DM p30-33 telemarketing Dec08.qxp 02/12/2008 12:48 Page 30
Telemarketing
As a channel much abused over the years, telemarketing hasn’t had its troubles to seek but it
has re-emerged recently as the perfect solution for those seeking to execute highly
personalised, two-way communications in real time with customers, and it remains an
extremely successful channel when executed well, finds Antony Begley.
Calling the shots
T
elemarketing has had something of a rough put the phone down at any time.
ride over the years with numerous unscrupu- “The telephone is not, in reality, a very intrusive
lous, unprincipled operators contriving to way of communicating with a consumer, despite
give the channel an often poor public reputation. The what many people may have been led to believe.
result has been that the pool of contactable con- Blue Donkey managing director Sureya Landini
sumers and even businesses has slowly but surely agrees: “Telemarketing has been a bit of hot potato
dwindled as more and more people opt out through that ends up in the spotlight every so often, but there
TPS and CTPS. This shift has been fuelled further by are really very few rogue operators now and the legis-
the fact that privacy issues have risen ever higher up lation is now so strict that they have been regulated
both the political agenda and the public conscious- out of the game – a good thing for all concerned.”
How responsible
ness thanks to the countless data loss blunders of Landini is insistent that the vast majority of suppli-
is it in any sense
recent time. Consequently, the need to ensure that ers want to do the right thing by their clients.
to make 500 calls outbound telemarketing is done as efficiently, politely “When you ask a third party to act as your mouth-
in order to make
and sensibly as possible has never been greater. But it piece, it can have huge repercussions for your busi-
one sale?
never pays to lose sight of the fact that telemarketing ness because personal interacion can have such a
is still remarkably effective when conducted properly. powerful impact. The telephone is not a mass market-
Sureya Landini, managing
director, Blue Donkey.
“The ability to market a product to the consumer is ing medium and should never have been used as
the very cornerstone of capitalism,” says 2Touch sales such.
and marketing director Gavin Rodgers. “And one of “Human to human contact should be thoughtful
the most effective, and cheapest ways of doing that is and contemplative, not churning through call vol-
telemarketing. umes at 150 or 200 calls a day per person. And how
“Good telemarketing is not intrusive and is not responsible is it in any conceivable sense to make 500
resented – it’s about giving people the option to buy, calls in order to make one sale?”
it’s not about selling to them.”
A fairly subtle point, but a critical one none the In-house or outsourced?
less. At the end of the day, and as Rodgers himself Perhaps the most important decision for any business
points out, the consumer always has the ability to to make when contemplating telemarketing is the
30 Database Marketing December 2008 www.dmarket.co.uk
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