In my career I have worked with over 500 small businesses in conversations about marketing and lead generation. Sometimes they are high level, basic marketing conversations; sometimes they have been in depth, full bore marketing and business development planning sessions. I think that 90% of small businesses confuse the purpose and expected results of advertising.
By advertising, I mean any paid, mass market medium where your organization has no control over who specifically receives your message. This could be radio, TV, print, outdoor or even web banners (though web banners can be pretty narrowly targeted)
In a business selling to business environment, advertising by itself holds little value unless you are selling a commodity product (like paperclips or toner) to a the mass business market. If you are doing any type of B2B sales, and think advertising is helping you, you are either spending ALOT of money, or you are simply misleading yourself. In the B2B, advertising is for brand building and for promoting specific events, offers or to drive a specific result (eg go to this website for a great promotion).
With a limited budget – if you have to choose between spending on ads or a telemarketer, take the telemarketer – and then make that even more productive by building (NOT buying) the best list you can from your service area. If you disagree, support this position or have a story related, I’d love to hear it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I am intriguing by your selection of telemarketing over other forms of B2B sales development activities, and would be very interested in hearing more as to why you chose this channel. In today’s “Do Not Call list” world, I would have expected to see a recommendation of investing in industry/trade specific publications, both print and digital. Perhaps you could delve deeper into this with some insights as to why this might produce better results in building a qualified leads list based on a limited budget, rather than the multitude of other marketing options in the SMB space.
Also, you make a point to build, NOT buy, leads. In my past experience, I have found that purchasing a leads lists from an industry leading trade-specific association / publication house can produce much higher conversion rates with targeted messages and promotions. Granted the cost seems higher on the front-end of the campaign, however, our experience has been that you can reduce the number of outlets you are marketing to, and thus concentrate your efforts on a much smaller and more qualified segment, and thus reduce the overall expense. Again, I would be interested in your thoughts on this subject.
Kind regards.
Hi Stanley. Good question on the telemarketing call lists – do not call lists only apply to consumer based marketing. B2B isn’t applicable – you can’t list a business line on a do not call list (to the best of my understanding). As to the leads – my point was to build telemarketing lists – not to rely just on lists purchased from brokers. A self-built list will give you names that haven’t been updated or added to a purchased list – I know of one company that found 4500 new business names in their market after the purchased lists had been “exhausted”. If you can buy quality, qualified leads – where someone else has done the work for you, by all means, do so.