The Sales Quarterback

Aberdeen’s most recent B2B teleservices benchmark states that 33% of all lead generation dollars in corporate budgets go to outsourced telemarketing services. The Best-in-Class spend, on average, 44% of their lead generation budgets on outsourced telemarketing. While this demonstrates a trend that heaps value on greater use of outsourced telemarketing, that by itself is, unfortunately, a lemming’s argument. So how can Marketing get the big bucks into teleservices without just pointing at this handy trend?

In the end, it all comes back to money. The magic word seems to be showing that x amount of dollars equals y amount of leads, sales, or actual income. And yet, ROI is, and will be, a difficult thing to calculate for any large company, or any company with a long sales cycle. Unfortunately, this defines a huge number of organizations. This has led to a strange struggle between marketing bloggers who either attempt to provide valuable and unique insights into successfully calculating ROI, and bloggers who feel that the emphasis on ROI is unjust and that the calculations are implausible. I tend to take the middle ground on the argument.

Firstly, I doubt that anyone in the world would leap readily from a stable position into one where the outcome was unsound, and on such a ground I agree with those who rely fully with the requirements of a calculable ROI. On the other hand, taking chances and leaps of faith allows growth and is often the only way to achieve. Business women and men are gamblers, but we have a keen eye for the odds—ROI is simply an odds-calculator for business strategies.

What I find to be the only ambiguous aspect of ROI is that a “Return” can hold many definitions. For instance, what the check-writer wants to see is how much money will come back, and when. Going on our gambling metaphor, the odds have to play a part in this as well. If I put up this banner, or sponsor this event, what percentage of people will see the banner or be aware of the sponsorship? What are the odds that it will affect their decisions in the future? How long will it take for those decisions to grow and flourish into a lead? What other types of investment will speed this process up, or increase the odds of it flourishing? These are all the questions that help delimit the odds. I discussed these issues as they apply to teleservices in Why, When, and How to Outsource Teleservices, but how do they apply to ROI?

In the business world, imaginary numbers don’t fly, but imagine this for a second. If I spend $20,000 on a lead generation campaign, that guarantees 20 well-qualified leads for my expenditure, and each lead can potentially create $10,000 each in revenue, then the potential return, after subtracting the original expenditure, is $180,000. This is an imaginary number (figuratively speaking), and is a best-case scenario, but a instead of wondering how well your lead generation campaign is going to go, you ask yourself how well your sales team can do with the outcome.

In Aberdeen’s B2B Teleservices Compensation: Defining a Path to Success, Peter Ostrow notes that the Best-in-Class tend to use retainer-compensation for their outsourced telemarketing providers–an often variable-enhanced monthly or quarterly fixed-dollar payment. In the 2008 B2B teleservices benchmark, Aberdeen collected various information which Ostrow analyzes in this graph:

(Click to enlarge)

“Of interest in Figure 3 is the relatively low-maintenance ranking of retainer-compensation teleservices customers. These strong-performing organizations focus on a collaborative, quality-centric relationship with their teleservices provider and are less reliant on their external partner, in comparison to companies in slow-growth mode that may consider the cost-per-lead and lead-quantity approaches in an unrealistic, panacea mind set” (Aberdeen Group, 4).

What Ostrow is pointing out is that the odds-bypassing formula of outsourced teleservices ends at the hand-off of a well-defined lead; something that the Best-in-Class realize before the Laggards. Keeping in mind the quality of the lead, what becomes of the imaginary 180,000$ is up to me and my sales team, but the value is certainly there for the picking and the variables are much reduced.

Hope you liked the long-awaited article! While waiting for something different next week, keep in touch. We’re always here to Listen @ Emotecomm.

The other day I had sat down to think about the objectives of Emotecomm as a lead generating service, and I decided this morning that it was something worth sharing in the blog. What it boils down to, in my mind, is that Emotecomm is not a product so much as it is a series of solutions geared specifically toward each client. With the quantity of products offered in the form of deliverables and the money changing hands, it is so simple to suggest that Emotecomm can be defined by these things, but let me explain what I’m getting at.

Take, for example, the VP of sales for a medium-sized corporation. There are certain problems inherent in her position in regards to sales, which it is her task to solve. She also has limitations on what and how she can solve these problems: internal training costs, managing and keeping such a team, and the vast amount of external solutions which compete for her attention. In sales, these limitations might be described as pain points, but, the way that we look at them, they are not so much the best place to hit so much as they’re the reasons why Emotecomm exists to begin with.

The distinction is in the positioning of the client as a problem solver rather than simply being a provider of products or services to the market. As a problem solver, the client is someone who can use Emotecomm’s services as tools which benefit her needs. Emotecomm intends to present itself as a valuable set of tools with lasting value which our clients can turn to when a problem arises. To demonstrate this intention, we’ve recently been investing in our research branch in order to provide industries greater understanding of markets as well as providing markets a greater understanding of various key industries. Thus, in ways and details that this blog could never delve into, information and clarity are provided that are not necessarily part of the marketing or sales cycles, and yet they are still free of charge. What this means is that the VP of sales is presented with a repertoire of information, the immediate possibility of a relationship with Emotecomm, and the option of having an expert, accountable, and solution-oriented third party ready to advise or to provide services or products whenever she needs them.

With such a large requirement of a solid relationship between the client and the firm, this kind of open, solution-oriented approach is required for a working campaign. The knowledge provided by research allows for well-targeted lists, a strong understanding of the client allows for better results with each call, and flexible, frequent communications between the firm and the client improves the overall results of the campaign. In the J.C. Williams Group case study, for example, Emotecomm provided, amongst several other deliverables, a training program and talking points for future lead generation campaigns; this kind of information certainly allows freedom of choice and the ability to select the best solution for your organization.

This is the last one before ROI! The next article will be up next Monday. For now, give our new Research a look. We’re always here to Listen @ Emotecomm.

So I stumbled across this article from Techdirt about the 21^st century’s upcoming news readers. I guess I’ve been in an article-reading sort of mood! The article brings up the idea that print media and print advertising are certainly not unchanging beasts, specifically the distribution of news is taking a turn toward digital word of mouth. If you don’t believe them (or me) just take a look at social media sites such as Digg or even YouTube. Certainly you can argue from the perspective of professionalism and suggest that people who subscribe to some of these sites do not fit your target market, but that’s difficult to say when the U.S. Department of National Defense was forced to block YouTube because it was just too popular.

Interestingly enough, some of the Emotecomm team participated in a BtoB webinar which presented some thoughts about corporate advertising budgets. Not surprisingly it tended to agree with our conclusions about where marketing was going to be headed over the next several years. Specifically BtoB noted that the largest cuts in advertising budgets and spending for starting 2008 was, for a large majority, looking at cutting back print, while online advertising had a majority of businesses looking for an increase in spending in the same year. Citing some pretty heavy hitters in the marketing industry, Booz Allen, ANA, Forrester and BtoB themselves, the speakers found that about 85% of B2B, US and international marketers all together are looking at increasing online advertising throughout 2008. The trend can potentially bring online advertising above print advertising within the next three years.

The difficulty presented by findings like these is that they herald change. For any size of organization, that means treading on unfamiliar ground and taking a large amount of resources away from the things that organizations do best. With the threat of a recession hanging over North America, these aren’t resources that many organizations are willing to part with. Certainly this is going to mean a much larger dependence upon B2C and B2B marketing companies for those that want to swim through these changes and tough times, and hopefully it will breed even tighter relationships between organizations. And, if I was leaving a cliff hanger it might go here, perhaps there will be a larger focus on marketing efficiency.

Next week I’ll be taking a look at marketing efficiency and how some big businesses are tracking ROI. If you have any questions about today’s article give us a shout at listen@emotecomm.com.