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.

A recent article caught my attention at Growing Business, they’ve taken the time to peruse a Boots study regarding the ability to concentrate at work. It’s a British study, but while the situation might be slightly different in North America it still brings up some important questions. For example, unless you have your workers on commission, you’re paying your workers, on average “151 minutes per worker each day,” which is wasted due to tiredness, and these hours quickly add up. So what can you do to avoid this waste?

In a B2B world, your sales people are likely doing both lead generation and sales, which makes it very difficult to put them on a commission system – it is human nature to find any imbalances in the pay structure and to focus on the higher paying aspect. Even if you did try a commission system, you would have a lot of quirks to work out before it became a safe enough environment to satisfy the modern employee, especially if your sector doesn’t have a high client turnover. The other option is to cut an employees’ work days down to around 5 hours, but that much of a pay cut is not going to go over very well with your sales team either.

So what we’re left with is the idea that you would ultimately prefer to give someone a set amount of money for a set amount of sales, and not have to worry about the efficiency of the team working at it. That’s what made the article so interesting to us at Emotecomm – it’s what we do. The great thing about third-party lead generation is that it’s a contract with a reliable business; all of the details are worked out first, and you know exactly what you’re getting and what you’re paying from the start. It’s the difference between having your son clean your car and bringing it to a car wash. Only your son expects to be paid for chasing you around with the hose.

If you’ve noticed difficulties with your employees or your own concentration, or have any solutions that you’d like to discuss, feel free to post comments or send us an e-mail!

If you’re interested in more information about Emotecomm’s successes, check out the J.C. William’s Group Case Study in the Knowledge Centre.

In the last several years the internet has increasingly been used as a tool for basic brand research. It has time and again proven to be an effective channel for lead and sales generation, and has certainly introduced plenty of innovative ways to track market interests – which in turn allows marketers more and more reach into the homes of consumers.

One of the many tools offered by this venue is the corporate web log. And not only do you get to sit down and write out your thoughts, but when your brain children are actually published on your flashy corporate website they become another connection between yourself and the fastest growing purchasing demographics in the world. Aside from the possibility of having your blog as a source of income through online advertising, it can work for you by having more traffic moving through your site, which is in turn exposed to your wares, and perhaps your sales team will get a call from a hot lead who didn’t require hundreds of man-hours to acquire. Internet Retailer would have you believe that this is increasingly becoming a possibility; in the last year, online retail sales have increased 19% with the rest of the market increasing only 4%. If these figures are indicative of consumer presence, which from all of my findings they are, then your blog could be involved in generating more income than even your print advertising within the next decade.

So, among all of the other forms of internet advertising, why a blog? First of all, I’m certainly not putting down landing pages, websites, email campaigns or other forms of online marketing. I do, however, find that the blog takes advantage of the feeling of over-saturation in the market. Marketing is so potentially invasive these days that it’s nice to be able to sit down and read and honest, plain-dealing blog post which is informative and beneficial to your specific demographic. And no one tries to trick you into thinking that you’ve won a plasma T.V. (Click Here!).

Blogs are also great ways to advertise brand new marketing materials such as a new landing pages, case studies, white papers, or even a new industry research document which you’ve posted. Ideally, you’ve just clicked those links and became a potential lead, but, if not, this blog has the ability to make you aware that I and the Emotecomm team are experts in our field. Discernible expertise, as you well know, is the best way to generate trust between yourself and a potential client.

And finally, a blog allows you to request feedback both from potential clients and any interested party – including your competition – in the form of comments (at the bottom of this page!) which help to generate a dialogue as well as to give you fresh ideas for new posts and articles when you’re not sure what to write about.