A typical expectation among new autodialing broadcasters or businesses considering employing pre-recorded telemarketing is that the biggest portion of their transferred calls will prove to be quality leads. The majority of the time this is not true. Yet despite the fact that a minority of calls prove to be qualified leads, voice broadcasting can be employed profitably in many cases, given a thoughtful approach and sound business systems.



If a telemarketer is dialing a pitch to live-answered numbers only, and receiving press one live transfers to sales staff, we've seen many winning campaigns that receive only a 15%-25% "long call value". (Here a long call is characterized as a call where both individuals are on the call at the same time for a minimum of 1 1/2 minutes.) And this is not to connote that most of the "long calls" prove to be identified as good leads by the broadcaster. Far from it. ome broadcasters have confirmed that often only 1/2 or even less of the long calls are good leads.

This is why it is essential that a concern think about their business measurements carefully as they launch a voice broadcasting program. For example, if their overall cost for a "long call" is $25, and 1/2 of them are worthwhile leads, and they can in time close 1/4 of the worthwhile leads, then the cost of a deal for them is $200. If the profit for a single deal is not a lot higher than $200, their own business systems may make it impossible to employ voice broadcasting profitably.

These numbers will change radically among industries, and are affected by both the pitch along with the target dialing list. For example, the make believe firm "Wonderful Web Widgets", wanting to sell website services to small business, would be wasting money to dial a campaign to an "all businesses" list, since such a list would include large firms (which they're not targetting), along with numerous small businesses that have not found a need to have a website.

Why send a message to beauty parlors and accountants if these types of businesses aren't usually concerned with websites? This simply raises the cost of the reduced number of quality leads that are produced.

Another thing to deliberate is the mode of the telemarketing program. The example above concerned a message delivered to live-answered phones. How about answer machine / voicemail broadcasts?

For most industries, the response value for the live delivery - live transfer broadcast is between 0.6% and 1.0%. Which turns out that for every 100 calls delivered to a live answered number, there is less than 1 transfer.

For a program that delivers pitches on answer machines, the numbers will be significantly lower, since the listener will have to have enough concern to write the callback number down, and finally dial it back, taking much more work than simply "pressing 1" when hearing a live recording. These results are impractical for us to track, due to the fact that the calls back to the broadcaster don't utilize our dialing system, but broadcasters who use this method have told us that the call back ratio is often 1/4 to 1/3 of the live transfer rate for a similar script.

For a person thinking about working with pre-recorded telemarketing as a lead production method, the recording is essential, the target market is critical, and the basic business systems are usually the most essential factor to debate when planning a lead generation campaign.