I have been asked this question a several times recently by a few different clients, and whilst you may think my reply would end with ‘agency’, you might be surprised. Depending on which stage your business is at, there are in fact three possible answers to this question. So, to be methodical I will skim over each of these three, as I am guessing that one of them may apply to your business:
1: You are a small business owner. You do not have time to cold call or do not want to, and may not necessarily have the 25-30K that you would need to hire a reasonable sales person, but you know that you need to do something to move forward.
If this is your situation then telemarketing could be the ideal service to bridge the gap. Most telemarketing companies will operate on a set daily fee of between £300-£400 per day. Whilst this may seem expensive, you only need to contract the company for as many days as you need them. A telemarketing partner will be able to arrange high quality meetings for you to attend on days that you have specified. Telemarketing will work at its best if your products are of a mid to high value and have a short to mid-term sales cycle. If you are selling products that are way under the fee the telemarketing company is charging then outsourcing telemarketing probably won’t work for you, and you should consider picking up the phone yourself.
2. You are a small to mid-size business owner and have more business than you can cope with. Your phone is ringing all the time and it’s getting to the stage whereby you need to turn business away.
If this is you, then recruiting a good sales person would be a good thing to consider. A telemarketing company would not necessarily be a good investment as there is no point in generating more business than you can already handle. Once your sales person is up and running, and you have caught up you may want to use telemarketing to manage your diary and handle all of your incoming leads so that you can attend meeting and close business rather than cold calling.
3. You are a small to mid-size business owner and you cannot find qualified sales people to work with your established sales team.
It’s widely recognised that sales roles are now some of the most difficult to recruit for. Many business owners offer their sales superstars incredible incentive packages to stay with them, and very often it works. This is where telemarketing can come into its own. In this situation telemarketing can not only fill the diary of your existing team but can also weed our all of the dross that stands no chance of ever becoming an order. Your sales people can then concentrate on closing business, which, lets face it, is what you really pay them for. When you eventually recruit for your role, you can immediately fill the new sales person’s diary with qualified appointments, and they can begin to pay their own way immediately.
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