So, how about your business? How much of your Business-to-Business lead generation budget do you allocate for teleservices which are outsourced? These outsourced services include offerings such as both inbound and outbound call center services, direct mail, business process outsourcing services, phone-based services comprised of live and automated handling, and live Internet contact by service agents.



Business-to-Business sales lead consulting professionals are often asked by their clients to help them select outsourced marketing firms, to better implement and improve their lead-generation, follow-up and lead qualification programs. Recently, some reports on this topic have provided results which I look at skeptically. As an example, a report stated that businesses are spending over thirty percent of the entire lead-generation budget on B2B teleservices, for example. The report also stated that the companies considered best of class spend even more, almost forty-five percent.

However, in my own personal experience working with B2B sales lead programs for top companies (of large, medium, and small size), have all led me to believe that these percentages are way too high to reflect reality. After taking a poll with some experts in the marketing and communications industry including B2B call center CEOs, some B2B marketers who do outsourcing, and some B2B telemarketing consultants, I realized that I'm not alone in my skepticism of the percentages indicated in the report.

So, then what did the informal poll indicate? All of the people who I polled agreed about the lead generation budget numbers being too high in the report. The telemarketing CEOs that I spoke with expressed that they would be quite happy if their customers spent thirty to forty percent of their budget on the kind of outsourced services in question. But, they also indicated that in reality they spend much less than that, in their own professional experience.

A Business-to-Business telephone expert declared that the numbers could not be correct, saying they just didn't ring true. The Business-to-Business marketing professionals who use these these sorts of outsourced services for telemarketing in lead generation reported that the percentages in the report were far higher than the actual spending that they allocated for outsourced services. This consistent disparity seemed to confirm my suspicions about the report, better illuminating the details of the overall scenario.

So what exactly could be going on here? It is actually difficult to know. In conclusion, even though the small scale, informal poll that I undertook can not truly be considered valid in the scientific sense, perhaps it brings to light that the more official report does not truly represent the percentages of actual outsourced marketing allocated in most marketing and communications budgets. It seems that this sort of examination of other independent experts involved in different elements of the marketing and communications field could make one think that a little skepticism concerning budget percentages could end up not such a bad thing. Maybe it's not enough to just take the information that is provided at face value, but instead it would be beneficial to delve deeper and create a more diverse source of industry information from a wider range of contributing reporters