Telemarketing companies have come a very long way. Today's telesales agents are respected and earn good wages with benefits. Every telemarketing agency is part of a much larger supply chain that is making businesses leaner and more profitable than ever before. Therefore, telemarketing companies have found a needed and very valuable niche in the business world and are exploiting it to its fullest potential.
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One of the main reasons that telemarketing companies have become so useful is that they offer businesses a way of streamlining their operations. Instead of having to hire, train and support a department of customer service personnel, businesses can outsource all of their call center needs to a telemarketing agency. The best part of such a scenario is that they no longer need to train the telesales agents nor provide them with the wages and benefits packages that come along with a full-time employee - all of that is left up to the telemarketing companies. Businesses can then concentrate on growing their operations at a much lower cost.
Another fact that makes telesales companies so useful is that they offer a wide variety of call center services that businesses can pick and choose for their own needs. If a business cannot afford to keep staff around after regular office hours to continue answering phones and taking customer orders, they can always contract out such services to a telemarketing agency. The telesales providers can then take over for the full-time office staff when they leave for the day so that the business is, essentially, opened twenty-four hours. It is because of this kind of versatility that telemarketing companies have continued to enjoy such spectacular growth and popularity.
The fact that many of the larger companies have moved the bulk of their operations off-shore has also made a big impact on the cost efficiency of the services that they offer. By having the base of their operations in developing countries, the telemarketing companies have managed to plug into a vast number of highly qualified individuals to staff their offices. They are able to pay them competitive wages because of the advantageous currency exchange rates. The new set-up with telesales providers means that there is a growing middle class in many of these developing countries that is being helped, in large part, by the telemarketing companies that are now basing their operations there.
Telesales companies have also found other ways of being useful to businesses. They have begun offering virtual assistant services, call forwarding, lead generation and all sorts of other accessorial services that make life easier for businesses. The smart evolution of the telemarketing industry has meant that the sector has now made itself indispensable to the business world. It is their offerings that have helped create a much more efficient and well-organised business world where the bottom line is constantly being raised.
Telemarketing companies are among the industries that will continue to see growth in the coming years. As long as businesses want to continue out-sourcing their call center needs, telesales agencies will continue to thrive.
Since we started operating in 1990, a small but persistent percentage of the prospects that we speak to have insisted on a "pay per lead" or "pay per appointment" model. The vast majority don't and the holdouts are a dying breed, but we're still contacted by people who have learned the hard way that pay per result models in Telemarketing often don't work.
Despite this, the superficial appeal of a pay per result model still lures the unwary into commercial arrangements that produce poor quality, build no pipeline, damage the brand and "burn" through precious prospect data.
Marketers sometimes forget that an telemarketing leads agency appointment is not a commodity - quality is the key driver of ultimate ROI and twenty low cost, poor quality appointments will deliver fewer sales, at much greater overall expense, than ten good ones. More to the point, an agency's skill set and ability is only one of the determinants of the number of opportunities that will be produced in any given campaign. The others are the profile of the data and the strength of the value proposition and finally, the qualification criteria used.
We use BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timescale) criteria to score leads. To give a very quick example, if an appointment can only be set with someone who has a time to purchase of one month, far fewer opportunities will be generated than if the time to purchase criteria is six months. This will hold true until a steady run rate has been achieved and all of the records in a given dataset have call back dates set against them, at which stage the rate of results will even out. It's easy to see how this subtle interplay of variables can have a huge impact on the "cost per lead" and why this makes a nonsense of many pay per appointment models.
At the agency selection stage, buyers using a pay per lead model have just one number to consider - the price per result offered, usually without any clarity on the kinds of variables we've discussed. It's easy to forget that poor quality appointments are expensive, however "cheap" they appear to be.
Bad appointments are expensive, whatever they cost. Our agents are fully salaried, our account managers are driven by bonuses exclusively based on client satisfaction, instead of just a target for leads and we charge our clients by the hour. This means that our entire organisation is geared around delivering the maximum ROI for our clients by delivering quality and quantity. An appointment is not a commodity - quality (measured in terms of BANT) is the critical element that underpins ROI. Not only do poor quality appointments convert to business at a much lower rate, but they also generate massive extra costs further down the process as sales teams chase non-existent interest or business contacts who don't have decision making authority or access to budgets. Because we only deliver an appointment when it is fully BANT qualified (meaning than budget, authority, need and timescale have all been confirmed) five of our appointments should be worth significantly more than seven of a pay per appointment agency's.
Lead Nurturing
Paying per appointment encourages a myopic approach by an agency. Agents and managers chasing a target will tend to "burn through" data to get as many quick wins as possible, at the expense of the (often more valuable) prospects that might require careful nurturing until they are "sales ready". Being paid by the hour means that we make every interaction count, not just those that might get a result today. We not only build a pipeline, but we also capture new decision maker names, profiling information and continually updating the calling database. This is the key reason that we deliver significantly more value to our clients in the form of an ever improving level of performance.
Whatever the payment model, no client will use an agency unless they see a strong ROI. We deliver, day in, day out, for an unparalleled client list. We've grown to be the biggest B2B specialist agency in the country by delivering outstanding results. Through the course of review after review our clients choose to stay with us because we provide the combination of quality and quantity of results that drive class-leading ROI.
When forecasting results, no agency can be certain how they will perform on any campaign before they engage. As a result, most pay per appointment agencies will build in a hefty margin to their charges to cover the risk they assume.
Risk
An hourly rate model might seem to offer less "certainty" and to put the balance of risk unfairly in our clients' hands. However, because we offer 24 notice of cancellation without penalty and we charge no setup fee or any other costs outside our inclusive hourly rate (other than data), the risks are in fact very low (and borne chielfy by us, which is why we won't take on work that we feel we can't deliver significant ROI around).
We work hard to keep our clients happy and provide regular updates on the campaign, call recordings for review and insight and pro-active recommendations to improve results spanning data, messaging, objection handling and many other areas. All of this means that clients are "in the driving seat" and choose to work with us month after month because they see great return on investment - there's no better evidence that a pay per hour model with the right agency delivers over the long term.