Is telemarketing the best way to generate leads for SMBs?

January 10, 2012 Interim Sales Leave a reply

The question of how you generate leads and whether you make someone responsible internally to make those calls or engage an outside agency or telemarketing firm is one I hear again and again from business owners.

Each business owner seems to have an opinion on this based upon past experience where it did or didn’t work to generate a number of leads. Sometimes it coincided with the launch of a new service or product but often it was a knee-jerk response to a lack of new business leads.

Rather than just dismissing telemarketing and saying that “cold calling is dead” my answer goes something along these lines, i.e. I tend to answer it with a number of pointed questions of my own:

Can you sustain the costs of a telemarketing firm long-term?
Is it cheaper outsourcing it than doing it yourself?
How are you guaranteeing results or minimising any failure?
Do you have control and what happens next?
Is your sales proposition clear to those that are going to be picking up the phone to your prospects?
Is it an effective way of generating leads for your business and how long should it be outsourced, what is your plan?
Should you also be making sure that your website is attracting new clients and your current customers are making referrals?
How should you be engaging with your buyers for the first time, a cold call or quality interaction?
How can you follow up on any interest immediately?

Usually the business owner recognises that engaging a telemarketing agency is not going to get lead generation working on its own. It needs to be matched with other activities such as inbound marketing, targeted senior peer to peer engagement and developing a referral network. In addition, what do you then do with the leads to further qualify them and take them through the sales funnel. Who picks it up and how do you make this seamless?

You are going to need a sales person at some point to do something with the warm leads particularly if you’ve invested a lot of money in generating them in the first place.

That’s where Jefferson Sales comes in to help you convert them into customers.