Is Telemarketing misunderstood? Does it work for lead generation?
Posted by Darryl Praill on Thu, Jan 13, 2011
Telemarketing! Teleprospecting! Telesales! Oi! I've heard every spin possible used to describe it. I know vendors who swear by it, and I know vendors who despise it. It seems to have a dirty connotation. I'm not sure why. I wonder if it's a generational thing. Some of my non-Gen-Y clients (you should read that as "older") always revert to Telemarketing as a first response to dwindling sales pipelines, whereas the Gen-Y clients typically refuse to even consider it.
Take, for example, the recently published 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report from MarketingSherpa. For context, the primary research of this report came from "the collective wisdom of 935 B2B marketers". I think that makes it fairly credible, eh?! In this report, one of the things it addresses is where are the investments being made in inbound tactics. Overall, Telemarketing investments, as a percentage of overall allocated Marketing budgets, are being increased in by 32%, whereas 54% are making no change and 13% are actually reducing investment. The only other tactics with smaller allocations of increased investment, or larger reductions in investment, are Direct Mail, Tradeshows, and Print Advertising; all of which are very much old-school tactics.
That says to me that the Marketing faithful have lost the faith in Telemarketing.
Yet, if I look at it a different way, I could spin the numbers to say that 86% of marketers are either maintaining or growing their Telemarketing investment. That sounds rather impressive, doesn't it?
Now, let's turn the page on the report and look at another chart which reports the "effectiveness of B2B marketing tactics". While the report measures and categorizes the breakdown by Very Effective, Somewhat Effective, or Not Effective, I'm going to keep this simple and look at the Very Effective numbers.
Telemarketing is deemed by 35% of the survey respondents as Very Effective. It's only beaten by, SEO (36%), Email (40%), Webinars (43%) and Website (50%). I wouldn't argue with that ranking.
What's more interesting is what ranks lower on the Very Effective results in the chart: Public Relations (31%), Tradeshows (25%), Paid Search (23%), Direct Mail (22%), Social Media (16%), and Print Advertising (10%).
That's right. Social Media ranks that low.
So what does this tell me? It tells me that Telemarketing still works, and that people still rely on it, and that if you have a bias against using it you should reconsider it.
For those of you who have been burned by Telemarketing, it may have been that you used a bad outsourced provider of these services, or perhaps your in-house team wasn't properly managed, or trained, or equipped, or staffed to be successful. In other words, it may not be the tactic itself that didn't work out for you, but how the tactic was implemented.
In my experience, the number one reason why Telemarketing has a bad reputation is because B2B companies use it without any other tactics. In other words, they do not implement and execute integrated campaigns involving all of the above listed tactics. Can you relate? I know that when a vendor sends me a series of relevant nurturing emails, followed by a webinar invite, or perhaps a compelling blog post reference, and then calls me directly, I am far more receptive to the call because I feel like I have some familiarity with them and I know they could potentially help me. Has that been your experience?
As the new year continues to roll out, let me ask you this about your Marketing plan and budget: will Telemarketing be part of the mix?
Stay tuned! Next week we'll be highlighting the very issue of telesales with a series of blog posts describing how you can make this tactic work for you!