Telemarketing!

nlgutters

Any one on here hired out to a call center for lead generation?

If so how did it work?



It seems pretty reasonable and it has to work i get enough of them calling me every day.

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pcplumber

we are calling old customers to inspect jobs we did several years ago. It is difficult for me to call anyone on the phone because rejection puts me in a negative and bad mood. You have to be able to hear the word "no" a million times and have a positive attitude. People are not quite as polite on the telephone as they are in person.

I tried telemarketing with so-called professionals on two separate occassions. It never panned out. We are currently doing door-to-door canvassing and we are getting 2 to 3 leads per day with one door knocker. We are closing a large sale on 1 out of 5 leads. We started about 5 weeks ago and our sales are currently up to about $100,000 from copper repipes and replacing drain pipes in homes.

Telemarketing generates leads when you call old customers and sell them something. We send a letter and follow up with a phone call.

I tried an automatic caller about 20 years ago. At the end of every day I had to listen to over two hours of people swearing. I ran the machine for 30 days and did not get one lead.

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nlgutters

Any one ever tried this?



http://www.voiceshot.com/

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handyhands

We hired a company out of Mass. to do some telemarketing for us over a year ago....Worse hand-job I've ever gotten.

We paid upfront for "the perfect lead program"--Think it cost us about $2800.00 and we were promised that they'd keep sending us set appointments until we reached x-amount of sales.

After running the first couple of leads, unfortunately we found that these guys were setting us up on junk calls,...renters,...people that couldn't speak one word of English, etc.

They worded their contract perfectly--they didn't have to reimburse us, just keep giving us "leads" (as they called them) until we reached our goal,....

-Bottom line, never closed one sale, and EVERY lead they sent us was BS.

you can find these guys by doing a search on www.ripoffreport.com--they use to call themselves advantel telemarketing...and have since changed their name at least 8 times.

-HOPE THIS HELPS

rbsremodeling

I see you getting the same response from that as what PC Plumber talked about lots of angry messages. I get those types of automated calls several times a week I never answer them.

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J-Peffer

With the amount of people that call my line trying to sell me things, and how frustrating it is to answer the phone, expecting it to be a lead or a customer and find out it's some guy in India that I cannot understand trying to sell me something.....I would never want to associate that with my business.

Elite_Drywall

Very true, I sure hate when they call me. So what would make you think your customer will like some person calling them trying to sell your services. Its not going to do nothing but make them hate your company and not want to use you.

nlgutters

Yah no one goes to sears any more.

no one uses geico

nobody uses any of the 20 banks that call about refinancing every day

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SeamlessGutters

I have some experience with this. If your going to use somebody, use somebody local in your area. You should be able to find a legitimate company in the area that can set you qualified appointments. Go for the appointments. Its going to be expensive though. Think about it, leads are not easy to get and figure they pay somebody $10-15 a hour and they get 1-2 appointments a day how much is that going to cost?

Only pay for appointments. That way, if it costs you 50-100 per appointment, that meets your criteria, it might be worth it. Gutters....Mabe...Roofing...Yeah.

When it gets slow calling up past customers and asking them if they know of anybody needing work done, calling old bid jobs from months ago, and calling contractors.

I found when calling contractors its best to be striaght up. "Hey, My names Ryan, and I am just calling to see if you are going to need any gutter work done this season or in the near future. Then shut up. Do that for a 3-4 hours and you will get some work. Every now and then you get a guy that says, actually I got this job I need to get done, what do you charge?? Its important that you don't make it seem like a sales call. Contractors like giving there subs work, and if they have it, they want to talk to you. If they don't have any, say, well I hope you pick some up! Can I send you my info and ask that you consider me for future projects? I used to set appointments for insurance and got damn good at it.

BAM done.

Its brutal work, so I just try to commit to a few hours a week when I have the time (no work)

Actually - This is what I am going to do tomorrow.

My two cents

handyhands

Well said, seamless.....I do 99.9% of the marketing for my company.

A. We DO obtain leads from various internet sources, of which I call repeatedly/ (email also) in attempt to set the appointment. Unfortunately as well all know, the quality of what we're getting from the lead services we utilize has gone down hill from what it once was,....but the only reason I'm still using the ones I'm using is because they do in fact provide a decent ROI.

**A good trick I've been doing as of lately is with all the ones that I have and never set,....Is if these are the people that when you call them,..and they finally have the decency to answer,...only to say "If i knew I was going to get 30 calls from various contractors, I would've never filled that #$%@ form out."....I let those people cool off,...give it a couple weeks, and send a letter, with one of my gift cards,....I've actually gotten a couple callbacks and set appointments from doing this,...After they get dilluged w/ calls and get pissed off enough to scrap the idea, it paints a somewhat friendly, non-evasive picture to them and they actually seem to appreciate it.

B. Around job sites, I'll put together a "radius" mailer to go directly to the nearest 200 homeowners around that particular area, and inform area folks that as we're doing work at such-and-such an address, and offer some sort of neighborhood "call to action". Drop those in the mail, and you can either use an outside mailing source/ agent to do this for you as well as provide you with a "pre-scrubbed" calling list, or you can out in the effort yourself if you have the time, and obtain the addresses and phone numbers for free by doing a reverse address search on whitepages.com.

**Give the mail a couple days to hit, then pick up the phone and start pressing the numbers.---Just landed a nice $18,000 window job 2 days ago from this.

C. Past customers are always a great source of leads during the slow times. 2 weeks ago we sent out maybe 240 letters to past customers informing them of that because of the recent passing of the stimulus package, there's now a $1500.00 tax credit worthy of taking advantage of if they have or know of anyone that needs work that falls within certain parameters done, and these folks also get sent a gift card as well, that I can physically right in an expiration date on (another call-to-action). That mailer has already landed us over $45,000 of business, as well as some nice referrals.

These are just a few, but very effective marketing tactics I've used, and I consider us fortunate to get the business we're getting while seeing some of my competition barely staying afloat.

Again, just some ideas-

Good Luck~!