Obtaining Telemarketing Services: Having In-House or Outsourced Services?

Even with the cost-effective outsourced services available in the world today, such as telemarketing, many still choose to have in-house telemarketing services rather than to entrust it to a third party provider. However, for small and medium firms that have only recently just started and do not possess the needed resources to have in-house services, the only choice would be to go for outsourced telemarketing services. Both forms may have their pros and cons, however, in-house telemarketing services are just a bit more disadvantageous that going with outsourcing. If you are planning to have telemarketing done for you soon, then you would do well to know which type to get: outsourced or in-house services.

As said above, both sides have their positives and negatives but as also mentioned, in-house services may just be a little more of a hassle to handle unlike with outsourced services. Hopefully, this article won't discourage you from picking in-house but rather just give you a view of what you would be getting into. Although, the question still remains: should you go with in-house service? Or outsourced services?

OUTSOURCED TELEMARKETING SERVICES - This is perhaps the most widely taken choice by many firms, even those who have the needed resourced for getting their own in-house staff and call center. However, many choose this because it is a cost-effective sales and marketing solution. Also, the telemarketing companies that offer their services to clients that need them employ professional and skilled telemarketers. And although they do hire new staff every now and then, the experience that they soon earn is enough to fuel their purpose. Be it lead generation, appointment setting or plain old hard-selling, these telemarketers are experts at what they do, show professionalism no matter the circumstances they are pushed into and know just what to do and what to say to make sales happen. Also, if the services is not effective for you, it can easily be terminated after the open contract is over. This offers less risk because you won't have to spend for so much and only have it fail in the end.

IN-HOUSE TELEMARKETING SERVICES - This type of service proves to be also quite promising but it takes a bit of difficulty to manage. For one, you would need additional office space to house your own call center, something that small and medium firms, especially those who are leasing a building cannot do. This already is a huge problem to those who do not have the resourced needed to spend for the construction of an in-house call center and those without enough space within their office building. Second, aside from just the costs of construction, one would also have to deal with buying all the needed equipment for the tasks that need to be done. Third is hiring new staff, another thing that may possibly incur a heavy toll on the allotted budget. Last and not the least is time. Time is mentioned because you would need to take time to train these new employees in how to market your products and services via the phone. You can have complete control of how your telemarketing campaign functions when you have it done in-house but just remember to be prepared that if it does not go so well, you may have just spent a great portion of your hard-earned money on a major loss.

Don't fret too much, though. No matter what type of telemarketing service you get, it has proven to be quite successful; don't get discouraged about in-house services, as well. If you're a small/medium firm, then outsourcing may be your only choice. But if you're a large company and can afford it and believes that your campaign will succeed, then by all means, go for in-house telemarketing services.

Sarah Barnes is a telemarketing expert with 11 years experience as a sales leads analyst for small and medium companies. Sarah invites you to visit http://www.121directmarketing.com/ for more information on pre-qualified sales leads and appointments.

Creating a Customer-Driven Vision

Customers don't always stay loyal to a company, but what lies behind their decision to switch companies? Much research is done to answer this question, including companies surveying their customers directly, outsourcing the survey process to a third party, or participating in a general and anonymous industry-wide survey. What all the research boils down to is that customers leave companies because they received too little contact and individual attention, or the attention they did receive was poor in quality.

To combat customers leaving because of little or poor attention, organizations must create a customer-driven company. This is accomplished by creating a customer-keeping vision and then saturating the company with the "voice of the customer." Achieving customer-winning performance means walking the talk and leading by example at the highest management levels.

So what is a customer-keeping vision? It is a vivid picture of ambitions and a desirable future state that is connected to the customer and better than the current state in some important way. An ideal vision statement is clear, involving, memorable, aligned with company values, linked to customer needs, and seen as a stretch ?‚? or something difficult but not impossible. Your vision should serve two vital functions: as a source of inspiration and as a decision-making guide, aligning all of your organization's parts so they work together for a common goal.

A market-share-building company constantly challenges itself by understanding its customers' needs and expectations and calculating how well those needs and expectations are being met. But it goes even deeper. You have to determine how your competitors are meeting these needs and then create a plan that outlines how you can go beyond the minimum that will satisfy your customers to how to truly delight them. Study the winners in your industry and measure and benchmark their performance. Benchmarking the competition is a careful search for excellence, taking the absolute best as a standard and trying to surpass it.

Remember, quality of service is your ability to provide what was promised, dependably and accurately. It also is your ability to convey trust and confidence through the caring and attention you pay to customers and your willingness to help them and provide prompt service.

To deliver quality service, help your employees serve customers well and enjoy doing it. Engage every person's whole mind in improving your organization. It is important that you set an unwavering goal of putting customer satisfaction above all other objectives. You can reinforce this by telling everyone about this obsession, measuring customer satisfaction daily, posting the results, and rewarding employees when it is achieved.

Let employees know what to expect and what is expected. But keep in mind that your existing employees may not be the best fit for this role. With that in mind, be prepared to hire new people who will embrace your vision. In addition, you need to continuously train and educate employees. Then you can work on creating an environment that makes employees feel good, and one that supports the enthusiastic pursuit of customer satisfaction.

Finding and motivating excellent people is both possible and profitable. You can do this by developing a hiring profile and sticking to it when selecting employees. Show employees how you expect them to serve customers and that creating happy customers is at the heart of your organization. Employees knowing that they are expected to use their abilities to serve the customer makes them feel they are part of the action and encourages them to stay with your company.

Train and educate people well and continuously, because it creates an opportunity to communicate and reemphasize the vision, it provides the concrete skills employees need, and it opens the organization to continuous improvement. When you engage your employees' minds, you will discover hidden skills that make people promotable.

People want to serve customers well and have the ability to do so, but they need support from customer-driven leadership, an unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction, constant communication of that objective, careful measurement, intelligent hiring practices, continuous education, a well-managed environment, respect, and a chance to use their minds to improve the workplace.

Smash the barriers to customer-winning performance by eliminating the barriers that prevent your people from serving customers efficiently and predictably. When you are able to accomplish this, you get both customer satisfaction and lower costs.

To smash these barriers, ask employees to tell you about the barriers preventing your organization from serving your customers and ask for their ideas on how to remove these barriers. Also, analyze current processes. Then design an improved process and establish measurable and achievable objectives. Then manage performance.

The more complex an organization, the more the customer can become a vague, far-off entity, and the traditions of the people in the organization become the driving force in people's behavior. Create customer-friendly policies. The most fundamental element of your organization is its vision statement. It shows what your organization strives to be. For a customer-driven company, policies must be aligned with its vision.

Use measurement to deliver more of what the customer wants by knowing why you are measuring and letting customers tell you which end results to measure. But never rest. Always ask how well you are doing and track the internal procedures that are suppose to produce the results customers want. Then tell your people everything you learn.

All measurement is an opportunity to focus on and exceed customer needs. Customer-focused measurement inevitably sticks its nose into every part of the company. So let customers' desires establish standards. When you set standards, focus your organization's efforts on the most important issues your customers tell you. Make yourself a world leader on the five issues that matter most to your customer. Then choose the next five and the next five and so on.

Take customer-focused measurement of internal processes everywhere in your organization. Tell the whole company the news, whether wanted or not, to change behavior.

Seven leadership behaviors distinguish pivotal people in a successful customer-driven organization. In essence, they personally put the customer first; they promote their organization's vision; they become "students for life" by seeking new ways to learn; they believe in and invest in their people through training, preparing them to do more, helping them to use what they have learned to remake their jobs; they make teams work together to solve problems; they stay the course, realizing that customer-focused quality takes time and constant energy; and they live the organization's purpose by leading by example.

So how do you know if you are moving towards being a customer-driven organization? There are always telltale signs. You will see yourself moving from motivation through fear and loyalty to motivation through a shared vision. Your previous attitude that said "it's their problem" is now ownership of every problem that affects a customer. Instead of saying "we've always done it that way," you will always be looking for ways to continuously improve. Decisions that were once based on assumptions and judgment calls now become decisions based upon data and facts.

Everything that once began and ended with management will now begin and end with customers. Departmental decision-making using a department's own criteria now becomes cross-functional cooperation. Organizations that were good at crisis management and recovery will now find that they are doing it right the first time.

You will no longer be dependent on heroics. You will drive variability out of the process and what was once a choice between participative or scientific management now becomes participative and scientific management.

Operating as a customer-driven organization is generally more satisfying for everyone involved customers, employees and management. And the result is improved customer loyalty, an outcome that reaps rewards on many levels.

Professional Telemarketers Are Everywhere! Price Is Just One Factor!

In light of recent events, people are once again bringing up the issue of pitting offshore outsourcing and onshore for things like lead generation services (e.g. telemarketing). Two common advantages/disadvantages that are often cited in these debates is quality and costs. You usually hear how offshore has low costs but also low quality. Onshore is costlier but better. On the other hand, you'll also hear the complete reverse with just as much frequency. Some say there are offshore countries with better services at lower costs whilst onshore companies just have a veneer of being high-end to make up for the lack of competent personnel.

Now what decision are you supposed to come to from this scenario?

Well the truth is there may not be a really strong connection between the two at all. And no, this isn't a cop out. You see despite citing only two common factors being discussed, there is in fact a focus on only one of them: costs.

Believe it or not but there are still plenty of businesses out there who judge rashly based on costs in the same way a person may judge rashly based on a book's cover instead of the contents.

For instance, what if you were a developer or a supplier of computer applications meant to assist in business intelligence? Even the smallest BI software company will tell you that the population size of your leads is going to very small.

Very small indeed but also very important.

This population is made up of none other than the high-ranking business executives and CEOs representing your target companies. Who else would use a type of software powerful enough to take all the information of an entire enterprise and then just pack it in one, easily manageable desktop dashboard?

If you have every intention to contact these people, you might even need more than just simply telemarketing. These people are hard to get, given their position. You need people skilled in various forms of B2B communication from the phone and mail to internet and social media. That's the only way you're going to cover your bases.

Do you really think it's wise to let price along indicate such skills? Given the varying arguments mentioned above, don't you think their constant employment is more likely a sign of diversity than simply one side being better than the other? What if some cheap offshore company is cheap purely because their country's currency is stronger/weaker than yours? It sure doesn't seem to affect their service. Likewise, the same could be for an onshore company.

What about lead generation companies that are multinational, with contact centers based in different parts of the world? What good is this debate then?

The fact is professionals are everywhere and in a world where discrimination based on nation is highly discouraged, how much more when you either pair it with price or just simply price alone? Price isn't necessarily an indication of skill. Any person with even the mildest experience in B2B (or even just business in general) will tell you that there are more factors governing a price tag than the quality of their service. If you're serious about your B2B lead generation, then outsource to company for reasons beyond just mere price.

Daniel Anderson works as a marketing communications program manager. He is inviting you to visit http://www.erpsoftwareleads.com/ to learn more about lead generation and appointment setting for the software industry.

Premium Blend of Quality and Precision

Today, the market is flooded with varieties of products that help in the proper execution of industrial applications. The unmatched quality and high performance level have made these products widely demanded in the market. In addition to this, the availability of the products in varied sizes and dimensions have also attracted various industrial sectors to place bulk orders. The unmatched quality and excellent performance has made these products ideally used for various industrial applications. Thus, the products are manufactured with complete compliance to the international standards in order to ensure utmost satisfaction to the buyers.

The industrial sectors, apart from he and heavy industrial machines, are also dependent o small tools and equipments. These tools and equipments help in simplifying the industrial tasks. There are various types of industrial equipments that are ideally designed to meet the requirements of the simple as well as complex industrial applications. There is a product for every industrial application and excellent result is assured. Thus, excellent results in respective applications have also played a vital role in the enhancement of the demands of the industrial equipments and tools.

There is a huge array of products that are widely demanded to meet the requirements of various big industrial applications. The products like the shoe cover and hand gloves are widely used in laboratories and chemical industries. These products may not be directly used in applications to ascertain results, but play a very important role in helping in ascertaining accurate and fast results. Therefore, the demand for these hand gloves and shoe cover is very huge as these act as a catalyst in the accomplishing of any application. These are available in standard as well as customized specifications to meet the requirements of the applications.

There are vendors, in the market, who are acknowledged for dealing in varieties of industrial tools and equipments. The raw materials used in the manufacturing of the shoe cover and hand gloves are of premium quality that ensures features like high durability and resistivity to adverse conditions. In addition to this, the notable features like light weight and low maintenance cost have also played a crucial role in the enhancement of the demands of industrial products. Moreover, to ascertain high level of satisfaction to the buyers, the shoe cover and hand gloves are available in customized sizes and dimensions as per the specifications and drawings provided. Thus, the affordable price has also attracted buyers from all round the corner to place bulk orders.

Kuldeep is an online Business Man. He loves to write articles and Blogs. He has written thousands of articles over internet. He loves to write about hand gloves and shoe cover etc.

Why Look For a Different Partner

There will always be a need to look for a business partner for your firm. After all, there will always be a limit to what flesh and blood can bear. More so in the field of lead generation and appointment setting services where the need for B2B leads is always high. But what should you look for in a business partner? There are many qualities that you must look for, like decisiveness, passion, and motivation to succeed, especially if you are using telemarketing as the medium of communication. But that is not all. There are other things that you will need. The most important point is that your partner must complement your abilities. In other words, your partner must be good at something you are not.

1.Vision vs. mission - yes, you may have the vision that your company will be great in the future, and you know how to sell that idea. Of course, that does not mean that you know how to do it. For this reason, you have to find someone who knows the nitty-gritty of things. He has to be a business partner who knows how to make your dreams a reality.

2.Right-handed vs. left-handed - if you are pretty good in designs and aesthetics, then good for you. All that remains is to find a partner who knows how to make your products work. In order to succeed, you need to get both design and function to work together. Remember Steve Jobs? He's not exactly a computer whiz, but he has a genius eye for design. All he needs are people who can make what he cooks up to work. It is the same thing with you.

3.Selling vs. making - if you have the talent to make other people buy from you, you should keep doing it. Just make sure that you find someone who can make all the things you can sell. A talent for selling can be a good, but it is nothing if you have nothing to sell to begin with. You have to create a balance between these two qualities if you want to make any difference.

4.Identification vs. solution - one thing that is important in any business, especially if you are using telemarketing as a business medium, is that you have a sharp eye in identifying problems in your business. Of course, that does not mean that you can solve it, too. In this case, it becomes even more important to find a partner who can find the solution.

5.Dream vs. reality - it is nice to dream about where your company is going, but it is also important to have someone who will keep your feet firmly planted on the ground. There are a lot of dreamers out there who just keep going and going, without someone to tell them that their gauge is empty. You will need a partner who knows how to balance the books for you.

These are the reasons why having a complementary partner will be good for you.

Belinda Summers works as a professional consultant. She helps businesses increase their revenue by lead generation and appointment setting services through Telemarketing. To know more about this visit: http://www.callboxinc.com/

Dental and Medical Practice - 3 Things to Avoid and 3 Things to Do For More New Patients (Now)

Marketing your dental practice is often the furthest thing from the mind of a busy medical or dental professional. However, marketing your practice needs to be a regular activity so that you are always marketing your practice.

3 to Avoid

1) Neglect to invest in training for your office staff - Your front office staff is the first impression new patients have of your office, both on the phone and in person. How a prospective patient is handled on the phone makes the difference between a new patient for you or a new patient for your competition. How a new patient is handled by the front office in person can make the difference between a one time visit and a life long client who refers.

2) Fail to check up on what is happening up front- Too many professionals make the assumption that once trained, the front office staff will always do it right. Even worse, some will assume that they "just know" what to do.

3) Invest more in learning new techniques than in marketing your practice - The thinking goes something like this: "If can just learn the newest techniques, I'll have a more full practice." The reality is it does not matter how many new techniques you know when you have an empty office.

3 to Do

1) Invest in regular training for your staff - A regular investment in training of your front office staff gets you the best return on investment of any investment in your practice. With regular training you get a happier front office that buys in to your mission and brings in more new patients.

2) Verify that the front office is working the way you want it to - Train, trust and check up on your front office staff. Just because they have been trained well, does not mean they are performing well.

In just a moment, I'm going to tell you about a great way to check on the performance of your front office staff. But first I want to give you one more important tip.

3) Always market your practice - ABM stands for Always Be Marketing. This is a motto you need to adopt, even when your practice is full of new patients. A Chinese proverb often quoted by Harvey Mackay goes something like this:

Dig the well before you're thirsty

You will do well to always be marketing your practice, even when your schedule is full.

Remember how I said I was going to show you a great way to check on the performance of your front office staff? Well, here it is:

You can now claim your Free Instant Access to our exclusive 5 Star Challenge when you visit http://increasepatientsnow.com/

You'll receive a CD recording of an actual Mystery Call we make to your office. Finally, hear exactly what you're staff is saying to potential new patients when they call your office. Find out if they are getting them in or turning them away!

Brought to you by Jay Geier, Founder and President of The Scheduling Institute - Dentistry's Best Kept Secret