In-House or Outsourced Appointment Setting and Lead Generation?

 

We’ve been providing outsourced marketing and telemarketing services, including sales lead generation, appointment setting, telephone account management, and data cleansing, for 12 years.  We typically encounter three main objections in terms of why people say ‘no’ to sign up for our service.

I’m planning to look at all three of these over the next few weeks and I hope you find my thoughts and views thought-provoking if nothing else.

Actually, more often than not, we encounter responses of ‘not now’ as opposed to an emphatic ‘no’ but here’s the first and most common objection for you:

Outsourcing telemarketing services is more expensive than I’d expected!

My response to that is: OK, but may I ask what you are comparing us with?

Yes, we probably are more expensive if you are comparing our hourly or daily rate to that of an inhouse telemarketing employee, but this is genuinely not the case if you carefully consider the following points:

If you outsource your lead generation and appointment setting activities you save:

  • Recruitment fees
  • Manage and keep people motivated
  • Provide a desk, a laptop or a car
  • Pay for holidays
  • Make pension contributions
  • Provide training on how to make sales calls

 In addition, ask yourself:

  • Do you have the time to manage another employee?
  • Or more to the point, do you have the time to manage them out of the business if they have already passed probation?
  • Do you have the appetite for additional headcount during these uncertain times?
  • Do you have the energy to start this process again if the person you recruit doesn’t work out?

50% of the time you will – meaning 50% of the time you won’t…

Assuming you do get this right, you will genuinely be extremely lucky if that person continues to perform that role successfully for more than 18 months.

I think you get the picture; this is a hugely expensive and time-consuming process.

So, just for the record; industry statistics tell us that the actual cost of hiring inhouse sales resources is usually double the salary that you pay them.

So, if you are paying an in house telemarketer £20,000 + commission, the likelihood is that the cost to your business in time, resource and salary will be closer to, or in excess of £40,000.  Food for thought?

Next week we’ll look at:

“How can you understand and represent our company on the telephone better than we can?”

All the best for now

Andrew Smart – MD – Virtual Sales Team

0800 085 5574  hello@myvst.co.uk

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