Telemarketing Results - First Round Feedback

by 23 replies
33
Hey guys,

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:

(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).


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
#offline marketing #feedback #results #round #telemarketing
  • I would suggest you get that number lower. You will not want to be services 50 to 150 clients personally.

    Depending on what you make at your job that number needs to be closer to 20 to 30 or even less.

    Remember to build a business not a job.
    • [ 3 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • I think I can manage that many clients. I should be able to easily scale with my network of contractors that can assist on projets if needed. The sites are all CMS based so the clients can log in and make updates to their content once I get them up and running. On some of my enterprise work, I've worked with teams of 8 to manage over 1,200 sites (on the hosting end). Not to mention dealing with stakeholders like brand managers, etc., but of course I do understand that small business clients will probably be a little more needy.

      I'm sorry, I probably didn't explain it in depth. What I meant was that I haven't received any call backs from the 42 voicemail messages I left.
      • [2] replies
  • I think its a function of no one buys something on a cold call that said, "can you send me information on that?". That is just a easy and polite way for them to end the call.
  • yeah brother... you made like 10-15 calls and got 2 prospects? thats gota count for something bro... its a crazy great rate...

    i would like to ask about your script too
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks for all the great feedback guys!

      One of the hot leads that I had a telephone appointment with turns out he has a REALLY bad website that he paid $2,500 for and it's total crap! I'm confident he'll like my designs so I'll let you guys know if/when I close him :-)

      I only left voicemails because it doesn't take any effort on my part other than hitting the "leave voicemail" button on my autodialer and poof I'm off to the next call while it leaves my message (that I prerecorded). I guess I will consider the "left a message" the same as "no answer" and try again at another time.
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
  • For your first few hundred calls you should be focused on getting into a grove or a call pattern, getting the words out of the script and onto the phone. Just getting comfortable with talking to strangers really, and having a transactional approach which is easy to say 'No.' to.

    This is very true.

    It takes just as much time to make a big sale that it does a little one. But the costs of small sales are much larger, especially when you begin to scale. Even with a CMS, web design is a nightmare when it comes to clients. They don't want to do it, which is why they are paying you, aren't they? The smaller the fish, the more pedantic they seem to be. Every detail is scrutinised and they will expect the world for a few hundred bucks.

    Paraphrasing everything I wrote above: your ambition is noble and I see no fault in your logic. But I think you should take a step back and reconsider if this strategy is ultimately going to help you accomplish your goal.

    You seem to be unhappy with your normal job, and want to have your own business, which is great. You've also done by working out the math, and you should need 10x amount of clients. Also great.

    But I guess you need to consider how much work you're really going to be doing for these people. 150 clients is a BIG number for one person, even with outsourcers. And this is just to replace the income for your fulltime job. Does this build that much desire in you to make the thousands of calls you'd need to make in order to quit?
    You're also going to need to do the work for your existing client base while you scale. I hope you have A LOT of energy to balance a FT role with all these extra stresses and responsibilities. I certainly couldn't do it.
    • [ 2 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • Yeah, most of John's rebuttal examples looked like he wants you to give up way too easily. Pretty much the only thing useful I got from that PDF report was a rough script (since I was Googling for a simple, transparent, non-pushy, and conversational style script). The other thing I got from the report was the psychology of "I'm just one small business owner offering help to another small business owner". This helped me to actually get in the state of mind to get started. Everything else in that report was useless to me since I already have sales experience. Each time I get a new job or a new contract in my field I have to "sell" myself on my skillset and how I would be able to help these enterprises. I also have inbound call experience from way back when I owned my e-commerce business. I made an average of 5 - 10 sales a day (depending on the season) with an average ticket price of $350. (Orders ranged in price from $90 to $2,000).

      I would certainly be open to script modification suggestions if you have any pointers :-)

      Lol, yeah I've seen that "idiot designer" cartoon quite a few times and oh how true that is in most cases. However, in the corporate environment, we've been trained to "push-back" and to "not support that" and to simply say "no" to things that stakeholders and brand managers want, but are just downright stupid; which I think a lot of freelance designers have never been formally trained how to diplomatically do that.

      I make over 6 figures at my current job (not a boast and I didn't even want to disclose that, but I need to illustrate the numbers here). My current contract is WFH and is actually pretty cushy, but I'm bored and miss running my own show. I could make more if I chose to work closer to the main city and actually commute somewhere, but part of the reason I even accepted this recent contract is because working from home allows me to build this side business (and hopefully make it a FT thing).

      My site design prices are probably a little low (and I'm planning on raising them a bit), but my hosting/support/monitoring prices are already much higher than the norm so I don't think it would be feasible to raise those. I'm looking for residual income that can be compounded with each sale. I don't miss those days of my last business where I had to keep chasing the next sale to make sure we could make payroll.

      To exactly match my current income I would need roughly 80 clients. 50 would be the bare minimum to pay my mortgage, car payments, utilities, etc. 150 would be nice because who doesn't want to make more money :-D

      In my last role on a team of 8 people we managed 1,200 sites amongst us. In my current role I personally manage 119 sites and sometimes I sit around twiddling my thumbs (or...now working on my side business). Keep in mind each of those sites actually has more than one stakeholder or brand manager that needs something or pesters you for certain things so you can think of them in terms of a small business customer...sorta I guess :-/ I wouldn't be able to know for sure unless I'm in the trenches.

      I think you're right about getting into the groove and practicing. Thanks for the feedback everyone...this has been really helpful :-)
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
  • Have a friend leave voice messages saying that their site sucks balls and to call you to get it fixed.

    That's how you leave voice messages! It works!
    • [ 2 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks for the feedback so I guess I shouldn't expect anything from the voicemails I left so far. So now I'm rethinking my voicemail strategy. It's just as much effort to click "hangup" as it is to click "leave message" so what do you guys think?
      1. Continue leaving voicemails when I get a machine and just keep calling back as if it were a "no answer". (Maybe the next call will be slightly warm because they heard the message?)
      2. Don't leave any messages at all.
      3. Leave a message with just my name and number (excluding the purpose of my call).

      I should probably clarify that I'm not specifically calling just to leave messages. I'm trying to reach live people. I just leave messages when I get a machine. Any suggestions?

      Hahahahaha! This made me laugh so hard Does it really work? I'm not sure I want to use tricks, etc. though. Plus most of my prospects don't have any site at all.
      • [1] reply
  • Study and Master the skill of consultative selling by phone. Several Masters on these techniques in this forum, including Jason and Claude.

    If your Pick all their threads and answers - You could easily publish your own ebook on the subject.

    I agree with most warriors here. You dont need 150 clients in a one man operation. If You do, You either sell the Wrong service or attacking the Wrong market. Offline clients with Big pockets is not afraid of Big invoices and they would love to pay.

    I use the consultative techniques not as a sales approach, but as a client approval system. they need to qualify in terms of having a relationship with me. I dont persuade clients to buy leads, i dont take on centspickers and i dont do business with People's, WHO cannot talk about anything but business....

    Regards, Lasse
  • Maybe you addressed this earlier, and I am curious, but you seem to be focused on Voice Mail.

    How many actual conversations have you had?

    I thinks it's good to look at the daily stats #Dials - to - #Conversations ratio closely as it tells me how I am coming across in the opening of the call (receptive or too sales-ie). Also, and this is really important, I can get a good idea if my pain points are resonating with that niche and allows me to modify/change/add as I gain more insight (ie, have more conversations) from prospects.

    Anyway -- sounds like you are moving in your desired direction. Good luck to you!
    • [1] reply
    • I don't mean to sound so focused on the voice mail aspect of my experiment, but I was just curious about whether or not it would move the needle much in terms of additional results.

      My major focus is finding out how many X number of dials/contacts are needed for Y number of sales. I think from my initial experiment I can see that this can work and produce a recent ROI.

      My next move may involve hiring an experienced telemarketer from a temp agency (in the US - not outsourced overseas). I'm thinking of doing this because now I have some metrics under my belt to know what to expect in terms of performance. I also know how to train the person to replicate what I've done. I have about 3 "hot" leads that I'm still working with, but haven't closed yet.

      I'm a little apprehensive about doing this because of my disastrous results with Odesk a few months ago. My postmortem thoughts are that when I outsourced on Odesk: I didn't have a script, I didn't have training materials, and the telemarketers all had accents (making them sound more like telemarketers).

      Do you guys think this is a good idea or should I stick this out and keep slowly plugging away at it myself? (I don't have as much time to devote to that as I do development)

      I'm much more proficient and have more experience with development and hosting than I do with telemarketing sales so I was thinking this might be a good investment in jump starting this business.

      Any advice is as always very appreciated
      • [1] reply
  • [DELETED]
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • [DELETED]
  • [DELETED]
Join the discussion

Next Topics on Trending Feed

  • 33

    Telemarketing Results - First Round Feedback

    Hey guys, 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).