Most organisations realise they need to step up their lead gen efforts - after all we can't all be Apple!
Some look to develop a lead generation engine in-house (Inside sales) but others look for specialists to help - particularly smaller, resource-constrained or early-stage companies.
What does outsourcing offer? It gives you immediate access to qualified, experienced staff in an environment with all appropriate tools at their disposal.
In other words, it allows you to hit the ground running with your lead generation efforts.
If you need lead generation - can you wait the three months plus it could take you to hire, train and organise your team, provide appropriate facilities and investigate the relevant tools & technology?
There are also no guarantees that after all this delay and cost that it will be successful.
The questions you need to ask yourself before embarking on in-house Lead Generation activity include:
- Have you got the right people (this is not an easy job that anyone can do)?
- Have you got the right management and supervision in place?
- Have you got the appropriate reporting in place?
- How long before you see results? Will they be the right results?
On the other hand, if you outsource, you bypass all these potential headaches. If you are selling into multiple countries outsourcing can deliver a range of additional benefits.
If you need to interact with your markets in different languages and still insist on doing this in house, you will face a whole range of extra costs, complexity and challenges;
- Can your lead gen managers or supervisors speak all these languages?
- Are all your agents multilingual? (Let’s face it, if they were they could earn a lot more translating somewhere like the United Nations)
- Do some markets or customers only want to talk to native speakers?
- Are the market demands of The Netherlands the same as they are for Germany?
- Can you justify full time staff for every language?
- How easy is it to turn off and on?
In fairness, many companies do recognise these issues and see outsourcing as a solution. Unfortunately, even if they do, many still make fundamental errors with their outsourcing approach.
Some may decide to keep English or other major languages in-house and outsource the rest. Alternatively, some decide to pick separate (possibly what they think of as market leading agencies) in each country.
While this approach may make sense on paper, in practice, it brings a range of problems;
- You will need to train and manage multiple agencies - this can create a major workload.
- Where is the consistency? In approach, messaging results, quality, reporting etc. How can you protect your brand and reputation?
- If you spread your business too thinly, no agency will treat it as a priority and results will suffer.
- A smaller market will deliver smaller results, so you could mistakenly think an agency is performing relatively badly when is extracting the most it could from a small, difficult market, compared with a lazy agency hoovering up the low hanging fruit from an easy market.
- How can you build the strong working relationship or partnership needed to make this work, when you are dealing with multiple agencies?
- If the lead generation activity fails, who should get the blame? Who do you work with to fix it? Is it you?
Outsourcing to a reputable multilingual lead generation agency can avoid these pitfalls, because it offers:
- Quality of staff - these agencies know what they are doing and know what makes a good lead generation or telemarketing agent.
- They have excellent training programmes to ensure their staff continue to deliver results for their clients, because if they didn't there would be no more clients.
- You only need to explain your product, service and messaging once. The agency will them make sure their staff get it.
- They can schedule language resources as needed to meet demand.
- They will have an overview of the whole campaign and so can give you valuable insight that can allow you to tweak your message as required across markets. They will know what works and what doesn’t.
- You will get consistent reporting that will allow you to accurately analyse the campaign as a whole.
- When you are ready to expand the campaign - or even dial back a bit (because it has been so successful!), they have the mechanisms and resources in pace to respond quickly. If you had invested in internal resources, you would have to find other things for them to do - Or even end their contracts. All of these activities will take time and incur expense.
- A reputable agency will work with you to define realistic targets and write these into a contract. They will move heaven and earth to meet these targets. Will you get the same focus from an in-house team?
- Perhaps the biggest benefit is that you get "one throat to choke." If it goes wrong you only have one provider to blame so it is quicker to identify issues and more importantly, agree on a plan of action to resolve them.
Working with a multilingual lead generation agency will turn into a productive and hopefully long term partnership. However, it is vital that you don't fall into the corporate hubris trap. Under no circumstances should you think "this stuff is easy, we should save money and bring it in-house".
Lead generation is not easy - telemarketing and telesales are not suitable for everyone. Those that are good at it, tend to enjoy it and those that aren't as successful, tend to run screaming from the building.
Do you really want to do this from scratch when agencies provide a cost effective, quality, flexible, responsive and accountable service without the need for any expensive recruitment, HR or infrastructure costs?
Come on, life is difficult enough as it is - why bring more pain into yours?
