How Telemarketers Are Bad for Business

Most Cold Calls are Irrelevant to the Target Company

Aug 5, 2009 Stan DeVaughn

Telemarketers' unsolicited phone calls at the office aren't just annoying, they're bad for business. They cost money because they waste the time of the people they reach.

"Our approach to selling is very personal and very much focused on relationships we already have," said Robbie Forkish, founding CEO of computer security firm Cloud Compliance, in an interview. "But the reality is that many vendors, large and small, in their eagerness to reach out, don't always do their basic homework."

Business-to-business telemarketers make a lot of calls. The total last year was a whopping 36 billion, according to telemarketing consultant Holcutt Associates. The number number will increase in 2009. This amounts to an average of 600 calls for every business in America. Of course, the bigger and more prominent the target, the more cold calls it will receive. One IT executive at a large insurance company got about 100 calls per week in 2008.

Business-to-business telemarketers are trained to leave at least seven voice-mail messages before they give up, according to Holcutt Associates. Deleting unwanted voice-mail messages just compounds the problem.

100 hours a year wasted

When they do get through, cold callers estimate that they spend about ten minutes talking to gatekeepers or decision-makers who rarely, if ever, buy anything. So that adds up to almost 100 hours a year that these recipients could have spent doing something more productive.

Respondents to a recent survey said that the growing volume of telemarketing calls they received at work made them "angry." Not just because of the rude interruptions, but that so many cold callers fail to offer real value to the companies they call.

"Too many IT vendors still get it wrong when it comes to things that customers value," said Robert Hamilton, product marketing director at Symantec and a marketing veteran at HP and NetApp. "When your outreach is guided by what a piece of technology can do, rather than why a specific customer would need it, you're bound to be misguided."

More companies wary of telemarketing fraud

In a struggling economy problem grows worse. More vendors resort to cold calling in a recession. Fewer targets are receptive. And they are not just weary of cold callers, but wary of them. The National Fraud Information Center says that telemarketing fraud amounted to $40 billion in 2008.

Outsourcing to a vendor screening service is one option and free-of-charge when the service provider charges the callers. The service screens the calls for relevance and value and reports the findings back to the parties who are called. They key is to screen the solicitation based on the needs of the business.

They can't make cold calling go away, but they can unburden managers and ensure that more work time is devoted to accomplishing work.

The copyright of the article How Telemarketers Are Bad for Business in Business Management is owned by Stan DeVaughn. Permission to republish How Telemarketers Are Bad for Business in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Cold calls waste the target's time

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