Why You SHOULDN'T Outsource Your Lead Gen to Us
We've been doing this for a long time now and I would be lying if I told you that every single one of our customer engagements went perfectly. Ours is a very tricky business involving more than just cold calling prospects. There are certain characteristics that exist within a company's sales and marketing organizations that allow them to work well with an outsourced teleprospecting firm like AG Salesworks. If you are entertaining the idea of outsourcing some or all of your teleprospecting I'd encourage you to ask yourself the following questions first:
1. What do your sales reps want?
We all can agree that there are plenty of politics involved in the interactions between our sales and marketing teams. Your teleprospecting plans are not immune to it. At the end of the day it is the reaction of your sales reps to the quality of the leads you provide that will determine how successful the effort is. Take special care to find out how your sale people define what a lead is and allow that to have some significant impact on your own plan. Many salespeople are simply looking to get in front of a target audience for a meeting. Others are looking for a pre-sales demo to be conducted by a teleprospector. We provide fully qualified sales opportunities with an introductory conference call attached. We function in the middle of those two options. If your reps prefer one or the other, then providing them with a service like AG's would have a lower chance of succeeding.
2. Do you think Teleprospecting and Inside Sales are the same things?
Many of the people I speak to in the sales and marketing community view teleprospecting and inside sales as the same thing. They believe a teleprospector not only generates leads for sales people, but they also can take smaller opportunities all the way to close; sort of a hybrid model. This works extremely well for certain organizations and if you subscribe to this view then a straight lead gen campaign with AG wouldn't meet all of your needs (we offer closing the sale, but that is different than our traditional lead gen efforts) . We have detailed business conversations and then transition prospects to sales people at the critical stage where interest is peaked and technical questions are being asked. If you want someone to keep going from that point and close certain deals, then we would not meet your expectations.
3. Are you a control freak?
Before you get offended, I am a self admitted control freak. I love having my whole team right in front of me in the office. For me, there is something substantial gained by having all of, or most of, your teleprospectors in one place. The buzz, momentum, and indirect training that occurs by having your team all in one place is huge for us. This is the driving force behind our entire customer service philosophy. We want our clients to have an office away from the office at AG. They have unlimited access to our facilities and their assigned team. We want them to feel that they have that centralized energy. That being said, it still isn't enough for some of us control freaks out there. If you know you'd sleep better at night with your whole team right there in your facility, then outsourcing, even to a company as transparent as AG, isn't the best move.
I hope this helps if you are trying to determine whether you and your organization are a good fit for a service like ours.
Pete