The Solutions Focus
+44 (0) 1727 843 820
  • Home
  • Services
    • Training >
      • Getting The Best From Feedback
      • Effective Conversations
      • Solutions-Focused Conversations for the Workplace
      • Bite Sized Sessions
      • Introduction to SF Coaching
      • Team Building
      • Leadership Development
      • Manager as Coach
      • Masterclasses
      • Productive Meetings
      • Leading Change through Powerful Conversations
      • Difficult to Constructive Conversations
      • Building Resilience
      • Increasing Engagement
      • Raising Performance
      • What Works Well
      • Positively Speaking The Course
    • Coaching >
      • Executive and Business Coaching
      • Team Coaching
      • Online Coaching
      • Coaching Conundrums
      • Supervision
    • Consulting >
      • Change Projects
      • Strategy Workshops
      • Appraisal Design
      • 360 Degrees Feedback
      • SF Professional Development Programme
      • Licensing
    • Speaking >
      • The Book
      • Keynotes and Presentations
      • Conferences
  • About Us
    • Our Approach
    • OSKAR Coaching Model
    • Six SIMPLE Principles
    • Solutions TOOLS
    • Our Clients
  • Resources
    • Articles
    • Blog
    • Books
    • Coaching Cards
    • The SF Community
    • Inspiring Quotes
  • Shop
  • Contact Us
    • Newsletter
    • Social Media
  • Link Page

How to avoid spending two grand on telemarketing for just one appointment  |  Paul

17/11/2011

0 Comments

 
As you grow your business, you probably consider various marketing strategies.  Here at The Solutions Focus, we’ve experimented with speaking at conferences, writing articles in trade magazines and building a mailing list for our newsletter.  More recently, we’ve been developing social media, such as blogging and tweets.
All of these have been reasonably successful, giving us what we have considered a worthwhile return for the effort and costs involved. Our biggest failure, however, has been with telemarketing – specifically with a company called Market Makers, who claimed to have ‘the proven formula for growth’.  Their glossy brochures and website told us that, ‘we, like all the others, provide lead and appointment generation through telemarketing. We are, however, smarter at how we do this and better at delivering you significant results that meet your exact telemarketing requirements.’

It sounded good - and when their slick salesman David Getzig assured us we could listen to call recordings from the outset, we signed up.

When we listened to the calls they made, we were shocked at the poverty of their performance.  Call us naïve, but we didn’t expect the callers to be suffering from impediments such as the habit of saying ‘sort-of’ several times per sentence, a compulsion to gabble without stopping to listen to the potential client, and a seeming inability to take in the most basic elements from our briefing of what our business is about.  One caller explained our offer to a training manager so confusingly that she replied that her company never bought that kind of service.

In the end we got one appointment, made by the best caller that we heard, who unfortunately left the company that same week.  No one else got close!

If the calls were bad (and they were), they were equalled by the stream of excuses from the senior staff who were supposed to manage these callers to ensure we had the ‘results and communication’ Market Makers promise.  In the end, manager Henry Braithwaite ran out of excuses and refunded half our money.

So, please benefit from our experience to save yourself time, cash and embarrassment by asking the following questions of any telemarketing company you are considering using.

Will they guarantee results?  Our telemarketers kept telling us how many hours they had clocked up: a culture of focusing on time rather than quality had spread through the company.

Will they take responsibility for poor calls and insist on excellence, or prefer to defend shoddy standards and keep your money?
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Book
    Care
    Change
    Coaching
    Comedy
    Complexity
    Conference
    Constructivism
    Consulting
    Conversation
    Decision Making
    Education
    Engagement
    Facilitation
    Feedback
    Future
    Goals
    HR
    Improvisation
    Interview
    Journalism
    Leadership
    Learning
    Management
    Marketing
    Meetings
    Mistakes
    Monday
    Neuroscience
    Organisation
    Organisational Development
    OSKAR
    Performance
    Philosophy
    Police
    Politics
    Problems
    Project Management
    Psychology
    Questions
    Resilience
    Scale
    SFBT
    SIMPLE
    Sport
    Stress
    Supervision
    TOOLS
    Top Tips
    Training
    Video

    Archives

    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    February 2013
    December 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    November 2011
    October 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    September 2010
    August 2010

Home
Services
Training
Coaching
Consultancy
Speaking


About Us
Our Approach
OSKAR
​SF Tools
Our Clients
Resources
Blog
Books 
Conferences
SF Community
Shop
Contact Us
The Solutions Focus
Tel +44 (0)1727 843 820
      
Email: contact@thesolutionsfocus.co.uk

     The Solutions Focus © 2014   All Rights Reserved
  Terms of Use   Privacy