Blog :: Business To Business (B2B) Telemarketing Consulting

How Much Does A B2B Telemarketing Lead Cost These Days?

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (3)

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

A poll on LinkedIn asking just that question got 500+ responses. Here are the results (note, the amounts are in British Pounds):

While revelatory in itself, segmentation always yields additional insight. Here we see the cost per business-to-business telemarketing lead broken down by company size:

What I find noteworthy in this second graph is that the smallest businesses are more likely to pay the highest prices for their leads. My suspicion is that this is caused by economies of scale issues.

Telemarketing campaigns require substantive administrative overhead- even for the smallest of projects. The percentage of administrative overhead contributing to the cost per lead increases the smaller the project is. Given that small companies, in most cases, can only afford small projects, it makes sense that they end up paying the most.

Comments (3)

Categories : Telemarketing Management, Telemarketing Outsourcing, Telemarketing Planning, Uncategorized

Relevance Gone Wrong

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)

Friday, February 19th, 2010

A key factor in increasing click-thrus for your banner advertisements is how relevant the message in your ad is to the content on the page. That’s why you wouldn’t advertise, for instance, hunting gear on a site or web page about vegetarian cooking. An ad for a vegetarian cooking DVD series would draw more favorable attention.

Just yesterday I was reading a news article on Yahoo News about Joseph Stack, a man who sought revenge on the IRS by crashing his small plane into an IRS building containing nearly 200 IRS employees. The article was titled “Man Angry At IRS Crashes Plane Into Building.” The crash resulted in deaths and injuries.

The article subject doesn’t lend itself very well to injecting humor, does it?

Well, here’s an ad I saw at the bottom of the article:

The sport portrayed is jousting. A violent medieval activity that often resulted in serious injuries or even death. And then there’s the brand name itself: “Tax-Slayer.”

Now, if I were with TaxSlayer, I don’t think I’d want my ad to show up under this story. Or would I?

Since the story is breaking news, it’s bound to get a lot of eyeballs. +1 point.

The ad is relevant to the story (the content contains references to taxes and the IRS). +1 points.

The ad is in extremely poor taste given the nature of the article. -10 points.

It comes down to brand image versus short-term profits. If the visitors coming to the article are indeed concerned about the IRS and taxes in their own lives, then they may sympathize with Mr. Stack and would like to “slay” the tax man themselves.

But, even for that crowd, the ad is likely jarring (pun intended).

What would you do if it were your decision to run the ad or pull it for a short while?

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Categories : Internet Marketing

Tags : Advertising, Relevance

Leaving Cookies By Phone

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)

Friday, February 5th, 2010

A common issue of contention arises when a marketing campaign uses multiple marketing channels: who gets credit for the conversion?

This question becomes significantly more urgent when commissioned telemarketing agents are involved in the campaign.

For instance, say a client were to promote a training seminar by mail, advertising, fliers, as well as commissioned telemarketers.

If the concept of “last touch” is used, then a telemarketing agent would lose out every time a prospect says they need to check the website first before agreeing to pay the attendance fee- because, most likely the prospect will complete the online registration form instead of reestablishing contact with the telemarketing agent.

Now, in the world of Internet marketing, if the prospect had gone to a landing page before getting to the conversion page, they would have been “cookied”- had a tracking code stored on their computer so if they come back to sign up at a later time or day, the original referring source would still get credit.

In the world of telemarketing, there is no equivalent of the cookie. Or, is there?

It really depends on whether you can agree in advance that the telemarketing effort will be credited for anyone on the telemarketing list that signs up for the event. The only caveat would have to be that the telemarketers would have to show evidence that they either left a message or spoke to the prospect.

And so, I present to you- The Telemarketing Cookie.

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Categories : Telemarketing Management

Tags : Telemarketing Telesales

Getting 2010 Started With A Bang

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Normally, the last three weeks of Christmas vacation and new year’s celebrations would have been a good time to relax. Not so this year. Everyone’s scrambling to stay ahead of the game. Take time to smell the roses and get run over by a train, I say.

I used the time to complete new professional certification courses, revamp my corporate website, move my mail server to a new dedicated server, introduce a slew of new services, and move this blog and re-purpose this website.

In a few days, I start a master-level, three-month certification program on conversion optimization led by Bryan Eisenberg, author of “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark.”

Why all this change, you might ask?

Well, I think everyone in the business-to-business telemarketing industry has seen it become more and more challenging over the last few years to generate positive ROIs. The reason, in my opinion, is that business prospects these days expect the conversation to take place over multiple channels; and, all of these channels had better be persuasive before they’re willing to move to the next step with you.

So, my point is that a telemarketing call alone is no longer enough. Your campaign needs to incorporate well-planned email marketing and dedicated landing pages to succeed.

With all three services delivered by a single provider (CCI), you gain convenience and confidence that your prospects are moved along the conversion process consistently and effectively.

To learn more about how I can help you get started with an integrated marketing campaign, use the contact form on this website. I’d be happy to answer any questions you have.

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Categories : Uncategorized

Deconstructing Marketing Metrics

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

I am struck by the many parallels between Internet marketing and telemarketing. For one, they both generate a lot of historical data allowing for “forensic” investigation.

Here are some web site statistics and their equivalents in telemarketing:

For web traffic history, all kinds of additional demographic and behavioral information is tracked, stored, and available for analysis. For instance: referring websites, country, type of computer used, time on page, visitor paths, and much more- making possible what web analytics experts refer to as “deep diving.”

In the world of telemarketing, when you combine demographically selected prospect lists with tracking the above basic metrics, you can accomplish nearly the same thing.

Why the deep dive? Well, as you probably have heard, “there’s lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics.” Top-level, aggregate ratios and moving averages rarely tell you the whole story or give you actionable insights.

Consider the following scenarios:

Web:

For the last six months, your online sales and ROI have remained steady. You promote your wares through a variety of online channels including Pay-Per Click advertising (PPC).

Being the sort that feels out of sorts when there’s seemingly nothing to worry about, you audit your PPC spend. After some Excel gymnastics, you discover that 80% of your sales are coming from brand keywords, whereas your remaining keywords consume most of your PPC budget.

Your brand keywords are subsidizing the campaign. In fact, some of your non-brand keywords are huge losers. You kill the non-performing ads and realize an almost immediate boost in your ROI.

Telemarketing:

You make a change to the telemarketing script and your rejection rate goes up while your conversion rate goes down. You think something is wrong with your new script.

You investigate further and find that the higher rejection rate is coming from a very specific demographic for which your product or service is not suited. Previously, your agents weren’t able to ferret these out early enough using the old script. Furthermore, the drop in conversions is linked to a group of new agents added to the project that still need to find their sea legs.

So, what at first blush looked like a negative, turned out to be a positive as your telemarketing agents now use their time more efficiently. Had you not investigated further than the aggregate statistic, you might have reverted to your old, less effective script.

So, when it comes to statistics, “drill Baby, drill!”

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Categories : Telemarketing Management, Uncategorized

Business To Business Telemarketing Fraud

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (1)

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Let’s face it; telemarketing has a bad name. Every time it makes inroads to respectability in the business-to-business world, another headline hits the wires about some shyster bilking consumers for millions of dollars with a business-to-consumer telemarketing scam.

Whenever I explain to someone what I do, I always make sure to highlight the business-to-business aspect- differentiating myself from “those guys that call you at dinner time.” It’s as if I’m obligated to defend myself from the get-go.

That’s why I take it personally when fraudsters manage to ply their trade in my domain. Two days ago some telemarketing outfit out of Philadelphia was convicted of ripping off nearly 400,000 businesses to the tune of $75,000,000. What boggles the mind is that their scheme was allowed to operate for a full three years before the authorities stepped in.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised. I mean, look at what Bernie Madoff got away with. Grease the right palms and you can get away with almost anything- but, not indefinitely. As the saying goes, “you can fool some of the people all the time, all the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time.”

About six years ago, I accepted a project from an entirely legitimate seeming company. I quickly discovered something was amiss when my team followed up with customers we had sold our client’s products to. I terminated the lucrative contract with my client when he wasn’t able to address my concerns satisfactorily.

After alerting the authorities, I contacted all the major publications with whom my client took out full page advertisements. Nothing happened. The publications continued to accept business from this company; the authorities ignored the situation.

Two years later, I stumbled on a news article indicating they had finally been shut down.

Comments (1)

Categories : Telemarketing Law

How To Poisen Your Sales Team With Leads

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

While I wonder whether the efficacy of email opt-in lists is being diluted by ever increasing ease of access, not just for third-party mediated broadcasts but actual purchase, the truth remains that you had better get while the getting is good.

But, as it often happens, the suddenly fortunate usually overestimate the value of their gains over maintaining harmony within their tribe. They consider responses to blind broadcasts as “hot” leads instead of the lukewarm to warm leads they really are- reserving them for their inner circle of top salespeople.

What usually happens then is that the salespeople soon discover the true nature of the gift, and begin to neglect it- focusing instead on nurturing existing customers and better qualified prospects. In the meantime, your disaffected hunters, your telemarketers, now face the prospect of calling a list devoid of the occasional gimmes that used to buoy their sagging spirits during dry spells.

While this may be the natural order of things, the process observed repeatedly in the hierarchical social structures of our chest-thumping, banana eating cousins, I say share one and share all.

Please, feed your telemarketers.

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Categories : Telemarketing Management

Tags : Telemarketing Management

Using Salesforce.com For Telemarketing

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Using or considering using salesforce.com to manage your telemarketing? If so, you need to step outside of salesforce’s productivity tracking system- it just requires too many steps.

Think about it. If you’re using salesforce.com for sales tracking, then you already know how tough it is to get your salespeople to dot all of their i’s and cross all of their t’s so you can generate timely and accurate forecasts. The typical salesperson only completes in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 calls a day. So, if it takes them 5 to 10 minutes to update the contact record, the to-do list, the forecast, and etceteras for a single call, their productivity level still falls in the “acceptable” range.

However, impose this regimen on a telemarketer expected to make 100 to 150 calls a day, and his productivity will quickly plummet to dismal levels. It’s not just the amount of time needed to update all the screens, but the mere act of excessive navigating will throw any telemarketer off his game.

By “excessive” I mean anything more than 2 screens. A telemarketer shouldn’t have to deal with more than one screen showing the prospect list and another screen to update records. To implement this in salesforce.com while still maintaining some day-to-day productivity tracking, simply add several fields to your contact record:

1. LastEdit: Date field updated every time your agent makes a call
2. Rating: Resulting record disposition updated after every call

Then, in the reporting section, create a cross-tab using these fields. You will need to manually copy the report into a spreadsheet every night to track your stats over time (salesforce.com will overwrite the results with every day of fresh calling).

To allow the agents to manage their callbacks, simply add a Callback field as well. Don’t make them use saleforce.com’s ToDo system.

Now, create a view for your agents. Use your contacts table and show the following columns (in this order): Rating, LastCall, Callback, Account, Contact Name, and Title. You can add some additional columns if they will fit on the screen and will help your agents navigate their lists.

Voila! Problem solved. Your agents can now move between records using just 2 screens, and you can track productivity.

Comments (0)

Categories : Telemarketing Management

B2B Telemarketing Scripts VS B2C

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)

Monday, September 14th, 2009

In business-to-business telemarketing script writing, an often-used tactic is to use a survey as a means to gather qualifying information for follow-up marketing efforts. Sometimes, the transition from survey to lead generation takes place in the same call.

However, if you work in the business-to-consumer marketplace, beware the federal Telemarketing Sales Rule. One of the stipulations is that any sales call must be identified as such. If you switch from conducting a survey to pitching your product or service, you could face $16,000 in fines for each violation.

You can download the FTC legal document here: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2003/01/tsrfrn.pdf

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Categories : Telemarketing Law

Tags : Telemarketing Law

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