agents' pc and send them to our clients at the end of the day.  Although agent knows this software has been installed, they are not able to control it or know when it takes place.  Although it is time consuming, this step absolutely assures compliance.

INTUITION

We talk about using our gut a number of times in telemarketing companies.  If you feel your appointment setter is not delivering 100% every hour of every day, stop.  Even if all steps are being followed. Your appointment might be working, but is your campaign working?

At the end of the day, as a business owner, you need to make sure your virtual appointment setter is working and not slacking.