Posted January 04 2010

Once again, The Telemarketing Company has sponsored the Telemarketing Survey run by B2B magazine. As always, the results throw out some suprises.

One of the less suprising results is that 39% of respondents say that their use of Telemarketing has increased over the last 12 months, whereas only 26% say it's decreased. This confirms that marketers beleive Telemarketing remains a thoroughly cost effective way of using scarce marketing funds.

More suprising is the number of respondents who say that they can't measure ROI effectively from Telemarketing. On the one hand, it's reassuring that a majority (56%) of marketers have visibility of this critical metric. Nonetheless, this leaves 44% of respondents unsure of what ROI they are getting for both their effort and budget. This seems ludicrously high when you consider the ease with which any organsiation should be able to plug opportunities into a CRM platform and track them through to an eventual sale.

If you can't demostrate ROI when using one of the most measurable channels available, what chance is there of establishing whether your above the line work, events, exibitions and digital work are delivering a profiable return? I suspect that part of the problem is that ROI calculations require a firm understanding of costs, as well as revenue. Costs for in house teams are often hidden wheras outsourced work has a price tag attached, making it easier (and politically often more important) to measure true return for a given level of spend.

Whatever the reason, as it remains an issue we'll continue to work hard to help our clients to measure the effectiveness of their spend with us - often we're in a better position to do this than they are and if a camapign is not going to make our clients money we'd rather tell them and suggest ways of improving results than wait to be told....

Category: Industry News