Why You Should Outsource Your Outbound Calling

Every marketing manager or sales manager has told there staff “if you want leads than you need to get on the phones”.  Telemarketing is a very good way to stir up business; results are practically instantaneous and it is the only marketing method that lets you speak directly to your target audience.  Expecting an employee who was hired to do outside sales and or marketing to take on the task of cleaning up a database or following up on direct mail, or qualifying leads or even to make customer survey calls is expecting too much. When push comes to shove adding phone work to an existing workload is not something the typical employee relishes and the phone calls become the lowest priority.

Everyone knows how to use the telephone but not everyone is effective.  Each person in an organization has a certain skill set that they were hired for and if they weren’t hired specifically to make outbound phone calls to suspects, prospects or customers, chances are the calling won’t be successful.  Outsourcing telemarketing duties makes sense when companies don’t have the resources to perform the ongoing prospecting that should be happening or when there is an influx of leads that need to be qualified in a timely manner; such as leads from a trade show, website or other promotional activity.

When looking for a call center one needs to ask questions like how do they hire their staff, how long a commitment is necessary to conduct campaign, who supplies the list, how are the results measured and aside from the calling expense what other costs are associated with starting up a campaign.  Other questions that may be considered is who writes the script, how is the data formatted when the program is completed, and how often are the results reported.  Also, depending on the size of the campaign one might want to ask whether there will be a dedicated phone rep for this campaign or will the number of callers vary.

Choosing to use a competent call center, like IT’S YOUR CALL, to handle your lead generation and lead qualification process will help with ensuring that your sales and marketing programs are being continuously developed,  let your staff focus on the tasks that they were hired to do and keep your pipeline filled.

Ceri Ruenheck has developed and managed inside/outside sales operations for over 20 years and is the president of It’s Your Call www.itsyourcall.com . A virtual call center, It’s Your Call works with companies that lack the time to make calls necessary for their direct marketing campaigns.   Author of the ebook “Cold Calling for the Clueless” www.coldcallingfortheclueless

Ceri has also presented to various professional organizations on entrepreneurship, networking and cold calling.  She lives in Harvard, MA with her husband two sons and two cats.