Telemarketing Results - First Round Feedback
So for the past 15 years I've worked in Dev/Ops (that area between web designers and infrastructure/hosting). 10 of those years I was a co-owner of an e-commerce business that I left due to my other two partners splitting up causing the whole business to fall apart at the seams. I've been working the past 3 years as a web hosting engineer (Dev/Ops side).
I really miss owning my own business and last year I setup my company to do web design and hosting. It's been sitting and collecting dust until now since I've been struggling with finding ways of marketing.
In December I decided to give telemarketing a shot by outsourcing to odesk (whopping failure and waste of money). I eventually figured I would try telemarketing myself, but the prospect of cold calling and the logistics of it all scared me.
I found John Durham's stuff and grabbed a copy of the PDF report from here and figured it sounds pretty logical even though I've read some good and bad reviews about him (I don't know the guy so I have no idea...I just know his script and psychology was enough to give me a kickstart).
I found an "autodialer program" that you import a csv into and you just click "powerdial" and it automatically makes calls over VoIP. It's pretty cool because I can prerecord a message and just hit that button when I get VM and it automatically leaves a message and starts dialing the next call...HUGE TIME SAVER!
My target market is small main street businesses with either no website or a crappy site. My USP is that I've worked with some very large enterprises and actually have been doing this for a living for a decade and a half, but I charge very reasonable prices for the design because what I really want is the residual hosting fees (web hosting is near and dear to my heart).
Sorry for the long winded intro, but here are my results so far:
disconnected / wrong number = 9
hot leads = 2 (one prospect "has a guy that's working on his site" but was open to giving me his email and talking more) (another prospect may want a redesign of his current site and I have an appointment over the phone scheduled with him later tonight).
no answer = 25
left message = 42
turn down = 7
warm = 3
sales so far = 0
How do those results seem for a small first time campaign? BTW, I haven't received a single callback from my messages so either my message needs to be tweaked, two days isn't enough time to gauge, or the autodialer is malfunctioning...or maybe a combination of all that :confused:
I figure that it takes about an average of minute of my life for each call (including no answers, talk time, etc.) It takes about an hour to laser target and compile a list of 100 potential prospects and import them into the autodialer.
I'm not worried about having to constantly rely on telemarketing because I don't need very many clients since I need between 50 to 150 clients total to match what I'm making at work.
The biggest takeaway from this is that I'm no longer afraid of cold calling and I have not had a single irate or pissed off prospect...yet :p Everyone has been extremely nice even when they turn down my offer (I have a site already; my uncles, brother's, nephew does that; blah blah; etc.)
Should I hit the phones a little harder? Is this a waste of time? Do I just need to make more calls? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. This is my first round of cold calling ever and my main goal was to see if at least people would be receptive to my calls, which seems like the case so far. Obviously the point of this whole exercise is to make sales so that's my ultimate goal
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âDo not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.â - Matsuo Basho
âDo not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.â - Matsuo Basho
>> For Agency Founders: The Fast Shortcut To Selling SEO, Leadgen, Webdesign & Other Services