It’s a question the VSA sales team has gotten on more than one occasion when speaking with potential clients:
Why should I pay an outside company to handle my B2B telephone lead generation when I can just hire someone myself to make cold calls, or even utilize some of my existing employees?
It’s a fair question. And truthfully, depending on your market, your offering, and the size of your business, you might very well be better off managing telephone lead generation internally. Certainly, outsourcing isn’t always a financially practical decision.
Often, though, partnering with an experienced lead gen and appointment-setting firm makes the most business sense. Expanding or relying on your own inside sales team for cold calling might be tempting, but when it comes to generating and nurturing leads, there are multiple reasons to consider outsourcing.
Here are five of them:
1. The technology
What type of automated dialing platform (if any) are you using to call prospects now? How many calls can your reps make per hour?
The days when cold calling consisted of picking up a phone and manually dialing prospects one-by-one are long in the past, at least if you want to keep pace with your competition. Power and predictive dialers deliver increased productivity and significantly higher call volumes, leading to more conversations with qualified decision-makers … and more conversions.
VSA recently added to our tech stack with an automated, omnichannel platform that allows us to communicate with our clients’ prospects more efficiently, and we’ve already seen positive results.
The right technology is an essential piece of any modern lead generation campaign, but it’s a major financial commitment. If you can pass that investment onto somebody else, why wouldn’t you?
2. Managing and training your reps
Having a few in-house reps available to make calls is great, but it’s not like you can just assign them to the phones and expect to see immediate results. There’s a reason so few sales reps excel at cold calling—as described in a recent HubSpot article, “it’s a tricky process that takes a lot of patience, persistence, practice, and finesse to nail consistently.”
VSA’s Program Managers and Quality & Training team continuously monitor, support, and train our Business Development Representatives, working closely with them to identify strengths and weaknesses. We know which BDRs will be most effective on which client programs, and which ones may require a little extra coaching.
On top of that, there are the scheduling headaches and other administrative responsibilities to worry about. Knowing you have highly trained reps making phone calls on your behalf for as many hours as you require, without having to schedule those hours or monitor those callers yourself, can take a huge burden off your shoulders.
3. Employee morale
Here’s another truth about cold calling: Your sales reps probably hate it. Especially if it keeps them from spending more time focusing on the juicier parts of their jobs, such as building meaningful relationships with prospects and closing deals.
According to recent statistics, 63% of sales reps describe cold calling as the worst part of their job, and 48% are reluctant to make cold calls at all. So even if your in-house reps are making cold calls, they probably wish they were doing something else.
At VSA, our BDRs’ only job in most cases is making cold calls, so it’s not like the task is keeping them from other assignments. And judging by how long many of them have been with us (there is only a 3% turnover rate among our top-performing BDRs), they actually enjoy making cold calls. The right attitude on the phone can make all the difference in getting a prospect to engage.
4. Accurate and secure data
Two questions: 1) How much time does your company spend compiling B2B data lists; and 2) How accurate is the data you’ve accumulated?
Various studies reveal that at least 20% of a business’s contact data is flawed in some way—inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, redundant. According to a recent Gartner study, poor data quality costs businesses an average of $12.9 million annually.
VSA’s list-building and list-enrichment tools can rectify many of those issues. The right list is a 60-70% predictor of a program’s success, which is why we spend ample time before (and during) a client program ensuring we have the most accurate possible data. VSA also takes data security and confidentiality very seriously (we are about to become SOC2-compliant, on top of numerous other data privacy certifications), adding to our clients’ peace of mind.
5. Scalability
Anyone who’s ever run a business knows there are always surprises—both good and bad—that impact staffing levels. You could be adequately staffed one day before an unexpected market turn suddenly leaves your team scrambling to meet demand. On the flip side, you could find that the new employees you recently hired, onboarded, and trained are suddenly no longer necessary.
In either case, you’ve got a stressful situation on your hands, not to mention the usual seasonal staffing challenges.
But with an outside partner providing the personnel, scaling up or down is as easy as making a quick phone call. VSA can adapt seamlessly and scale your team and calling hours to match your requirements at any given time, no matter how often those needs fluctuate.
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There are plenty of other reasons to consider outsourcing your B2B telephone lead generation needs, all of which could potentially help you grow your business.
Or, depending on your company’s situation, outsourcing might not be the best choice.
We’d love to have a quick conversation to find out.