How Much is Really Spent on Outsourced Telemarketing?

So, how about your business? How much of your Business-to-Business lead generation budget do you allocate for tele service which are outsourced?

Business-to-Business sales lead consulting professionals are often asked by their clients to help them select outsourced marketing firms, to better implement and improve their lead-generation, follow-up and lead qualification programs. Recently, some reports on this topic have provided results which I look at skeptically. As an example, a report stated that businesses are spending over thirty percent of the entire lead-generation budget on B2B teleservices, for example. The report also stated that the companies considered best of class spend even more, almost forty-five percent.

But in first person experience working with B2B sales lead programs for top companies - large, medium, and small, have led me to believe that these percentages are way too high. After taking a poll with some experts in the industry including B2B call center CEOs, some B2B marketers who do outsourcing, and some B2B telemarketing consultants, I realized that I'm not alone in my skepticism.

So, then what did the poll indicate? All those who I polled agreed about the lead generation budget numbers being too high in the report. Telemarketing CEOs would be happy if their customers spent thirty to forty percent of their budget on on outsourced services. But, they indicated that in reality they spend much less.

A Business-to-Business telephone expert declared that the numbers could not be correct, saying they didn't ring true.

The Business-to-Business marketing professionals who use these outsourced services for telemarketing in lead generation reported that the percentages in the report were far higher than the actual spending they allocated.

In conclusion, even though the small-scale, informal poll is not truly valid scientifically, perhaps this report doesn't truly represent actual outsourced marketing. However, it will make one think that a little skepticism concerning budget percentages could end up not such a bad thing.