All businesses have a budget and when it comes to outsourcing telemarketing then the more bang you can get for your buck is clearly an attractive proposition. This is why so many companies get lured in by ‘pay per lead’ telemarketing companies believing that it makes sense to only pay for a bona-fide lead. On the face of it, this just sounds like common sense and it’s only when you delve into the reality of per lead that you start to realise maybe it’s not such a good idea.
So why isn’t pay per lead exactly what it says on the tin?
Well, it may sound like a bit of a cliché but ‘quality over quantity’ is what you should be looking for in any telemarketing campaign that you do. Pay per lead companies are driven by numbers because that’s how they get paid. This philosophy drives behaviours in a telemarketing team that you don’t really want and the desire to get numbers, irrespective of qualification and quality, takes precedence.
Imagine how your sales force is going to feel when they get these leads. They may initially be motivated by the numbers that are coming through but when they make contact they will soon discover that the so-called leads that have been generated are not qualified, not relevant for now and at best, lukewarm. It’s amazing how quickly you can damage the mind-set of your sales team and if you give them lousy sales leads and waste their time, you will soon see a lot of negativity creeping in. Negativity which is perfectly understandable when they have been expecting to receive prime sales opportunities.
False Economy
It’s true that there are many telemarketing companies out there vying for business and the way they can differentiate themselves from each other is through price and through promising pay per lead programmes that intend to save you money. However, this can often be a false economy when you start to see the amount of wasted sales time involved in chasing leads that aren’t worth the effort; then managing the fall-out as disgruntled sales people start to vent their spleen about the rubbish leads they are getting.
Benefits of the Time and Labour Model
In light of this, working with a telemarketing company like GCL that operates a defined time and labour model is a more considered way forward. There is not the same pressure to panic sell in order to drive numbers and the telemarketing team will take considerably more time in qualifying the lead as a genuine sales opportunity before passing it forward.
A time and labour model may cost more but in terms of return on investment it delivers. It’s a fairly simple equation; Better qualified leads = more genuine opportunities to sell = a more motivated sales force = a better bottom line.
Pay per lead forces the situation and often results in the telemarketers pushing too hard, over-promising, using hard-sell techniques and when they’re really under pressure, just making the sales lead up to hit a target. Do you really want your brand to be sold in this way to your potential prospects?
Of course you don’t. The last thing you want to do is have to implement a PR campaign to undo the damage that a pay per lead telemarketing team has inflicted!
