Nine Reasons Why B2B Marketing Should Own the Teleprospecting Function
Over the last several years, according to MarketingSherpa, marketing departments are increasingly taking responsibility for tele-prospecting. Why do you suppose that is happening?
Let me be clear: teleprospecting is not selling something over the phone, a function that remains squarely in the sales organization. B2B companies use telesprospecting to follow up on and qualify marketing-generated responders, and identify and generate demand through outbound calling.
While I explained in a recent MarketingSherpa blog post that teleprospecting should serve as a bridge between sales and marketing, one department has to own the function, and marketing seems to have momentum. For good reasons.
Before I break down why marketing should own this function, let me say that people I respect believe with all their hearts that teleprospecting belongs in sales. This is their general rationale:
- It’s a sales activity.
- The best teleprospecting representatives should have career paths into sales and should have a sales aptitude. (Ex-road warriors are a hot commodity in the recruiting profile of many organizations.)
- You need a sales culture in a teleprospecting operation – yes, all the braggadicio and rah-rah stuff that the black-turtleneck crowd arches an eyebrow at.
- The teleprospecting representatives must have a sales-like compensation structure, based upon results.
- The teleprospecting representatives should be aligned with sales.
While there is always a situation that would be an exception, I generally agree with all of their points.
But so what?
Are any of these reasons valid enough for sales to own teleprospecting? Sure, there’s the “if it walks like a duck” argument. But lots of us have duck walks and we’re not, in fact, ducks.
Here are more compelling arguments – on behalf of marketing ownership – listed in increasing importance:
1. With the right teleprospecting approach, more inquiries will convert to sales-accepted leads. The teleprospecting team can set up a structured approach to nurturing accounts. They can provide follow-up and network to identify the appropriate buying influence, cross-polinate one interest to another, and execute numerous other tactics that result in a bigger revenue contribution from upstream marketing campaigns. Obviously, marketing must find the right balance between wringing the last nickel of campaign revenue and obtaining a good return on investment. But with responsibility for the entire function, better yields are entirely possible. Can sales do the same thing? Yes. But marketing has the greatest vested interest in capitalizing on upstream investments.
2. Teleprospecting can improve upstream demand generation yields. Not only does teleprospecting convert leads, it can elicit precise feedback on each one so marketing can better tune media, messaging, and tactics to improve the upstream investment yields. Can sales do this? Yes. But again, marketing has a much greater vested interest in making sure upstream campaigns work well.
3. Teleprospecting overlaps with demand generation. Clearly, when teleprospecting representatives cold call, share a value proposition, and discuss how solutions solve problems, those representatives are generating demand. They are just doing so by phone instead of emails, landing pages, blogs, and other forms of contact. Marketing owns demand generation. Teleprospecting is one really important tool in the demand generation toolkit. You wouldn’t take paid search or email marketing from the toolkit, would you? Giving marketing demand generation more clearly divides sales and marketing responsibilities at each stage of the buying cycle. The bigger the company, the more important it is to delineate responsibility. This divisions by stage of the buying cycle will reduce duplication of effort.
4. Integrating teleprospecting into other forms of outbound marketing can improve its efficiency. Integrated marketing works for a reason. So does integrated lead nurturing. You need one group to design and orchestrate messaging, timing, frequency, and method of contact, and then set up experiments to optimize the contact, messaging and information-exchange strategy. This lead-optimization experimentation must become de rigueur for marketing. That will be challenging if you take the most important tool – teleprospecting – out of the marketing toolkit.
B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads
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