B2B Outbound Telemarketing
Telemarketing Survey Article in B2B Marketing Magazine - July/August 06
July 2006
Niall Habba Writes in B2B Marketing Magazine:
Reports of the imminent death of the cold call have been around for some time.
It’s a commonly held view in Direct Marketing circles that outbound telemarketing
is in terminal decline. The impact of the TPS has been substantial and
continues to reduce the pool of marketable consumer prospects. Continuing bad
press around silent calls and call centres in general also contribute to a mood
of inevitable decline.
However, the reality behind the headlines is much more complex. Despite the
problems with outbound consumer calling, it’s clear that for a variety of
reasons B2B outbound telemarketing activity is still growing and effective.
The vast majority of survey respondents use Telemarketing. Moreover, despite
the problems with perception, more than 90% view Telemarketing as at least as
effective as their other marketing mediums. It seems that B2B marketers also
have faith in the future strength of the channel; organisations planning to
increase their spend on Telemarketing exceed those planning to spend less by
six to one.
Maybe one of the reasons for outbound B2B’s continued growth is the fact that a
well designed and managed campaign can deliver both demand generation and
market insight. True market research and the generation of sales leads or
appointments cannot easily be combined. However one of the unique advantages of
B2B telemarketing is that there’s scope to actually engage in a dialogue, which
is potentially much more powerful than just sending a message to your market
and waiting for the response. Although only a minority of respondents claim to
use Telemarketing with market research as an explicit aim, if market
intelligence is not gathered through calling then they are not realising the
full potential of the channel. Finding the reasons why prospects won’t buy is
often more useful than finding the reasons that they will.
As you would expect, the majority of outbound Telemarketing is still carried
out by in-house teams, with a sizeable minority outsourcing the activity to
specialist agencies. This is no great surprise – almost every company in the
world uses the phone as a sales channel but only some a minority use a
specialist outside agency.
As with most DM channels, legal compliance issues have grown over the last few
years. For outbound B2B telemarketing, the most prominent development has been
the Corporate Telephone Preference Service, introduced a few years after its
consumer cousin. Although awareness of the restrictions placed on B2B marketers
by the CTPS is high in the survey group, anecdotal evidence suggests it is
close to zero in the general business community. Most sales staff within
businesses have no awareness of the scheme and will happily cold call in
ignorance of the possible consequences of dialling up a CTPS registered
prospect.
Even amongst those who are fully aware of the CTPS, a large minority of B2B
marketers are not sure they are compliant. This suggests that compliance isn’t
seen as a critical issue. One explanation might be that agencies have a strong
incentive to comply as their entire business could be jeopardised by a breach,
but an in house sales team doesn’t have the same overwhelming pressure to stay
on the right side of the law.
Either way, the good news is that B2B telemarketers are not generally finding
that the CTPS has had a significant impact. The jury is still out in the long
term, but for the foreseeable future outbound B2B telemarketing is a growing and
highly effective medium.
