© 2008, Michael A. Brown
www.michaelabrown.
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
- 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.
- 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..
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
About the Author
Michael A. Brown helps business marketers conduct profitable, distinctive Business To Business By Phone® via consulting and training. Clients include a "who's who" of successful business marketers, from startups to the Fortune 100.
Contact Michael in Austin, Texas, 800 373-3966.
www.michaelabrown.net.
E-mail is [email protected]
Business To Business By Phone
www.michaelabrown.net.
800 373-3966
