Why Choose Outsourced Teleprospecting?
Everyone out there is looking to build a sales funnel; either to improve the one they have, or possibly because they are starting a new product or business area.
In order to cover ground and to interact with your audience in a meaningful way, calling and talking to prospects on the phone will give you the best information.
1. Dedicated Personal Calling to Your Prospects
There are other marketing methodologies that will give you information, perhaps even less expensively. However, with teleprospecting you are able to speak directly to the key evaluators and decision makers that you need to reach, and they speak back to you. The result is real information that is actionable.
Having teleprospectors engaging in meaningful interactions will grow your sample size and your funnel in a predictable way over time.
Other methodologies may bring you information, but it won’t necessarily be from key evaluators and decision makers. Speaking back and forth over the phone reveals a lot of important knowledge that other marketing methodologies can’t capture.
Of course, more ground can be covered on the phone than in person, so having people dedicated to spending time on the phone to reach the right people will, I guarantee you, grow your sales funnel in a predictable way.
2. In-house Telephone Sales Can Result in Expensive Turnover
Telephone sales is hard work and can be grueling, causing turnover, which is expensive.
If you are trying to manage telephone sales in-house and acquiring employees, there will be a turnover factor that will affect the performance of your group. That is the way it is in the inside sales/telemarketing profession. If you outsource to the right group, you can have a dedicated team that is properly managed.
Treating this function as a core competency (which it is), is a better investment. If you’re trying to manage a team in-house, you might be dealing with someone who hasn’t handled this function before. Even if they have, their experience is probably not as diverse as an outsourced group that has done this for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of companies.
You hired your CPA to handle your professional accounting needs – it makes sense to hire experts to handle your telephone sales needs as well.
3. The Experience and Time to Nurture Relationships
Good teleprospecting nurtures your organization’s relationship with an account. This takes experience.
Keeping focus on the task at hand, having the ability to re-visit targeted prospects or accounts, building the relationship over time – these are things that will be done well through an outsourced teleprospecting firm.
Outsourced teleprospectors are able to focus on the long-term, and nurture an account before it’s ready to become a qualified lead and handed off to sales. An inside salesperson often has to focus on the immediate – focusing on business that is nearer to a close, and therefore will potentially drop the long-term prospect who would benefit from lead nurturing.
4. Full-Time Employees are Expensive
Bringing on a full-time employee is expensive. Outsourcing the portion of work that you need completed eliminates the need to bring on the expense and management of a full-time employee. Quite simply, you are only paying for the portion of your need, rather than carrying the full-time expense of an employee.
In addition to a cost savings, outsourcing allows you to keep the people dedicated to the task. When you try to do this in-house and you have extremely good and valuable people doing working on your behalf, you are going to find other things for them to do. Consequently, they are going to get pulled away from the task at hand of making calls and building the sales pipeline.
Before you know it, your employee may be dedicating 25-80% of their time not doing what they were hired to do. If you outsource, 100% of that time goes towards calling targeted prospects, and building your sales pipeline. That is a value.
5. Outsourced Teleprospecting Produces High Quality Leads
Experienced teleprospectors will deliver higher quality leads to your B2B sales team.
Hiring an experienced teleprospecting firm means that the leads they hand off to your sales team will be highly qualified and robust.
The feedback we consistently get from our clients is praise about the amount of detail we provide on our lead sheets. Time and again we hear that they weren’t getting that level of detail through different means – either in-house, or with a different outsource company. Vague and sparse information does not make up a qualified lead.
If you have the right person making the calls, the key qualifying questions will get asked and answered. If you have someone else doing it who is not as adept at sales, and doesn’t have the proper business acumen, you are not going to win the confidence of the decision maker or key evaluator, and they will not provide the meaningful information that helps qualify that lead.
Do you have experience with in-house or outsourced telesales? What benefits do you see in outsourcing this task to a dedicated team of experts? Please leave me a note in the comments.
John
