Strategy & Best Practices to Manage Telemarketing Services

Having identified the Industry Trends in Telemarketing in part one of our Industry Trends Blog, we ask Andy Rutherford, “What are the Best Practices and strategy in the industry to manage Telemarketing services whilst demonstrating relative cost effectiveness and efficiency?

1. Measure value not cost per lead. We would encourage you to measure us on both Expense to Pipeline & Expense to Revenue. In other words if you spend $1 with EIMS and you get $10 back are you happy with that? This approach does require effective closed loop reporting which is a challenge but by measuring us in this way it makes us part of the solution.
2. Engage both sales and marketing into program design. With almost every customer EIMS have we foster an active relationship with the sales leadership as well as marketing. We’re very happy to spend the time and energy in this process. Both parties need to be involved to deliver an outstanding ROI, and sales are as much the customer of Telemarketing services as anyone. Involving sales helps ensure that your sales model is geared up to cope with the demand or you tweak the demand you create to  fit the sales model you have but either way it drives up return.
3. Work in partnership. Do regular quarterly reviews with your Telemarketing partners, ensure that there is exec level engagement on both sides, encourage your Telemarketing Partners to bring advice, best practices  and industry insights but perhaps go further. For other customers we present at thought leadership forums etc.
4. Run consistent, on-going programs that allow for continuous improvement, not stop start. This is an area where many vendors could make both savings and productivity gains as a lot of work is still done tactically or quarter by quarter. Fewer, bigger programs would give vendors an improved return on your spend.
5. Wherever possible don’t think about the services that you buy in terms of silos. It’s very tempting to think in terms of ‘we spend x on tele-marketing and y on demand gen and z on creative’ and try and extract the best price or service level from each. It’s not always easy but the biggest gains come from looking at the sales and marketing process holistically & working with your partners [supplier agencies] to see if waste can be reduced in the process. This can best be achieved by giving a greater proportion of the ‘problem’ to a multi-disciplined agency to deliver on an end revenue goal because you can then charge that agency with the objective of getting to the end goal in the most cost effective way, rather than each discipline trying to ‘protect their budget/role’ . The same effect can be achieved with a lead agency that pulls in specialist agencies as and when needed, but only when necessary to improve the outcome i.e. a better ROI.

For more information or to find out how we can help your company, please contact us on +44 1202 555533, email us at enquiries@eims.biz or find us on Twitter at @EIMSltd.