What are the “real” differences are between a professional telemarketer and an in-house telemarketer? We have compiled a list that helps assess the choice and what you need to think about.
Reason 1# Cost:
Whilst high-level professional outbound telemarketing may look costly, it is often not compared to what the hidden costs of in house lead generation. An outbound telemarketing contract costs between £7,500 – £20,000 for a team of professional, experienced telemarketers to target your ideal clients. They will be evangelising your business, brand, product or service and generating face to face appointments for you or your sales team to go out and meet.
The choice to recruit an in-house telemarketer at the same amount per year has hidden costs. Once you factor in your training costs, overheads including equipment costs, bonus, holiday, national insurance? Suddenly a £20,000 salary has jumped to a much higher figure before they have even picked up the phone and started generating new business opportunities.
Reason 2# Experience:
Everyone involved in sales has some level of telemarketing experience, where they make cold calls. It is finding that ideal candidate that has the experience and drive to come into a business and hit the ground running that really changes the game. Most telemarketing companies especially those who focus on B2B have a much lower staff turnover than that of a typical call centre and we work extremely hard to retain that experience.
Business decisions are all about risk, the risk of onboarding an untested individual into your organisation when you can hand on the risk to a telemarketing agency that not only has experienced expert diallers but also diallers passionate about your product or service? Experience is essential, it maximises the return on your investment and offers the ability to turn up and down lead generation to match your needs.
Reason 3# Brand awareness:
Communicating your brand message is challenging, finding that right mix telemarket skills paired with product and industry knowledge and experience is tough.
However, campaigns at outsourced appointment setting agencies like Virtual Sales Team to maintain a consistent message and levels of performance is essential to telemarketing success, prospective clients are identified, qualified, and made appointments based on a message that is clear and drives sales.
Reason 4# Transparency, feedback, and control:
For any investment in outsourced telemarketing, you will want to see what impact and return your investment is generating. In-house you see the straight reporting, how many calls have been made, what have these calls led to? Appointment, lead, hot callback? Outsourced telemarketing will enable you to receive much more transparent reports, the pipeline of opportunities reports on metrics that are important to you as a business. The majority of telemarketing is spent profiling and cleansing data to ensure every opportunity passed to you has a genuine reason to become your next customer.
The added value of telemarketing extends beyond those opportunities with a pipeline of future opportunities. Building your business profile and brand awareness coupled with an effective sales or marketing message adds the value of any outbound activity. Being able to see who and what verticals have worked well, actively targeting those prospects, and reacting to the market’s changes and that provide feedback to improve your messaging is invaluable. Why risk using an in-house telemarketer who may not react quickly enough to capitalise on these essential pieces of information gained?
Reason5# Return on Investment:
The most important reason for any marketing/telemarketing campaigns is to generate a return on investment, establishing a new business, and ultimately finding new revenue flow for the business. ROI is calculated through a variety of different models, be that straight return, x invested equals y return or a more complex ROI structure. At Virtual Sales Team we set a shared ROI expectation from the outset and always aim to keep it simple and transparent.
One of the key benefits of outsourcing your telemarketing is that targets and ROI can be calculated from the outset. Outsourcing will establish what your conversion rate is from sat appointments to converted business, what level of ROI would you see from these converted appointments, would one sale generate enough ROI to justify the activity? All of these questions are taken into account and factored into a campaign ensuring that the activity delivers.
So what is the real difference between professional outsourced telemarketing compared to an in-house telemarketer?
