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?
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?
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