How Do Marketers Screw-Up Outsourced Telemarketing? Let Me Count the Ways …

By Michael A.Brown

© 2008, Michael A. Brown
www.michaelabrown.net

A while back, DMNews International carried this extraordinary quote: “Where you may want to use a service bureau is in the making of programs. They already have a pool of talent and are a way you can get good results. And you don’t have to pollute (italics added) your offices with a telemarketing department.” Pollute! I can’t recall a stronger verb applied to a legitimate business practice. 

The person quoted, a European publisher, has it all wrong of course. The “making of programs” is up to the marketer, not the service bureau. And the “pool of talent” too often isn’t.

 Nevertheless, the misguided publisher does provoke an interesting question: what other mistakes do marketers make when outsourcing telemarketing? In my work with many companies that outsource telemarketing, and several outsourcers themselves, I have identified six “killers” … three each strategic and tactical.

Strategic

1.       Inherent business mismatch: they don’t really do what you really need done. Examples:

• Your marketing strategy calls for sustained opportunity development and lead nurturing but the outsource provider is better at stand-alone campaigns.

• Their history and their hearts are in b-to-c, but because of National Do Not Call Lists in the USA and elsewhere, they pretend to be knowledgeable and experienced in b-to-b.

• Inappropriate technologies such as predictive dialers, and rude behaviors such as pitching during the call opening and failing to ask, “Is this a suitable \ good \ OK time for a conversation?”

• Wrong metrics such as dials-per-day and talk-time rather than ratios of results v. efforts and generating enough viable opportunities.                                                      

• Their labor market, education base, and turnover rates will not support the right types and levels of calls to the kind of people you need to reach. For instance, they hire high school grads to contact C-level prospects.

• They are offshore, and their reps cannot understand what your prospects and customer are saying and vice versa.

2.       Undisciplined outsourcer selection and default of oversight. Examples:

• Some marketers fail to screen the outsource provider themselves, much less conduct due-diligence in selection. Rather, they have purchasing put out an RFI or RFP. To me, that’s a firing offense. (Are you reading this, really large technology companies?)

• Ignoring or not even acknowledging an absolutely crucial outsource selection criterion … the outsourcer MUST forecast to staff, NOT staff to forecast. If the latter, their “stable” of callers and the callers’ quality will fluctuate widely. Also, their management will spend more time recruiting and interviewing than attending to your projects. Conversely, forecast-to-staff generally yields a more dependable group of permanent callers, meaning a greater likelihood of continuity and success for your marketing campaigns and projects.

• Allowing more than 30% of the callers to be temporaries. You need to know who is calling on your behalf at all times and that they are trained and competent to do so. That cannot happen with a room full of temps.

• Not conducting constant high-level management of the business relationship and the conduct of the calls, and then expressing surprise when callers say odd, ineffective stuff and results fall short..

3.       Not recognizing that besides catering to your marketing requirements, the outsource call service bureau also has their own business to run, and it’s not yours. They have to turn a decent profit, exactly as you do. Beat ‘em up over price and you will pay the price.

Tactical

1.       Failure to integrate telemarketing with other marketing and sales media and\or to tell the outsourcer about the others. Here are the penalties:

• The outsource callers do not know about, nor have they seen, the webinar content, mailing, or offer that their call is based on or supports.

• The outsource callers are supposed to read from marketing “scripts” that were originally written for visual media such as web sites or print, not the ear … and they sound awful!

• Out-of-context campaigns and offers that under-perform. Customers and prospects want whatever we present to them to make sense in their business life and timetable, not ours. The “call from out of the blue” confuses and annoys and does not sell. What callers speak about must be relevant and timely to the prospect, not the marketer.

2.       Allowing the outsource provider to conduct undifferentiated calling. Examples:

• The “one call fits all” approach, without prospect research or call preparation.

• Generic, undifferentiated calls to high-level contacts fail, unfailingly.

• Asking outbound reps to make 100 dials a day. Dials without resulting conversations mean nothing. Talk-time without qualified leads, positive next steps, and orders causes poverty.

• Over-automation. In their attempts to reduce costs, some marketers want to replace live callers with automated messaging systems. And don’t we all love automated messaging systems.

• Narrative phone mail “ads” (some over 2 minutes long!) left overnight for prospects to listen in the morning. After clearing 83 spams from their e-mail and hearing “you have 24 new messages” on their phone mail, the last thing prospects want is an infomercial.

• Disguising sales calls as surveys. Deception eventually destroys the deceiver regardless of the economy.

3.       Not listening to what is being said and done by the outsourcer on the marketer’s behalf. Examples:

• Inability to monitor calls from anywhere on the planet. If you cannot hear them, you cannot assess them. And marketers never should leave monitoring solely up to the outsourcer. Hey, it’s your stuff!

• Their technology is incompatible with yours. Their data input, throughput, and output is on a different platform and\or in a different format. While it is not necessary to replicate every technology aspect, you do need consistency and continuity so everyone in marketing and sales and the outsource company “reads from the same page.”

The good news is that every one of these mistakes is entirely avoidable! If you avoid them, you’ll do much better despite our economic woes. May you prosper!

The Dollar Value – Increasing the value of your marketing dollar

By Sali Lu

So, we have the inevitable headlines… as jobs are being axed in the tens of thousands at a time. And, of course, enterprise spend is under increasing scrutiny (if not completely frozen). This is equally true for marketing budgets, as cost cutting seems to take resounding priority over growth. In fact, (ideally) cost cutting will need to happen despite growth.

 

Quite simply, every single dollar, from an outcome point of view, needs to be leaner and meaner. The main advantage of outsourcing lead generation is to help both your Management and Sales Teams achieve greater cost savings by reducing the overhead costs associated with hiring and managing your own internal teleprospectors.

 

There are a number of variables that you are able to control when delivering any type of marketing campaign:

1)      The market

2)      Branding (how will your brand hold up as competitors become more fierce?)

3)      Positioning (is your brand positioned to be attractive during a recessionary period?)

 

More specifically in outsourcing teleprospecting campaigns, the elements that we can take control include:

1)      Good Data

2)      An attractive offer

3)      The right pitch

 

The one thing that we can’t control is Macro-economic factors (legislation, inflation, interest rates…)

 

We are in a time when the variables we cannot control are proving to be a challenge. Thus, the elements we can control (like the operator and the pitch) become increasingly important.

 

How will the operator respond to all of the above factors, intuitively, and articulate value professionally and convincingly?

 

1. Unscripted pitch means that operators are trained to engage naturally with each prospect. Prospects especially decision makers are highly resistant to scripted calls, simply because they sound artificial and insulting. A well executed, unscripted campaign can ensure that calls to prospects which don’t yield an immediate result will present your company’s brand in a positive light, building long term value.

 

2. Market intelligence includes immediate and actionable feedback, as well as the ability to incorporate market research into sales mix. Anecdotal feedback and building strong qualifying questions is the key in achieving better results and value in lead generation.

 

3. Visibility occurs when there is interaction and participation between the client and our operations team at SFS. Clear visibility helps us to better understand the needs of our client.

 

A tighter marketing budget may not necessarily mean shrinkage in the outcome of your next campaign. However, this is only possible when all the controllable factors are taken into good care.

The $28,000 sandwich

By Ciaran McGuigan

 

Free for lunch? You may not have given today’s lunch much thought – after all it’s pretty routine. Pop into the sandwich bar and five or six dollars later lunch is taken care off. I also usually grab a bottle of cold water from the fridge. My perception of lunch changed recently when I was powerfully reminded, by two different news reports, of just how much more important Value is rather than Price when it comes to selling.

 

Let me illustrate: How about paying US$455. for just a few teaspoons of twenty seven year old water. Or, if your budget will stretch to it, how about US$28,000 for a ten year old grilled cheese sandwich? – With a large bite taken out. In 1977 Wade Jones kept a plastic cup which Elvis had been drinking out of and froze the remaining contents. This was six months before Elvis died. In the autumn of 1994 Diane Duyser, from Florida, made a toasted cheese sandwich and was surprised to see an image of the Virgin Mary looking back at her.

 

Both of these items were auctioned on ebay recently and their former owners were delighted to find that there were hundreds of people from all over the world happy to bid what may seem at first ridiculous amounts of money. Let’s take a look at these in more detail:

 

Value and price are NOT the same

Our customers act on what they perceive as value. We don’t know what that is until we start to engage them in conversation and listen to their responses and the meanings behind them. Sometimes our greatest challenge is setting aside our own perceptions of their needs. The reality is that customers have demonstrated time and again that they will buy what they want before what they need. Find out what those unique wants are and relate your product to move them towards their outcomes.

 

Technology can create new markets

One of the major reasons why these sales were possible and profitable is the internet. ebay have combined a global reach and a niche focus to empower people from all over the world who can  now buy and sell products and services which would be impossible on a local and regional level. A major feature in the sale of these items was their ‘newsworthiness’. The ‘sandwich’ customer, Richard Rowe, CEO of The Golden Palace casino, is already using it to market his establishment.

 

This is a perfect example of supply and demand. If there are a group of interested and keen people bidding for a unique item and there is a deadline (like an auction) then prices are going to go up – irrespective of how ridiculous it may seem to those who have no interest in the product.

 

So what can we learn as sales people?

1.      Don’t use your own value systems to qualify clients

Start you client interviews with a blank slate. Ask plenty of quality questions and listen to the answers. Take lots of notes and try not to jump to conclusions. I like to almost act as if I were a family Doctor and ask what may seem obvious. But more often than not yields important information.

What we think of as expensive / cheap is just that; what WE think. It is not uncommon for sales people to believe that their product would sell more if it cost less. If you focus on the VALUE your product could have for your customer, then price will not be an issue.

 

2.      Find out what is truly unique about your product

Do you know what is truly unique about your product? It is not what you think, it is what your prospect thinks is unique about your product that matters. Once you understand their perspective you are in a powerful sales position. The way to do this is by constantly asking them for their opinions on features and characteristics of your product class. Something else that you may not have considered; YOU make your product unique.

 

3.      Make it easy for them to Buy

Finally make it easy for your customers to make buying decisions and to actually buy from you. Can you offer proof, guarantees, easy payments etc? Can they purchase online, over the phone, by mail order or any other way they chose. One of the factors of an auction like ebay is that each prospect can see in real time just how easy it is for their competition to buy. This helps ‘fuel’ the competitive atmosphere and drive the price higher. Although I still think that US$28,000 is a bit over the top. Now if there had been ham in it, well that’s another story!

 

Revenue, Revenue, Revenue!

By Chris Moriarty

 

Revenue is everything in business. Nothing else matters. It is the life blood of any organisation – even if you are not profitable.

 

As long as you have revenue circulating through your business you are a chance of staying alive.  Unless you have revenue pumping through your veins you can never prosper.

 

Sales generates around 100% of all revenue for just about every business.

 

Therefore, whoever has the best sales teams and the best sales process is in the best position to prosper through the current economic climate.

 

Think about athletics.

 

It is hot, humid and oxygen is thin. You have to run a marathon. Who is going to survive – the elite athletes or the slobs?

 

This is a great time to be in sales. Great sales people should be celebrating their good fortune at being in the market at this time.

 

First, all the lazy and weak order-takers will be the first to fall. This will open up the field.

 

Second, your prospects are all in pain. Everyone is in pain, the whole economy is feeling pain. This is great. It means there is an abundance of pain points. Pain points are great because they give you something to sell against.

 

An amazing thing is happening. At Strike Force Sales our hit rates are going up. I would like to think it is 100% due to our skill and application. But another factor is at play. There is less noise in the market. People are giving up.

 

When the going gets tough the tough get going. It is true. The soft are giving up. There are less people out there spruiking for business. Instead they are sitting at their desk in sackcloth and ashes moaning about how bad business is. Meanwhile their absence from the market is leaving it wide open for the tough and the fit.

 

Right now is a fantastic time to be on the phone, drumming up leads and developing a battle hardened sales team and sales process.