Telemarketing Lead Generation Blog

Inbound Marketing on the Rise – Leverage it to Enhance Teleprospecting Interaction

Posted on Jun 24, 2011 by Jason St Onge, Senior Account Executive

The excitement around inbound and social marketing tactics is on the rise among business-to-business marketers, particularly in the area of lead generation. As my colleague Kathy Rizzo pointed out in a recent Atlanta Business Chronicle article,Why Social Media Doesn’t Replace Tradition , these tactics are important components of a marketing strategy providing valuable content and driving interest among prospects; they can also be leveraged by teleprospectors to enhance outbound dialogue with prospects.

Recently, Lauren Goldstein featured an article titled,Inbound vs. Outbound B2B Demand Generation Marketing on her Lauren On Demand demand generation blog. The article highlights the importance of relevant content designed to meet pain points and interests of the target audience as key to success for any marketing campaign, regardless if it is inbound or outbound. This is a great point, and is something that should be considered when developing any teleprospecting initiative. An interesting item from the article was a statistic from a HubSpot inbound marketing survey that stated:

• Inbound marketing-dominated organizations experience a cost per lead 62% lower than outbound marketing-dominated organizations

While I am not surprised by this statistic, I do think it can be misleading to marketers, particularly those that still rely on cost per lead metrics. I wanted to point up a couple things to keep in mind:

• Not all “leads” are created equal. Lead definitions vary greatly from company to company, person to person and source to source, so make sure lead cost comparisons take that into consideration. Ask yourself – where is this lead coming from, how qualified is it, would I pass it directly to sales.
• Cost per lead for inbound programs may be less expensive as they are typically less qualified. For example, a prospect that downloads a whitepaper does show interest, but is less qualified than a telemarketed prospect that indentifies their decision making ability, specific needs and timeframe.
• Inbound leads often require additional qualification. Whether it is done by a telemarketing or sales team, the time spent on this qualification process does have a cost, and if added to the initial cost of the lead, can significantly increase the true cost per lead number. Here is a previous blog post on examining that cost: Examining Cost – Historical Stats to Estimate Realistic Results & Maximize Investments.

So what does all this ultimately have to do with inbound tactics enhancing teleprospecting efforts? Well, inbound and outbound marketing efforts working together can make a greater impact. Teleprospecting programs are significantly benefited by the availability of relevant content and marketing touch points, as they can be leveraged real time during a conversation based on a prospect’s specific areas of interest or need. Also, while inbound leads do reflect some level of interest, they typically don’t tell the whole story (i.e. provide insight into the prospect’s need, budget, decision-making process, and purchase timeframe). Due to this, inbound leads that are further qualified by telemarketing have more value, and a higher conversion rate.

Tagged: teleprospecting, lead generation, telemarketing lead generation, targeted lead generation, outbound marketing, inbound marketing, lead generation telemarketing

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