Interesting news from Brand Republic that Blueview has acquired digital agency Glass and B2B telemarketing firm Logicall.

It's looks like a logical (no pun intended) move for Blueview since they're building an agency offering "multi-channel customer management" solutions.

I'm particularly interested in the news because, if you read any of the B2B marketing press for the past 12 months, you'd be forgiven for thinking that telemarketing was dead and everything was about "digital".

Telemarketing still remains and effective part of the B2B marketing mix and, as Blueview seems to believe, if it's integrated with other marketing channels it becomes even more effective.

I believe this will be a trend that continues.

Whether that means further integration with the industry or an expansion of multi-channel services from traditional telemarketing agencies, we'll have to see. Or maybe even both.

I know from our side we are running more email marketing (digital) campaigns backed up with telemarketing. Throw in micro-sites built specific to campaigns and you can see how the two disciplines are becoming more integrated.

As I said, it's certainly a trend that will continue.

Labels: b2b telemarketing, digital marketing, email marketing

I've recently finished reading the excellent Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin.

In his book Seth maps out 14 trends that are shaping the business world and suggests that the winners will be the companies which align their business model with what he calls "New Marketing".

Unsurprisingly, since this book is from the guru of permission marketing, Seth says in the executive summary that Old Marketing tactics such as telemarketing and cold calling "are all in trouble"

I didn't exactly spit out my coffee at that point but it did make me sit up :-)

The thing is that Seth's talking about telemarketing as a "mass marketing" media, since he compares it with Network TV and newspapers.

And in that sense, he's absolutely right.

Mass-market telemarketing, which is typically B2C, is dead. As I've posted about previously (see Ethical Telemarketing Companies? Now I know we're in trouble!) unsolicited cold calling to consumers just doesn't work any more.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Telemarketing can still be extremely effective as a marketing tactic and, in certain situations, can deliver far better results than other, often over-hyped, digital marketing tactics.

As long as it's highly targeted and relevant then outbound telemarketing can not only be effective but it can also be well received (I posted about this a year ago Google ads show us the future of cold-calling).

My view is that telemarketing is already shifting to higher value, more complex sales propositions where it can still deliver a strong ROI.

Will telemarketing ever become extinct as a marketing tactic?

I guess that if it no longer delivers a return-on-investment then the answer's yes. Or if legislation comes out to ban it's use in business-to-business.

At the moment, though, if you need to reach senior decision makers and key influencers in business, high-targeted telemarketing can still deliver.

Labels: b2b marketing, b2b telemarketing, cold calling, social media

Even though I've been in the telesales business for over 20 years (I ran a telesales team back in 1989 for an IT services company), I'm always interested in reading books on the subject. You never know, you just might pick up a real gem of an idea.

Anyway, I was looking Art Sobczak's Telesales Blog and saw a recommended book that's not in my library called Successful Sales Managers Guide to Telephone Sales.

Cool, I thought, let's have a look at this one. But, then, something stopped me dead in my tracks - it was published in 1999!

Now, in some ways, 1999 isn't that long ago. But in the world of telesales it's an eternity.

In a way, the title of the book gives it away - "Telephone Sales".

I was chatting the other day to one of our associates who worked in one of the first telemarketing companies back in the 80's. We were talking about how the game has changed so much in that time.

For a start, there was no voicemail. Not to mention the fact that people were actually happy to chat with you :-) No email. No web.

Today, at some levels within an organisation, you can call all day and not reach anyone. And that's exactly why the tactics that worked in the 80's, and even back in 1999, just don't cut it anymore.

Back in 1999 I was a regional sales manager for a company selling IT solutions for manufacturing (the fact we were selling to manufacturing dates the story for a start!) In those days, you would ask a prospect, "do you have an email address?".

The game has changed.

The description "Telephone Sales" just isn't accurate any more.

Telephone, voicemail and email are all daily tools. Today, we set up as many appointments by email as we do by phone. Social networking sites like LinkedIn and web based research tools have become critical in positioning your approach. Web demos have become the norm for software telesales.

But in a few years time we may be saying... that's so 2009!

Labels: b2b telemarketing, cold calling, social media, telesales

I came across an interesting piece on Inside Sales from the Bridge Group based in the US.

They've published a "Periodic Table of Inside Sales Metrics", which is an interesting way of presenting many of the metrics they've researched.

The Bridge Group specialises in consulting on Inside Sales for technology vendors and their president, Trish Bertuzzi, is founder and manager of the Inside Sales Experts group on LinkedIn.

Looking at the metrics they present, there are some interesting ones from a telesales perspective (what we would typically refer to "Inside Sales" as in the UK)

Under lead generation, the average quota for appointments per inside sales rep is 16 per month. Also, the average hours per day on the phone for lead generation is 4 hours.

Now, I know from reading other articles published by The Bridge Group that many of the inside sales people surveyed are also responding to and qualifying inbound leads so this doesn't mean that 4 hours a day, 20 days a week generates 16 appointments from outbound cold calling.

To me, that's not a million miles off our experience in lead generation and appointment setting for technology vendors.

We figure that one of our team (focused purely on outbound lead generation) can generate a qualified appointment every 1 to 1.5 days for a technology proposition.

Based on The Bridge Group's figures their on quota average is 1.4 per day but, as I said, that will be a mixture of inbound and outbound lead sources. Which means I think we're broadly on the same page.

Also, I liked the metric that that average ramp-up time for an inside sales rep was 4.5 months.

If only we had that long :-)

Labels: appointment setting, inside sales, sales lead generation, telesales

For many companies, data is often an after-thought when planning a telemarketing campaign.

If you think that you can pull out a file that's sat on a PC for a couple of years, dust it down and off we go - think again.

Data is a key element in the success or failure of any telemarketing or telesales campaign. Telemarketing is a high-cost marketing medium, so it's critical that you give yourself the best possible chance by investing in good data.

When it comes to data, the best way to think about it is whether you should "build" or "buy".

"Build" means researching online and creating a bespoke database for specific companies. "Buy" means, well just that - buying (or more accurately renting) data from a list-broker or data provider.

Here's some things to consider:

1) Cost - building bespoke databases costs more than buying your data. However, if it means that you have a highly targeted list then you'll save time (and money) actually contacting the list.

2) Job title - if you need to reach a specific job title or area of responsibility within an organisation, you may not always be able to buy that data. Some data providers will supply contact names at a very granular level within all main functions. However, if you need to reach a very niche job title you may have to research it or try the approach in point 3 below.

3) Buy & Qualify - sometime a good approach is to buy data with an entry point and then use that contact to qualify and find the correct one. This works well where you're hunting for someone with a specific area of responsibility rather than a clearly defined job title. Typically you'd go for a more senior contact within the desired function and get referred to the right person.

4) Trigger Events - if your ideal prospect is best identified by specific circumstances that are happening within their organisation, such as mergers or acquisitions, you can subscribe to lists that will update you every month with new prospects. Other trigger events can include new appointments, people leaving, or new product announcements.

Essentially, the more niche your market the more value you'll get by investing highly targeted lists. If you have a much broader proposition, then it's often more cost-effective to buy more generic data and qualify by phone during the campaign.

Either way, the data you use will have a great impact on the results you get.

Labels: data sourcing, list building, telemarketing data

I've noticed a few telemarketing companies have started to brand themselves as an "ethical telemarketing company".

As soon as I saw that I just knew that we're in trouble :-)

I mean, how bad has an industry got to get before your main point of differentiation is that you're "ethical".

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I start from the principal that you should be ethical in business full-stop, not just for the purpose of marketing spin.

It's not just telemarketing either. I recently read a report that said many players in the email marketing business have started to position themselves as the "best practice" specialists.

Best practice? Surely applying best practice should be a fundamental principal of any marketing agency?

Of course, what we're seeing here is what happens to any marketing medium that gets abused.

Go on YouTube and search for telemarketing and you'll see hundreds of videos showing recordings of idiot telemarketers being abused by the general public (all good fun). In B2C telemarketing they effectively broke their own market by over-use, to the point that they are now locked out by TPS and "Do Not Call" registers.

Email's going the same way. If the latest advances in anti-SPAM software doesn't kill it then you can bet some legislation is heading our way.

Can you remember when faxes came out? You'd get into the office in the morning and there'd be a mile of fax paper on the floor. That's why we got the FPS.

Direct marketers love cheap a marketing medium.

Getting back to the point about "ethical telemarketing", to me, I think it's just marketing spin.

There are good and bad companies in any industry. Over time, the good ones grow and the bad ones disappear. Telemarketing, as with email marketing, is one of those areas that is in demand and can be set up with very little overhead (just a phone in the case of telemarketing).

There are clear regulations which should be adhered to in different markets (such as the CTPS register in business-to-business) and I would suggest that most (if not all) telemarketing agencies already do that.

Despite all what I've said about abuse of cheap medium, there will still be a place for telemarketing or telesales. It'll be niche, highly targeted, and integrated with a multi-channel approach that links opt-in lists, email and other web services, but there'll still be a need to speak with prospects.

Can you remember "junk mail"? How much mail do you get through the post now? But guess what, there are still plenty of B2B DM agencies pulling good responses with highly targeted and personalised campaigns.

At the end of the day, ethics are more about the people you're dealing with. And the people who are making the calls on behalf of your company.

Personally, in my experience, when someone feels that they need to tell you they're ethical - it usually means that they're not.

Labels: b2b telemarketing, email marketing, telemarketing best practice

I must admit, I'm not a purist about this one.

For many people "Telemarketing" and "Telesales" are inter-changeable descriptions for the role of sales lead generation and appointment setting.

I suppose, strictly speaking, you could describe them as:

Telemarketing - conducting marketing research, surveys, data-cleaning and generating marketing leads by telephone.

Telesales - actually closing business over the phone.

These are two extremes with telemarketing being the softer end of the spectrum and telesales being the sharper end (we clearly see ourselves at as the latter)

However, I've found that when most people are talking about "telesales" they're thinking about someone who's making calls to either generate leads or set up sales appointments.

Essentially, telemarketing and telesales are both seen as part of the sales process.

Interestingly, Wikipedia currently describes Telemarketing as follows:

Telemarketing (known as telesales in the UK and Ireland) is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits to prospective customers to buy products or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or Web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call.

I thought the "known as telesales in the UK and Ireland" was interesting.

Certainly, I know a number of US based "telemarketers" who would always consider themselves salespeople, so maybe Wikipedia's got that one right.

Either way, whether it's telemarketing or telesales, it's always about the same thing - opening doors and closing deals.

Labels: telemarketing services, telesales