Are You Looking At Using A Freelance Telemarketing Expert Or Agency?In lead generation, you have the choice between using a freelance telemarketing expert, or an agency.
Deciding between a freelance telemarketing expert, or an agency can be a hard choice.
What is the issue other than cost?
The answer really is none.
The only benefit in using a freelance telemarketer is that they charge a lot less than an agency would. They do not have the running costs that an agency would have. Rent for the offices, cost of staff, salary for the directors, company cars, IT infrastructure, marketing costs etc.
However a side thought may be experience. Does the freelancer know your industry? They may have been doing B2B telemarketing for many years, but industry knowledge does play a big part in the sales process.
Before starting telemarketing , have a look at their case studies and sectors on the website. With an agency, chances are they have worked in your sector in one way or the other, so it would simply be a case of using the agent that knows your market.
Selling is selling, a good sales person should be able to sell no mater what the industry, skills are transferable. A telemarketing expert should be adaptable to change, in sector and in the level of client they are talking to.
However whist this may be true with a well seasoned sales person, the majority of telemarketers are under 30. They do not have the sales skills that a sales person with 20+ years experience has. Many lead generation agencies will use their staff wherever they can find them.
Finding good staff (like in any business) is difficult. Very often staff that have finished school or university will do telemarketing as a first job. Once they have some experience on their CV they will leave for a better paid job. The dilemmas of running a business.
So when considering using a company. the main thing is to find out who will be doing the calling, how experience they are and how long will they remain with the agency before leaving.
The downsides of using a freelancer is that they may decide to stop and get a full time job.
Often they are doing work in-between jobs or maybe if they are on maternity or long term illness (therefore cannot leave the house). If you have invested time and money to find that the freelancer has stopped, this means you need to start finding someone else all over again.
There is a period at the beginning of any telemarketing campaign where the telemarketer is finding their feet.
They are getting to know your business, getting used to the telemarketing script (if you have one); so to have to start this all over again means more investment.
Some freelancers may operate a pay per lead telemarketing, but most will demand a fixed day rate.
Half of the battle with telemarketing is getting hold of good data.
A lot of time can be spent chasing a prospect and if you finally get hold of them after 10 attempts only to find out they are not the right person, that is money down the drain.
If you multiply this by several hundred, a lot of money is wasted.
This is why getting hold of good reliable data is key.
Who is going to supply your data, will you or the freelancer?
A quick search on a search engine will show that there are over 2 million pages of information.
Recruitment companies, blogs, job adverts all giving you information about freelance calling. So actually finding a freelancer is not quite so easy, specifically one that is local and knows your industry sector is hard.
Consider the following questions:
NB – Forget commission only telemarketing, freelancers will not consider it.
A big point that is raised above is data. What is the agency going to use to call against?
Either you provide them access to your database (which is a very dangerous thing) or they purchase data from a data broker, or you buy data.
If they are using fresh data, then there will be a lag period as they do cold calling to qualify the data and build the sales pipeline. Meanwhile you are paying them to do this work.
If you do decide to go down the route of freelance telemarketing, it is wise to get multiple quotes from different freelancers.
Using it is going to take investment, not just in money, but also in time. They need to get to know your business products/services inside and out.
You want to start seeing results as soon as possible, for this you really need a telemarketer with good sales experience.
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