Top Ten Reasons to Outsource Your Telemarketing Needs

For businesses that need the opportunity to generate potential leads via the telephone, it’s often a massive drain on human, financial and physical resources to conduct this work for themselves. Furthermore, inexperienced telemarketers could damage your reputation and your credibility. By outsourcing your demands to a specialized telemarketing service, you can benefit from the best in skilled industry professionals using proven techniques derived from results-driven environments, with the latest technology, top quality target data and all at an impressive investment to revenue ratio.

#1: INEXPERIENCE SELLS ITSELF: When you use current staff members to perform your telemarketing, you are usually placing an inexperienced individual into a stressful and demoralising position. Those emotions of stress and dispiritedness soon transfer to the call’s recipient who unconsciously sense’s their distress and rather than feeling confident about your product or service, they want to terminate the call quickly. Inexperienced staff, often working without a script or well-written guide, quickly becomes ineffective and even counterproductive.

#2: YOUR OFFICE ENVIRONMENT: Leading on from #1, your office environment is not the most conducive to conduct a successful telemarketing campaign. With other staff around, your telemarketer feels self-conscious and censors themselves. By focusing on limiting social embarrassment, your telemarketer stops listening to the call recipient and successfully responding to their signals. Furthermore, the environment is often noisy and distracting.

#3: DATA SUPPLY: Where do you get your potential leads from? A professional telemarketing company provides leads that are based on strategically selected data. Developing your own data supply is costly, both in terms of money and time. Outsourcing this to a telemarketing specialist saves you both time and money by having the professionals provide the right data to supply the telemarketers making the calls. Weak, cheap data provides poor leads, occasional low-level sales, broken contracts and meagre investment to revenue ratios.

#4: DON’T BE TEMPTED BY TEMPS: It’s all too easy to pay the price of getting in some ‘temporary staff’ to perform your telemarketing. These are reasonably low paid workers whose agency takes a good cut of their worth and who are likely to work well for you but are not really going to be fully invested in getting the results that your business needs. What and where’s their incentive? They get paid hourly. Temps don’t know your company, your products or services well enough to deliver effective results. By outsourcing to professionals, you receive the support of dedicated and experienced telemarketing staff that effectively integrates their own skills with your company’s message, products and services.

#5: TALK THE TALK: Effective talk guides or scripts are essential to strategically turning leads into sales. Telemarketing scripts should be professionally researched and written, weak scripts lead to loopholes, silences, and closed questioning. If you don’t feel confident to write a strong telemarketer’s script, you need to outsource to save wasting valuable time and money on calls that go nowhere.

#6: FLEXIBILITY 1: Truly effective telemarketing requires the flexibility to change your volume of approach from hour to hour, day to day or project to project. One day you need a single marketer calling select contacts, the next; you need dozens of staff canvassing a wide range of potential leads. This flexibility is difficult, if not impossible to manage and achieve with your own in-house staff.

#7: FLEXIBILITY 2: Following on from #6 – you need to be able to use your telemarketers at hours that might not suit your own staff. Will your 9-5’ers want to change their hours to those needed to gain maximum capacity from a telemarketing campaign? Would they be happy to come into work on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday morning to cold call your potential leads? Consider the over-time implications of this and you’ll soon see that the cost outweighs the potential benefit. This dovetails nicely into #8

#8: COST: One of the most compelling reasons to outsource your telemarketing requirements is the cost associated with setting up your own telemarketing. Cost comes in two forms, time and money. Consider the cost of training your staff in telemarketing techniques, in advertising for new staff, over time costs, the cost of equipment, diallers, software, scripts, the morale costs on staff working unsociable hours and finally the cost of the calls. Good telemarketers don’t want to be constrained by limited talk time limits. These costs are all included in the provision provided by your professional telemarketing service.

#9: EQUIPMENT: Closely related to cost is the issue of telemarketing equipment. First off, you need a quiet separate room where your telemarketers can work. They need separate desks so that your potential clients are listening to others working at the same time. Furthermore, you need computers, software, automated diallers, additional phone lines, call monitoring equipment, cables, telephones, headsets – these have the double cost of first purchase and then the constant updating required to keep up with the speed of telemarketing technology. Equipment also requires maintenance, technical support, care and hygienic cleaning. Outsourcing your telemarketing needs removes these costs from your project’s budget.

#10: MAKE THE WORDS WORK FOR YOU: It’s not just about having a good script or talk guide, it’s about being able to express yourself clearly, confidently and persuasively under pressure. Experienced telemarketers improvise based on the direction the call recipient takes; do you own staff have this quality in abundance? When a telemarketer uses certain well-honed phrases naturally, it captures the recipient’s attention, they use the script to draw further interest before skilfully leading them to take action and get the results that you need. The very words that professional telemarketers use are directly related to the needs of your potential customers. Rather than selling a product, they offer the recipient solutions, chances and opportunities that encourage the customer to connect without the traditional fear of tele-sales/marketing callers.

It’s obvious to see why some businesses make the mistake of doing their own telemarketing. It’s seems simple enough to set up their own telemarketing campaign and get the results that they need to help business improve. Buy a few good leads, rent a few phones and persuade some of your sales team to do a bit of over-time. It seems to be little output with maximum gain. However, from the tips outlined above, it’s clear to see that the value you will get from professionally outsourcing your telemarketing requirements will massively outweigh the potential costs and problems of DIY telemarketing.

Author: Andy Dickens
Company: Virtual Sales Limited
Telephone: +44(0)1798-875040
www.virtual-sales.com