Telemarketing Lead Generation Blog

Keep Your Company Top of Mind and Market SMARTER!

Posted on Feb 12, 2009 by Ashlea Harris, Vice President of Program Management & Operations

In a recent article in Entrepreneur Magazine, Robert Kiyosaki, author of the Rich Dad series of books said “I have good news and bad news. The good news is you will have fewer competitors next year because many of your competitors will be out of business. The bad news is you might be one of those out of business.”

The bottom line of his piece was in a down economy; strong companies spend money to get stronger. He used the example of a local appliance store that ran a full-page ad in his local newspaper as their competitors struggled. His advice, “when times get tough, your job is to promote more, not less.”

While I agree with his sentiment, I’d like to add one caveat, in tough times, good companies promote more, and they promote SMARTER! It’s similar to the advice that financial advisors give to their customers getting out of debt— mainly to pay off the highest interest rate first and work your way down.

How does this affect you from a marketing standpoint? Well, it’s simple, in a down economy, you don’t cut back your marketing dollars, you just have to be sure that you allocate the dollars to the correct place. One piece of advice is to line up your marketing budget and look at the return on investment. If there needs to be a cut, take from the marketing efforts that have the smallest ROI and move it to the higher ROI. This takes an objective view of your marketing efforts.

For your telemarketing initiatives, ideally you should be able to attach ROI to each telemarketing campaign, allowing you to focus your dollars on those that were the best revenue generators. However, if you can’t track ROI (or don’t feel it’s accurate), you can also look at the following metrics:

• Sales Acceptance Rate –Look at the percentage of your leads that your sales team accepts as valid and rank programs with the highest acceptance rating.

• Estimated Lead Value – Attach a lead value to each opportunity based on the type/quantity of product/service and/or estimated engagement size based on budget. By attaching a value to each lead, you can tentatively determine which will be your best revenue generators.

Keep in mind that changing your telemarketing approach based on CPL stats alone is dangerous. Many times the best quality leads have the highest CPL, but also yield the most revenue. Thus cutting a program just because of a higher CPL is not always in the best interest of your revenue stream. Never assume that the lowest cost per lead translates to be the “best campaign”. In many cases, the best return on investment can come from the campaign that yielded the highest quality of leads but may have cost a bit more.

In general, cutting your marketing budget in a downturn economy may end up costing you more to regain your market share later. By pulling your marketing dollars, your brand is out of sight and out of mind. Marketing during these trying times, creates a competitive advantage by making customers and prospects feel more positive about the company’s commitment to its products and services. It also keeps those companies top of mind when purchase decisions are made.

Eventually, this recession will pass. When it does, the companies with good products/services and smart marketing will emerge stronger.

Tagged: lead generation telemarketing, telemarketing leads, telemarketing sales leads, telemarketing lead measurement, lead generation metrics

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