Making Business Sense With Telemarketing

A couple of years after the inception of the first telephone, businesses were quick to recognize its potential for their business’ growth. They assimilated this new technology into their business processes and thus revolutionized what was to become the first set of telemarketers. It not only provided businesses with quick access to present or existing clients, but also potential ones. Unfortunately, legitimate business owners were not the only ones quick enough to jump on the telemarketing bandwagon. Unscrupulous and opportunistic groups of people were also quick to recognize the opportunity to make a quick buck. This gave birth to the first fraudulent boiler rooms. From there, it was all downhill for the entire telemarketing world. Legitimate telemarketing companies were dragged into the scandals that followed.
The public outcry was loud enough to be heard by legislators. They quickly acted on it by creating laws (DNC, Mandated Caller ID, Curfew, Etc.) which protected not only the consumers and other businesses, but in the process, protected the legitimate telemarketing companies as well. Over time, B2B telemarketing became the next big thing as businesses ranging from small “mom-and-pop” store to Fortune 500 companies were making a fortune by migrating a great deal of their business processes like appointment setting, business lead generation and answering services over to the professional care of B2B telemarketing call centers.
But the stigma is already there and the damage has been done. Because of this, business owners are now thinking twice on using telemarketers for some of their business functions. They simply believe that the telemarketing process itself does not work and there are some even saying that in no way, shape or form would they ever have their company names attached with telemarketing. Though their reasons are not entirely baseless, they do however, stem from plain and simple ignorance. By 2009, industry sources have already put the telemarketing growth at a ballpark figure of around $480B, that’s more than what Microsoft or Apple makes.

Putting things in perspective, yes, there will always be fraudulent telemarketing companies and people who will take advantage of consumers over the phone, in the same way that there will be people posing as legitimate doctors or stores selling questionable products made in China. But the thing here is, there are laws that protect us from all of them, in the same way these same laws protect the legitimate businesses. It’s also true that people on the DNC list don’t want to get any phone calls from telemarketers, but there are still others who chose to not register despite their ability to do so. Unless you’re living under a rock or you’ve been comatose for the last couple of years, you’d know for a fact that telemarketing does work. The honest-to-goodness truth is that telemarketing remains among the most responsive channels to utilize in your direct marketing campaign. The proof is all around us. All you’ve got to do nowadays is look up a telemarketing company via Google and do a little background check.