As a consumer, when you think about the concept of “telemarketing”, what comes to mind? Do you think of annoying dinner time phone calls by pseudo market research firms requesting your time to answer a brief survey? Or from local small businesses offering real estate services, newspaper subscriptions or free estimates for windows and doors.

It’s fair to say that telemarketing has a nefarious reputation because it’s disruptive and in fact, is commonly referred to as interruption marketing. Still, big and small businesses as well as not-for-profit organizations alike rely on the use of telemarketing as the key driver of communication for their overall sales and marketing strategy. The telephone remains a very productive means of selling many types of business services and products.

Telemarketing campaigns can be very effective as a strategy to introduce a company to a prospect, for setting up appointments and in general, as a key element in a company’s overall sales cycle. And not just to initiate sales activity. A follow up call made to a prospect after a face to face presentation can further advance the communication process and even lead to a close by phone.

For the contemporary telemarketer however, dialling for dollars is not as efficient as it once was during the salad days of marketing by phone. Today, callers outgoing sales messages must now compete with email marketing, direct mail, fax broadcasting, voice mail, jaded gate keepers, and in the United States, “do not call legislation”.

To recapture some efficiency for this tried and true direct selling method, big business in particular has introduced the use of outsourcing and sophisticated telemarketing software. Increasingly, a lot of this outsourcing is going off-shore to service providers located in countries such as India, for example.

India is a country with a very educated workforce that is available at much cheaper labour rates than the those of the US and Canada. India’s business proposition continues to garner a reputation for reliability and for services that include outbound as well as inbound call center fulfillment.

Thinking of telemarketing in the US? Our next post will be a good resource for you to bookmark - or to link to - because it will be a handy reference for information about “do not call” legislation in the United States - on a state by state basis.

In the meantime, this is worth a listen – it’s a consumer making a disruptive (but very funny) phone call of their own.:-)

Now if you’re a Mr Rogers fan btw, don’t fret. We like Mr Rogers too and we’ll be posting some excellent footage of this great man shortly. Stay tuned!