Insource it! There are lots of companies out there offering outsourced telesales and lead generation on a pay per lead basis. Indeed, our own experience in the past in having performed those sorts of services for clients shows that there’s a large demand for that service. A better way is to bring that function inside your company where you can more tightly manage and control it.

Why is this? Inside sales and lead generation are a strategic part of any successful company’s sales and marketing arsenal and cannot be efficiently and cost effectively outsourced in today’s environment. The nuances of your customers’ changing needs, your value proposition, the features and benefits of your products and the whole consultative selling process require that you constantly define and refine your inside sales approach. When you outsource this kind of function to a third party, what you’re getting is a team of people who are working on a project and who don’t adapt to the subtleties of a changing selling model. Oftentimes the best way to improve your telesales or telemarketing effectiveness is by keeping that function in house, where you can watch over it, constantly refining the call approach, the target, the message, the warm up questions, the qualifiers, etc.

So if you’re considering outsourcing your lead generation or telesales function to a third party, our experience shows that building this kind of capability in-house is much more efficient, much more cost effective and can lead to a much higher lead conversion count than you’ll get from an outsourcer. Yes it’s more costly in terms of up-front cost, but the actual return on investment is typically a lot higher. This is why leading companies in enterprise software, hardware manufacturing and Health care all have established their own outbound call centers and telesales operations in order to develop and master this core competency. Why insource this function? Because it’s strategic.