Choosing whether to run your telemarketing activities in-house or outsource to an external agency can be a difficult decision.
That’s why we wanted to put together this article to cover the differences and some of the pros and cons of doing in-house telemarketing or outsourcing your telemarketing.
The Benefits of In-house Telemarketing
Campaign control
One of the benefits of running telemarketing campaigns in-house is that you can keep a watchful eye over how it is executed and managed, and how it is performing. This means you can maintain control over the campaign's direction and take a more hands-on approach
Maintaining compliance
When your campaign is run in-house you have control over the way that it’s run, which means you can ensure that it is run in compliance with marketing regulations and laws within your industry.
Knowledge of your business
You are the experts of your business and industry, which means you know exactly what your customers are looking for and how to engage with them. Some external agencies might not have this knowledge or experience in your sector.
The Drawbacks of In-house Telemarketing
Budget restrictions
Running telemarketing campaigns in-house can become very costly, very quickly.
Not only will you have to pay for software costs for CRMs and softphone systems, hardware costs for headsets and additional office equipment, and compliant data lists for dialling – you’ll also have to pay the wages of the telemarketers or salespeople that are going to man the phones. All of which can reach many tens of thousands of pounds altogether.
Time investment
One of the biggest drawbacks of in-house telemarketing is the time investment.
With aspects of the campaign like training, call coaching, planning, prospecting, and dealing with follow-ups all taking a large amount of time, you and your sales teams could be spending hundreds of hours a month on running the campaigns.
That’s a lot of time to dedicate to the activity when it could be better spent actually closing deals or otherwise running your business.
And, if you are having to recruit a sales team to run the campaign, that could take even longer, and could be very pricey!
Required skillset
While you may have an unrivalled knowledge of your industry, if you don’t have the experience in successfully planning and executing telemarketing campaigns, all of the time and money that you pour into your campaign could all be for nought.
The Benefits of Outsourced Telemarketing
Experts in telemarketing
When you outsource your telemarketing to the right agency, you’re handing over the reins of your campaign to the people that know telemarketing inside and out.
They know what works, and more importantly, they know what doesn’t work – so their approach could yield far better results than if you ran the campaign in-house.
Takes the weight off your shoulders
Passing the telemarketing torch over an external agency means you have more time to run your business, and your sales teams aren’t bogged down in prospecting and making introductory calls; they have more time to do what they do best – close sales.
Reduce costs
Without having to pay for masses of overheads or dedicated staff to run the campaign, you could be massively reducing your costs by outsourcing your telemarketing.
With the combination of this potential reduction in costs with the opportunity to see better results from an external agency, it’s a recipe for increased profit and ROI (Return on investment).
The Drawbacks of Outsourced Telemarketing
Less control & visibility
Generally, when you outsource your telemarketing campaigns to an external agency, you won’t have full control over the campaign process or as much visibility of call stats or what goes on during individual calls.
However, some agencies, like us here at River, run completely scalable telemarketing campaigns and give you 24/7 access to our CRM system, so you can view call notes and keep up with your campaign’s performance in real-time.
Finding the right fit can be hard
It’s important to find the right fit when searching for a telemarketing partner. But doing trial and error with multiple agencies can mean multiple failed campaigns with a negative return.
We’ve heard from multiple clients that they had tried multiple agencies before finding River, and it’s the same for other reputable agencies too.
Industry experience
Some agencies may not know your type of business or the markets that you want to break into to build a sufficient basis for a campaign. Without this knowledge and experience, you may see results that are lower than expected, you may spend large amounts of time training the external telemarketing agents on your business, your offering, and the markets you want to reach.
Making the Right Call for your Business
To sum up, you need to carefully consider your current position in order to make the best call (little 'call' pun there) on whether to run keep your telemarketing in-house or outsource.
If you already have a tried and tested approach and provisions in place to run your campaigns e.g. trained staff, equipment and software, and a reliable and trusted source for data, then running in-house campaigns can be very effective.
However, if you would have to go through the hassle of recruiting and training a telemarketing or sales team, buying licences for software packages and acquiring data, and not to mention the many hours of trial and error that you would encounter, outsourcing can be the far more effective option in terms of time, money, and results.
Another great thing about outsourcing your telemarketing is that over the years, the telemarketing industry has come a long way. What we mean by this, is that you can still experience many of the benefits of running campaigns in-house like maintaining campaign control and visibility, when you outsource to the right telemarketing agency.
Take River, for example. We know how important it is for telemarketing campaigns to stay flexible, which is why we give our clients the freedom to ramp up or dial down their activities with us, so they can increase the amount of dialling per week or slow it down to suit their budget and workload.
We also know how valuable campaign visibility and transparency is when working in partnership businesses, and that’s why give all of our clients 24/7/365 access to their campaign’s analytics within our CRM system.
Clients can view call stats, notes, and outcomes all in real-time. Giving our clients complete visibility of their campaigns means we can ensure they are happy with our approach, or they can make changes to the pitch, target market, and call outcomes if they wish.
If you’re looking for the right telemarketing company to take your lead generation or appointment setting work off of your hands, then get in touch to speak to a member of our team!