How Data Quality Affects Telemarketing

I recently came across a lovely Telemarketing company with a compelling proposition of guaranteeing good quality appointments for his clients for a fixed price and the client would get to determine the quality, a good deal all round!

 

So, here is someone delivering what they promised, but their results are dependent on two key factors:

1. The message
2. The data

As an experienced marketer, one can control the quality of a message until it gets the conversion rates you require.

 

However, this company relies on the client providing their data as basis for the telemarketing campaign. 

 

If the quality of the data is good then the client achieves a higher daily conversion rate for calls made against appointments set.

 

The data is good because it’s the right contact in the right target market, and the contact is still with the company, and the phone number is correct so the caller got through to the contact immediately.

 

This allows the telemarketer to process more calls in a day whilst feeling good that appointments are being set.

 

Telemarketing is a tough job, so good data goes a long way.

 

Now imagine what would happen if the data wasn’t as good.

 

1. The caller could be calling someone who is no longer there.  They then have to spend time working out who is the right person and engaging them – this could take several calls, so productivity drops.
   
   
2. The caller has the number of a different office location. The right contact is at a different office.   Again, several calls are required to find the right phone number for the right person.
   
   
3. The contact is not the right type of contact.  The campaign should focus on HR Managers, but the contact is a Purchasing Manager who is not involved in HR matters.
   
   
4. The contact is the right type but the company is not.  You have a HR Manager but you are supposed to be calling professional services companies bigger than £5m revenue but here you have a smaller company.  In this case the contact is not of use and has to be discarded.  You now have one less company to call.

 

You can see clearly from the two scenarios of good and bad data how the productivity and quality of results vary greatly.  Let’s use some maths to highlight the problem more clearly.

 

Firstly, here are some parameters to work with:

 

1. A campaign involves 500 calls
2. Client is expecting a 1% conversion rate with 5 high quality appointments being set
3. Where the data is good it only takes one phone dial to make contact
4. Where data is poor, it can take on average 5 dials per contact to find the right decision maker
5. A caller can make up to 120 dials a day and is expected to call 100 contacts per day

 

 

You can see from the calculation that it will take 82% longer when the data is 30% poor compared to 5% poor.

 

 

Often data is much poorer, so you can calculate the difference and imagine how much worse the results will be.

 

You can play around with the parameters, but the main point is that there is a SUBSTANTIAL difference in productivity with poor data compared to good data.

 

So for this telemarketing company, good data is hugely important.  It affects their profit per project and their profit as a company.

 

When you are running a telemarketing company, poor data is a stark realty to the company’s performance, but it’s also the same if you have an Inside Sales Team.

 

Just because the performance isn’t as exposed with an Inside Sales Team compared to an independent company, your Inside

Sales Team will still be underperforming.

 

In fact it could be worse, because these appointments are for your company; hence your revenue is lower because of fewer appointments due to poor data quality.

 

If you like to have good data for calling, by good data I mean targeted, current and accurate, then contact us and we can substantially increase results for your telemarketing campaigns.