Be it as a single process or a part of a much larger marketing strategy, the actual cost of telemarketing shouldn’t be treated the same way as other strategy. This is based on the simple reasoning that one type of marketing will cost differently from another. Insisting on otherwise would be like saying the cost of a desktop PC should be the same as the cost of, say, an electronic notebook. It doesn’t even matter how high or how low they are in comparison. Instead, the costs of telemarketing should be seen within the context of its own factors. These factors are more or less:
Results
Do you get what you pay for? Better yet, do you get more than that? You should but on the flip side, if your total marketing budget doesn’t lend itself much to your telemarketers or your outsourced provider, then you shouldn’t expect as much. Besides, you should be measuring the results of other methods in the same manner anyway.
Ratios
Taking the results in mind, how does their ratio of cost-versus-results compare to the ratio of the other methods. If you’re struggling financially and have to make cuts, this is the type of comparison you should make. You don’t just kill off the process that uses up the most money. You might just accidentally kill your golden goose!
Performance
Finally, their performance should culminate the previous two factors. They might be able to justify their costs with their number of software leads. Their ratio might be better compared to the others. However, if you know they can also do better, then you should also expect them to. You might not give them too nasty a cut at this point but you need to firmly insist that they do better.
Integration
This can be very complex and unique trait to measure. By integration, it means you have to see how your telemarketers are using other tools. Using other tools can actually call for an entire re-evaluation in terms of measuring the previous three factors. A few questions you could ask would be: Are they depending too much on one tool or are they using them both efficiently together? You may not be reducing costs directly on their part but cutting down the costs of tools they count on for support could also have negative consequences.
Another analogy you can compare this to is when cleaning out your hard drive or even just a flash disk or online storage. You clear out the stuff you don’t really need at the moment but retain what you’re either using most of the time or data you need in times of emergency. On the other hand, the consequences of accidentally removing something, purely on the grounds of saving more space, obviously means difficulty when the files you deleted were the ones you needed the most. In marketing, you can make a similar mistake with their budget. Here are two of the consequences of accidentally cutting your marketing budget the wrong way:
Fewer leads
Less money isn’t just about the risk of less motivation. You reduce their capacity for quality. Remember: You get what you pay for. Paying less for a good service can get you less (provided, of course, you can see how money in the process directly relates to performance).
Worse performance
They were actually doing well but because you tampered with, for example, the money that was spent on email marketing support, you tampered with their strategy of using emails to generate permission for their calls.…