Research Project Damian Brockway – January 2008 – Outbound calling.

Damian Brockway is managing director of Pulse Enterprise UK Ltd a specialist outbound calling, telesales and telemarketing company, working both in the UK and worldwide.

I am often asked what the prospects are for both my own business and the UK industry as most people perceive that the art of outbound calling is disappearing.

Whilst I would agree that the outbound calling industry has changed dramatically and that we will have to change even more so to meet the demands of an ever changing demanding commercial world, I do not agree that the market will either disappear or die altogether.

Inevitably outbound calling companies will diversify, disappear of go to the wall, but this has always been the case. In fact as I often point out look at the outbound calling sections in either a local Yellow Pages or internet listings and it is very easy to see that such companies have always come and gone.

Pulse with a seven year track record is regarded as an old timer! Why? We adapt to our market?

What is currently happening in the UK outbound calling market? Certainly all research points towards tighter and tighter regulation and further difficulties in being able to do the job properly – whether it be caller display, voicemail systems, email, answer phone, TPS service etc.

But how do companies grow? How do they market to their most important ABC1 profile customers? When certain marketing channels die others appear automatically – just look at the internet!

In the case of our business – outbound calling from unsolicited data lists is definitely dying – but cold calling or outbound calling to warm leads or opt in customers remains huge
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Undoubtedly the direct costs of making these outbound calls is increasing from a vendor perspective – but this is mainly due to the collection of the data in the first place.

But I argue, and will continue to argue, that almost nothing competes with the cost per lead generated via the worldwide web – how can it? The cost per delivery if you get it right is generally speaking so low why spend elsewhere?  
 
But there is a major flaw here – how many companies can feature regularly in the top ten searches via any search engine portal? In my view put quite simply there can only be thirty to forty companies who ever survive longer term sourcing leads via the web in any given vertical or horizontal marketplace. There simply is the not the space otherwise!

As more and more companies invest in either their website or SEO web generated sales or leads costs will escalate accordingly and in my opinion very rapidly – if they are not already.

If we were to analyse newspaper advertising revenues I believe this would show just this – and also the value in spreading lead generation resource.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your view of cold calling – outbound calling companies will always exist – it is just we will change our tack according to consumer acceptance of the latest codes or ways of conducting business.

I see more and more outbound business to business calling and less and less business to consumer outbound work – but believe that inbound contact centres will soon do the job the outbound calling used to perform i.e. whilst they are on the line let us get the information we need in an unobtrusive fashion. Even better if we can ask them for opt in to outbound work and they agree using clever marketing techniques then we can still do both!