The subject is from "Funky Uncle Marketing", a blog I recently stumbled on. He wrote an entry on May 16th about a study from Go-To-Market Strategies that I'd forgotten about.
In it, the following information is noted:
- They dialed, on average about 15-18 prospects in an hour
- They connected with a person about 20-30 percent of the time
- They converted 20 percent of the calls – Where conversion is defined as objective of the call being reached (qualification established, product demo scheduled, information requested, etc.)
What does this actually mean?
This indicates an overall success rate of between 4 and 6 percent when reaching a specific target. The study that GTM used included B2C as well as B2B environments. The Direct Marketing Associate holds a different number of 8 percent for B2B only. One note is that these are professional telemarketers and people who know how to 'talk'. A random person from the street would get significantly lower numbers.
For the purposes of this example, we'll take the middle road of 6% for B2B contacts. Assuming you are gathering leads and ten percent of your leads turn into sale on average, this means that you would be able to generate 4.8 leads (.48 sales) per day and 24 (2.4 sales) per week. Considering the average rate of success for a direct mail marketing campaign (less than 0.1% on average) and the costs involved, telemarketing is certainly a valid way to go. With improved processes, strong product, targeted calls and strong sales people, these numbers can certainly increase.
