When I first started my telemarketing company, one of the first things I had to consider was how we would charge potential clients. You may or may not know that there are, in the main, two types or fee structure when outsourcing to a telemarketing company.
These are as follows:
Payment by results: Clients are charged a set fee for each lead or each meeting. Typically £50-£100 per lead or £100-£150 per meeting. The telemarketing company only gets paid if they deliver you leads or meetings, if they don’t; they get a big fat ZERO.
Daily fee: The telemarketing company charges you a set daily fee, typically between £250-£350 per day. This fee is fixed and does not change whether the company arranges you 0,1,2,3 or however many meetings per day.
The type of fee structure that a company uses can tell you an awful lot about the culture of the organisation that you are doing business with.
I carried out a lot of market research when I started Telemarketing Matters, ringing many businesses to discuss our potential offering with the decision maker. The overwhelming result was that whilst companies would prefer payment by results, they had only ever experienced very poor ROI when dealing with partners who used this fee structure. This had also been my experience when using telemarketing in a different life. I attended three meetings in one day, and found that not one of them presented a genuine opportunity to win business, but they did mean the person who arranged my meetings got paid!
This all told me that:
1. Poorly arranged appointments at any cost are an expensive waste of time and money.
2. A quality approach (not focused on numbers but totally quality) was the only way.
3. To make appointments for sales people you need to be a sales person.
We opted to only use a daily payment structure, focusing on quality, and only ever delivering results that will turn into business. This has been our philosophy since day one.
We are probably asked at least once or twice a week if we would consider a payment by results structure, and our reply is always no. Nearly every bad experience I hear regarding telemarketing is concerning poor results, wasted money and poor account handling. Put simply, when your telemarketing agency is paid by hitting the numbers then they will, but the results may not be great!
Now this is not to say that all telemarketing companies who use this structure are bad, we have simply found that a set daily fee is certainly what our clients prefer! Quality or quantity? You decide!
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