This will not come as much of a surprise to most companies that have ever used or thought of using telemarketing as a source of decent qualified sales leads.
There are a number of reasons for
the ever diminishing returns that telemarketing based lead generation delivers to most business to business orientated companies, but the really big ones are pretty obvious to most
of us;
- The Corporate Telephone Preference Service that enables companies to remove themselves permanently from telephone cold calling lists and targeting is making the telemarketers potential market smaller and smaller by the month – varying estimates suggest between 15 and 20 percent of UK businesses are now CTPS registered.
- Fewer business decision makers will take cold calls – if you don’t, why would you expect your target market to?
- In many cases the people doing the cold calling do not have the experience or knowledge required to be credible with their target audience. Put bluntly asking the average 18 to 25 years old to have a conversation about accountancy systems with the CFO of a multi-million pound business is unlikely to have the desired impact.
- The propositions developed by telemarketers for use on the phone are frequently naive and lack any compelling argument that would lead to a business decision maker wanting to do anything other than hang up the phone.
- Most telemarketers have aggressive targets and are as a result very pushy which makes it easier to not take the call in the first place than subsequently try and politely get rid of them.
As a final point, in many cases
we also found that databases were being poorly utilised with little or no
planning being put into the ongoing development of the data or the way that it is
used to develop relationships with potential customers that could lead to
something in the future. This is a highly wasteful practice.
We’ve spoken to, worked with and been exposed to a large number of companies (over 100) in the last three years. The majority of them have at some point tried telephone based lead generation campaigns and none of them believe that traditional telemarketing works as a method of generating leads.
As always there are exceptions which I put into a matrix last year to help companies decide whether or not telemarketing is right for them. There is however a big fat caveat. In isolation or backed up only with a bit of something simple like e-mail, telemarketing does not work for all the reasons listed above.
As you can see from the matrix, there are areas at the lower end of the market, where the value of the transactions is such that telemarketing, e-commerce and so forth are the only really cost effective approaches. While up at the high end with infrequent, high cost purchases telemarketing is so ineffective on its own that it is frankly a complete waste of time and money.
Having now slammed telephone based lead generation and telemarketing in business to business marketing, when used in isolation, I will assert that it is an essential part of the marketing mix. However I am going to leave that for next week.

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