Telemarketing Lead Generation Blog

Examining Cost & Historical Stats to Estimate Realistic Results & Maximize Investments

Posted on May 19, 2009 by Kathy Rizzo, Vice President of Sales and Marketing

Reviewing recent campaign metrics for an outbound lead generation campaign aimed at 1,000 prospects that downloaded a whitepaper, I found some interesting cost statistics, which are worth sharing.

In this particular campaign, the telemarketing targeted approximately 1,000 “responders” for the purpose of qualifying and identifying “sales-ready” leads. The results were as follows:

• 31% unusable data
• 57% completion rate of the usable data (completion = successfully identified and reached correct decision-maker for meaningful interview/discussion)
• 16% lead rate (leads / completed interviews)
• 6.4% list conversion rate (leads / total list)

Statistically speaking the telemarketing was successful. The completion rate fell within the expected range and the lead rate was higher than the traditional 10-12%. The list conversion rate was also higher than historical averages.

However, the Cost Per Lead for the entire campaign was astronomical. Why? As it turns out, to get the 1,000 responders, more than $150K was spent on content creation and media placement. Telemarketing added only $25K to the effort. Nevertheless, the overall CPL was $2.7K.

This is a case in which the cost outweighs the possible return. The campaign driver estimated that if 1,000 prospects downloaded whitepaper, 30-40% would become sales-ready leads. But that assumption doesn’t match historical results. Statistically and historically speaking, a 6.4% conversion of list to lead – as obtained in this campaign – is actually quite reasonable.

What can we take away from this?

• Use Historical Statistics To Estimate Your Return – If you don’t have historical data, check with others on your team, contact your tele-qualification team or vendor and/or even post a question in a Linkedin group of your peers. Most importantly, make sure that the end result makes your investment cost effective.

• Augment with Proactive Cold-Calling to Drive Additional Leads – Getting your prospects to raise their hand and then qualify via telemarketing should not be the only way to obtain leads using your assets. Additionally, you can proactively contact prospects in your database via telemarketing in order to relay your message and probe for opportunities while using the assets you’ve already invested in creating. Taking the above scenario, if another $30K was spent on telemarketing to a cool list, the quantity of leads would have increased by 40 to 50, driving down the CPL by nearly 40%.

• Nurture Your Non-leads To Maximize Investment – Nurturing the prospects you’ve spent money in identifying will benefit your organization in the long-run and will allow you to maximize the investment you’ve already made.

Tagged: lead generation, targeted lead generation, lead generation metrics, telemarketing lead generation metrics, lead nurturing

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