Businesses often question the difference between professional telemarketing and in-house telemarketers. At SBF, we have had this discussion numerous times with current and prospective clients and colleagues and it is often the case that they want concrete reasons to support their decision to outsource.

See below the top five reasons for outsourcing your telemarketing function:

Reason 1: Cost Cutting

Outsourcing your telemarketing function may look costly as part of an initial outlay, however it a small price to pay when you consider the cost implications of an in-house telemarketing campaign. Hiring an in-house, outbound telemarketer may cost £20,000 for a single yearly salary. That’s one person, instead of hiring a whole team of professional, experienced telemarketers to target your ideal market for a set monthly or yearly fee. That’s a whole team delivering education on your business, brand, product or service and generating face to face appointments for you or your sales team to go out and meet.

Yes, you could bring in an in-house telemarketer at the same cost per year but is that in fact the real cost? Have you factored in the training costs for this staff member, their additional overheads including equipment costs, salary bonuses, holidays, national insurance? Have you considered the fact this employee will need a manager to monitor their work, and perhaps a team of colleagues to make them effective in generating new business? Almost immediately, a £20,000 salary has increased far beyond the initial £20,000 outlay you had factored for, and that is before they have even begun to pick up the phone to work on your campaigns and generate new business opportunities.

Reason 2: Experience

The question of experience within telemarketing often perplexes many recruiters. They look for that quintessential experience within telemarketing and rarely find it. Everyone in sales has some level of telemarketing, where they have had to make cold calls in order to explore lead generation. Finding that ideal candidate with the experience and drive to come into a business and hit the ground running is the most difficult aspect of finding a worthwhile salesperson. The majority of specialist telemarketing companies, especially those who involved in B2B lead generation, turnover less staff than a typical call centre and keeping that experience around and disseminating it amongst the staff is key to success.

Why choose to hire untested individuals when you can outsource to a telemarketing firm has experienced, expert telemarketers and diallers that are passionate about your industry? Experience is essential to get the maximum return on your investment, a guarantee when you outsource. Outsourcing also provides an established formula that allows you to monitor and manage your lead generation services to meet the capacity of your business.

 

Reason 3: Brand awareness

Marketing and communicating your specific brand can be difficult, especially when trying to find the correct blend of professional and engaging telemarketing, product and industry knowledge and experience. Outsourcing your company’s telemarketing function allows your company to turn years of experience across multiple industries liaising with different layers of management, from CEOs to office managers, to your advantage.

Maintaining a consistent message that communicates the individuality and merits of your brand is difficult, particularly one that delivers results. Both factors are essential to telemarketing success, otherwise why should you risk contacting prospective clients with a message that is still being shaped by in-house telemarketers and may not deliver?

Reason 4: Transparency, feedback and control:

As with any investment, you want to see what return your money is generating. With In-house telemarketing, you may see the straight reporting from operative to line manager to you. They will provide statistics like how many calls have been made per individual and what have these calls led to, whether it is an appointment to discuss services, a lead towards getting that appointment or a hot call back.

With outsourced telemarketing you receive much more useful data in much more transparent reports. These will include pipelines of opportunities, reports on specific metrics that telesales companies know are critical to you and your business. Telemarketers spend the majority of their time cleansing data and profiling the companies, establish what they might need before calling them, to ensure that you have all possible data on a potential client or lead and that every opportunity passed onto you is vetted and genuine.

However, the real value of telemarketing is not just those opportunities that have developed into Face to Face appointments. It is the pipeline of opportunities that helps to build your business’s profile and increase your brand awareness, paired with an effective sales or marketing message. This is the real value of any outbound dialing activity. Being able to see identify which industries you have penetrated, which companies and which staff from these companies your telemarketers have interacted with is essential, as is know how to proactively target these prospects and how they react to the market’s changes and to your messaging. Why risk an in-house telemarketer who may not be experienced enough to recognise how to adapt the benefits these essential pieces of information can bring quickly enough to capitalise on them?

Reason 5: Return on Investment:

The main reason for all marketing and telemarketing campaigns is to generate a profitable return on the initial investment by establishing new business contacts and improving relations with potential clients in order to find new revenue streams for the business. Whilst a return on your initial investment can be established through a multitude of matrices, whether it be a straightforward financial calculation like ‘X amount of investment equals X amount of return’ or a far more complex structure wherein costs and established costs, projected value, margins etc. are taken into consideration at the outset of the project or investment, it is beyond any contestation that a clear ROI must be established from the beginning in order to deem a project profitable/.

A key benefit of outsourcing your telemarketing function is that all call, dial and lead generation targets (helping you determine your ROI) can be calculated from the beginning. Outsourcing can establish an accurate conversion rate from set appointments to converted business and help you determine whether the ROI you see from these converted appointments is worth the investment and how many sales would generate enough ROI to justify the campaign? All these questions are taken into account and factored into a campaign to ensure it delivers on its promises and potential.

So what is the real difference between professional outsourced telemarketing compared to an in-house telemarketer?

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