Hire a Telemarketer

If you know how to get prospects to react over the telephone, consider teaching someone else how to do it, too. There’s a lot to be said for tried and true. With the right tools and a little organization, a telemarketer can deliver as many as 10,000 4-minute presentations each year. That’s why leading companies in a wide range of industries including financial services, home alarm-monitoring services, and long distance telecommunications continue to employ in-house telemarketing staff. We may not like to get cold called, but the simple truth is that it works! Take care to stay on the right side of the law, however. In the U.S., recent changes to federal legislation let consumers add their names to a Do Not Call list (donotcall.gov). Calling on people who have opted out can result in steep fines.

Hiring and training a telemarketer to make calls for you can free up time for you to work on other tasks. Also, once you’ve developed a model for teaching people how to develop leads, it is a relatively easy next step to scale the model up to produce a greater volume.

Make it as easy as possible for telemarketers to succeed. If you’ve found a pitch that works for you over the phone, write it down and make telemarketing staff study it and learn it word for word. Track their results, note their stumbling points and any common objections they encounter, and refine the script until it sells consistently.

Don’t underestimate the commitment it takes to supervise telemarketers. Running a good telemarketing operation is not a simple matter of showing telemarketers the ropes and letting them do their thing. They need constant motivation and encouragement, and regular performance check-ups to make sure that they stay on target.

When you get to the stage of having three full-time telemarketing staff, you may want to consider hiring a dedicated telemarketing manager. Hiring, training, motivating, evaluating, and rewarding a telemarketing team takes a lot of work, and doing it effectively can easily consume more time than you had anticipated.