If a telemarketer is sending a script to live-answered telephones exclusively, and accepting press one live responses to sales staff, we’ve seen many successful broadcasts that obtain only a 15%-25% “long call value”. (Here a long call is specified as a call where both parties are on the phone at the same time for a minimum of 1 1/2 minutes.)  And this is not to mean that every one of the “long calls” prove to be classified as good leads by the broadcaster. Far from it. Some broadcasters have revealed that often only 1/2 or sometimes less of the long calls are good leads.

This is why it is essential that a concern debate their business systems deliberately as they plan a voice blasting program. For example, if their average cost for a “long call” is $25, and 1/2 of them are worthwhile leads, and they can ultimately sell 1/4 of the good leads, then the cost of a deal for them is $200. If the profit for a single sale is not substantially more than $200, their own business measurements may make it impossible to utilize voice broadcasting profitably.

These numbers will vary radically among different types of businesses, and are affected by both the pitch as well as the target dialing list. For example, the hypothetical business “Wonderful Web Widgets”, who desires to sell website services to small business, would be making a mistake to dial a broadcast to an “all businesses” list, because such a list would include large concerns (which they’re not targetting), in addition to a lot of small concerns that dont feel a need to have a website.

Why send a pitch to beauty parlors and accountants if these types of businesses aren’t normally interested in websites?  This only raises the cost of the reduced amount of qualified leads that are received.

Another thing to consider is the mode of the broadcast campaign. The example above was about a live delivered message. How about answer machine / voicemail campaigns?

For most industries, the response value for the live delivery – live transfer broadcast is between 0.6% and 1.0%. Which means that for every 100 calls delivered to a live answered phone, there is less than 1 transfer.

For a program that leaves messages on voicemail, the numbers will be a whole lot less, because the listener must have enough involvement to record the callback number, and finally dial it back, requiring much more work than simply “pressing 1″ while listening to a live script. These results are impractical for us to track, since the calls back to the telemarketer don’t utilize our broadcast system, but telemarketers who use this method have confirmed to us that the call back ratio is often 1/4 to 1/3 of the live transfer ratio for a like pitch.

For a businessperson considering working with pre-recorded telemarketing as a lead producing system, the message is essential, the targetted list is essential, and the basic business systems are probably the most critical factor to consider when planning a lead generation program.