As a business-to-business marketing or sales leader you have numerous options for lead generation tactics and tools. Top choices include teleprospecting, direct marketing, search engine marketing, website, and trade shows.
Even with the growing number of digital routes, outbound phone calling, or teleprospecting, remains a powerful method to engage personally with your prospects. Because a phone conversation efficiently replicates face-to-face sales activities, these one-on-one flowing and probing interactions are the most effective method to validate the quality of a lead. Skilled telemarketing professionals can reveal needs, discover market intelligence, form early relationships, and ultimately qualify the prospect as a lead, primed to pass on to sales.
Your decision on whether teleprospecting can be absorbed by your current staff or handled by a dedicated outsourced team is critical. Your revenue results will be directly affected.
You may have considered the following challenges when evaluating the choice to improve results by outsourcing your teleprospecting lead generation:
Our business is different.
Sales is sales. Every business is a bit different; however, people buy things to solve business issues based on the solution fit, the reputation of the company selling the solution AND the effectiveness of the sales person.
No one outside gets us.
Most of the good sales people do not dream of becoming technical experts. If they hear a buying signal in the form of a technical question when talking to a buyer, they are likely to bring in a sales engineer. The sales skills required to effectively solve business issues for any solution can be documented and communicated for any company. No solution is that difficult.
We can do it cheaper inside.
A fallacy. As you see on the table above, it appears less expensive to “do it inside," until you take the following hard and soft costs into account...
Additionally, in-sourced inside sales centers are notorious for their lack of productivity. Please see the table below for an example of typical Inside vs. Outsourced results:
I do not want telemarketers calling my prospects.
In fairness, our industry has created the image. It is hard not to think about “telemarketing” without remembering a time when you have been interrupted at home by someone who sounds like they can barely read, much less carry on a two-way conversation. However, as with any business, there are specialists. Teleprospectors are specifically hired and trained for engaging high level executives and initiating the complex sale. They are skilled in relationship building and are intelligent, articulate, adaptable and thorough.
You would not dream of building an electric plant outside your office building to generate your own power, you probably should not invest in an inside sales function to support your revenue objectives. Maintaining productivity, keeping turnover down as well as training and managing this function is a job that few people can, or want to do.
Compared with inside sales teams, an outsourced teleprospecting team can double the quality contacts and dramatically increase the revenue. Review your options. Delegating the critical initial function of generating quality leads provides access to world-class capabilities, increases your control over quality and productivity, improves company focus, reduces operating costs and decreases risk.
Can you really do it cheaper inside? Probably not, and probably not as well.
1Outsourced includes more contacts and more dials per company. Conservative: Ignores value of long-term leads produced. Assumes 1920 hours of one person-year of effort in both cases.
Topics: B2B Telemarketing, Lead Generation, B2B Marketing, Inside Sales
