Why International Agencies are Asking for “No Telemarketing” Lead Gen Campaigns

In the last few months, TechTarget Europe has received a rising number of lead generation briefs from savvy customers and agencies that say in big bold letters – “No Telemarketing.”  The top B2B tech agencies are passing along their clients’ requirements (no longer requests) for digital-only leads.

Where did this come from?

Online tactics are the only way that TechTarget generates leads.  If an IT Decision Maker (ITDM) replies to an email offering of content, their interest is real, because they took the action on their own.  We assumed that while generating online leads is hard, most publishers were doing the same.

I’ll suspend my shock that “online media” companies are using telemarketing to supply digital leads to customers. Instead let’s examine why tech companies tell us they are putting the No Telemarketing requirement on lead acquisition.

• Purchasing intent data from telemarketing (at the lead acquisition stage) is poor. The phone number is good (as it should be). But when you ask a telemarketer (TM) to interpret an enterprise ITDM’s tech interests, it doesn’t work out. The TM is pushing a white paper and trying to fulfill a quota of leads as opposed to truly probing for pain points. In their defense, it is so hard if you don’t know the technology, the company or the white paper.
• If your data about a prospect’s purchase intent or technology interest is off, that group of leads will distort your marketing metrics down the pipeline. In a worst case scenario, those telemarketing-produced prospects are not interested in your solution, so they don’t respond to your good pitches, and you think good marketing isn’t working, so you head in a different direction. In a less-worse scenario, you miss the exact topic they are interested in, so they don’t respond to your first or second waves of emails and calls.  This means it takes you longer to convert them and depresses your CTR and scoring metrics. It makes everything look bad and delays the time to their entry into the pipe.
• Our customers tell us if they pass prospects to sales that aren’t interested in your solution, reps lose confidence in marketing’s ability to drive pipeline. This is the a damaging outcome. To make digital efforts drive pipe, sales must be on your side.

Telemarketing has an important/crucial place in pipeline development and digital campaigns have their own issues with conversion. But the path ahead is online, because that is where ITDMs are doing their research and are expecting engagement from their technology providers.

We want to hear more from smart marketers on where telemarketing fits into their overall marketing strategies and tactics. Feel free to leave a comment or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.