Telemarketing - Is this a good deal?

[Burdett]

Hi

I have decided to go down the telemarketing route but I want to have a test of it first before I fully commit to it. I have about 320 contact details and have been quoted £80 by a telemarketing company do do a campaign over 2 days with the possibility of going commission only if everything goes well.

I think this is a good deal but I have nothing to compare it to so I am not 100% sure that it is a good deal.

Has anyone used a telemarketing company before and would this be a reasonable price?

 

[SmilePrint]

Works out at 160 contacts / £40 per day

20 / £5 per hour. (can I mention minimum wage?)

3 minutes each with no breaks.

Assuming they will not get through to everyone, would 3 minutes do what you need to do with the data/ sell what you want to sell?

Its a very cheap price, but I suspect its not realistic, so therefore not good value for money.

Expect a telemarketing co to charge £15/£30 per hour. Even a home based no/other overheads should charge £10/ hour to cover themselves.

Check it out

 

[telemax]

Hi

I have decided to go down the telemarketing route but I want to have a test of it first before I fully commit to it. I have about 320 contact details and have been quoted £80 by a telemarketing company do do a campaign over 2 days with the possibility of going commission only if everything goes well.

I think this is a good deal but I have nothing to compare it to so I am not 100% sure that it is a good deal.

Has anyone used a telemarketing company before and would this be a reasonable price?

Ok You need to look at the small print on this one. How much time will they be devoting to this. Is it just a few hours over 2 days? Lowest rate in the UK is around 120 per day, I'm not saying that this offer isn't genuine but when something is going "cheap" you need to investigate exactly what you are getting.

At that rate it may well be an outsource to India company, but it seems a little too cheap for that even. Nothing necessarily wrong with that but It would be advised to listen to a telemarketer making a call. After all it's your company they would be representing.

To give you a guideline our rates would be £600 for the same work, we would also do the work over a month period as it's virtually impossible to get results over a 2 day period. I'm not angling for your business on this as we are way out of your budget anyway but my feeling is look into it further. However I think you are throwing £80 down the drain if you go with that outfit.

I hope this helps

Jonathan

 

[Burdett]

I think its a fantastic deal and they do have a base in India. Even if they don't sell any I still haven't lost much money so I am not risking much.

 

[telemax]

I think its a fantastic deal and they do have a base in India. Even if they don't sell any I still haven't lost much money so I am not risking much.

True Enough

 

[Mr_Wizard]

I offer a 'pilot' campaign where we run a batch of calls pretty much 'at cost', the results of which are reviewed with clients to set achievable expectations and negotiate price. I thought this offered a low cost entry into telemarketing but I agree with the other guys - even as a pilot scheme I couldn't make that price yet alone come back to you with anything I'd have any confidence in.

 

[Delta_Software_Services]

At that price you will be getting a couple of hours a day, not a full one. The numbers just dont add up.

 

[Burdett]

I think the telemarketers are in india which is why it is so cheap. I think because because of that they could get through the list completely.

Maybe I'm being naive but I don't think so.

 

[maxine]

This cost is low but might be based on the number of call attempts of 320 which even so would work out at around 16 hours work at 20 calls per hour. This means you are just paying for the effort with little focus on the end result as the call attempts will include no answers, voicemails, call backs etc.

It will be interesting to see what the outcome of this is.

This works out at an approximate hourly rate of £5 which is below the NMW £5.73 for someone aged 22 and over but is below the NMW for someone under the age of 21 so perhaps it is a youngster that will be making the calls. ???

If you are using an India based call centre then the level of interest and take up will be a bit lower based purely on it being a turn off for a lot of people receving telemarketing calls.

The other thing with a rate as low as this is that the telemarketing agency/resource would find it difficult to build in any preparation time for the calling to understand product or service but perhaps they are doing this as a longer term investment.

For comparison purposes we would have priced this at around £350 which would include a small allowance for call backs.

Hope that helps and good luck

 

looks like they are charging for calling 320 contacts NOT speaking to 320. keep that in mind.

 

[Burdett]

They did ask for a script so I assume that they will be talking to them. What would be the point of phoning and not talking? I don't think any company would do that.

 

no your missing the pint, what i am saying is they will not speak to 320 people, more like 50 over the two days depending on the level of decision maker, and depending on how many people dont hang up because its an indian callcentre.

 

[Burdett]

I should hit myself for not understanding.

I thought all telemarketing companies would be the same though? For instance if they quote £600 and only speak to 50 of 330 they still charge £600. What's so different?

 

people chagr in different ways, by day, by calls , by people spoken too.

example: it would take approx 10 days to call 1000 companies @ £200per days =£ 2k
it would take 34 days to SPEAK to 1000 contacts @ £200 per day = £6.6k

 

[virtuallysorted]

Can I suggest something?

Let's say your database are fresh leads generated by you, so you know they are good quality leads. How many of those would usually convert if you followed up? If you have this figure, it'll make it easier to assess if the project is worthwhile.

E.g. Let's say your conversion rate is 10% and the profit you make on each sale is £50 - so you would be expecting to get £1,600 of income from these leads. So unless the telesales company's conversion rate is better than 10%, you're actually losing money AND paying them to do it...

Plus there's the potential damage to your reputation. Whatever your views are on offshore call centres, a lot of people hate them and refuse point blank to use a company that has offshore call centres. Are you potentially alienating people on the list, and losing out on further sales or damaging your reputation?

Just a few pointers... If you want domestic sales staff I can help www.virtuallysorted.com/sales

Caroline

 

[Burdett]

All of these are fresh leads and every single one of them are recruiting staff. They have also advertised job vacancies in the last 2 weeks so there's a good chance that they might want a background checking company if they are told how they can benefit from it.

A lot of people might hate call centres located in a different country but most of those in this country are outside my budget.

 

[telemax]

All of these are fresh leads and every single one of them are recruiting staff. They have also advertised job vacancies in the last 2 weeks so there's a good chance that they might want a background checking company if they are told how they can benefit from it.

A lot of people might hate call centres located in a different country but most of those in this country are outside my budget.

I've had a lot of bad experiences with Data that costs twice as much as your whole campaign. I've learnt only to use a few reputable companies. Even then up to 25% of records are either dead lines or ringouts. It does seem an awfully bold claim to say that they are all fresh and all recruiting staff.

It may well be that many of those 320 calls will end up going no where because the data is cheap and nasty.

 

[Burdett]

I didn't pay for the data. I found it myself and it took ages - much longer than I thought it would.

This is how I find my contacts - seeing as I do background checks on job applicants - I look for companies who are recruiting. The best place to look is the job centre website. This contains the companies that are recruiting and the names of the people you are supposed to ask for. Some of them night be low ranking HR employees but it's a start as it gets me through the "door"

Once my company gets more established I am going to have to find a better way of finding these companies as just finding 330 took up far too much of my time.

If I was to find about 2000 contacts it would probably take 60-70 hours and I probably won't have that time to spare. Maybe an Elancer could be prepared to do it.

 

[GreatSEO]

If you spent a lot of time putting together your campaign then you obviously care about the results you get.

An indian call centre is NOT going to get you the same kind of results that someone in the UK will get you that is proven.

If you want to talk to someone that can give you some decent tips and help you on your way to doing it yourself then please feel free to PM me and I will do what I can for nothing.

I hope this helps

Dave

 

[Burdett]

Thanks for the offer - I might PM you later in the day. At the moment I am waiting for 2 important calls.

Has there actually been any research that shows that Indian call centres get worse results than British based call centres?

 

[GreatSEO]

The language barriers, the amount of posts in Google concerning the amount of campaigns that have gone sour, lost money and waste of time.

Don't get me worng I am sure there have been some successful campaigns but when I was running a 10k project to drive new business for a corporate I was told to use the indian call centres and it cost the corporate 23k to find out what I had initially told them. Now the campaign is going well and they are using a call centre in brighton. I will give you an idea -

A - 23k spent 13 leads produced 2 deals at around 3k each (bad)
B - 5k (so far) 78 leads produced and 11 deals at 3k each already and we are only 6 weeks in.

I hope this helps

Dave

 

[Burdett]

It turns out I am probably not going to use the Indian call centre. I have had a talk with Mr Wizard and I might be giving him a try.

 

[GreatSEO]

Hopefully that will do you justice better than what you had originally.

I have not heard of Mr Wizard so I cannot comment

Many Thanks

Dave

 

[accountancyextra]

You are concentrating here purely on cost, not on value and, in my opinion, that's a bad idea!

You may spend more money with a UK based firm (consider one of the helpful firms that have responded to this thread for example), but the results could be far better. You think there's little risk as there is little cost involved, what about the risk to your brand name that a poor telemarketing firm could bring?

Is it good value? Honestly, it depends on results. £50 spoent with no return is poor value, but £75,000 spent that generates £1m in profits is fantastic value!!

 

[Burdett]

You can only concentrate on value when you have the money to concentrate on value. I only have the money to go for the telemarketing equivalent of Aldi at the moment (price-wise not value-wise).

If I had the money I would spend as much money as possible.

 

[accountancyextra]

You can only concentrate on value when you have the money to concentrate on value. I only have the money to go for the telemarketing equivalent of Aldi at the moment (price-wise not value-wise).

If I had the money I would spend as much money as possible.

Sorry I don't agree. Value isn't about the amount you spend, it's about the return. As I said in the previous post, £50 spent with no return is poor value, as is £10, or even £1!!

If you aren't going to see a return from your spend, then keep the money in your pocket until you can find a provider that will deliver a return for what you can afford to spend.

You've likened yourself to shopping at Aldi - however cheap apples were at Aldi, would you still buy them if they were inedible?

On the presumption that you'd answer "no" to that question then you'd probably either seek out oranges for a similar price that were edible, or, you'd travel to another shop where you could buy less apples for the same money, but where the ones you did buy were fresh.

 

[Mr_Wizard]

I had a chat with the OP today - nice guy and facing all the problems many of us would have had when we started trying to carve ourselves a business for the first time.

The pilot scheme I've offered him is based on limited finances and the need to get some results on the board, it won't be perfect because the budget simply isn't there.

One of the major considerations here is that a single sale is low value, over time a new account could easily become worth many many times the cost of finding it but, the budget is small and we have to implement a strategy that has the real potential to pay for itself over the initial campaign. I guess like most of us here I can invest time and money for a gain over the long term but some start ups simply have to get some 'quick kills' to get going.

Chatting with the OP it took me back to the days when I ran my first business out of my old bedroom at my mum and dads house, and used a serviced office to take calls for me and transfer them to me to give the impression I was running something bigger. I bought my laptop computer as a 'disposal' from Dunn & Bradstreet and my car was so c**p I used to park it around the corner and tell prospects/clients 'I caught the train'. I recall one time I got a lift back to the station and had to wait till the guy drove off and had to walk 3 miles back to the car.

I do a fair bit of work these days for some 'top drawer' clients but I still have a lot of time for this type of work - I can remember how hard it was to get going, I have a daughter working her socks off to make her dream of vet college, and I find it doesn't do me any harm at all to get back to fighting just to get off the first rung of the ladder.

This guys £80 is as important to him as the thousands of pounds are as important to many of us - and, if he does decide to give it a try, I will keep that firmly in mind. And I have no doubt whatsoever it will sharpen my game up a little into the bargain.