Telemarketing “campaigns” are usually short term activities, ranging anywhere from three to nine months. It depends on the marketing budget of the company: how much money they are willing to invest in the cold calling and appointment setting activity; and on how many phone numbers there are available to call in a given industry or business category. Telemarketing has been compared to gold prospecting or gold mining. Just like when prospectors are digging for gold, the reality is there are limits to how many gold nuggets exist in the United States. It’s the same thing with marketing budgets and phone number lists: there’s limits to the prospecting activity. It can’t go on, infinitely, forever without any interruptions. Telemarketing lists also need to be “scrubbed” or narrowed down, based on new discoveries in the cold calling activity: usually this means sorting out the business categories that don’t belong in the list. While scrubbing a list can increase the hit rate or frequency at which leads are generated and appointments are set, it also involves thousands of unnecessary phone numbers being removed from the list, and also many people asking to be put in the Do Not Call list (DNC). Eventually you will reach the bottom of the barrel of telemarketing phone numbers; and there won’t be any new phone numbers left to call. Cold calling always has its stopping point.

We use Zippia.com’s webpage called “Average Business Development Representative Salary,” which is an aggregator of statewide salary averages for BDRs. We also look at the company’s annual revenue on ZoomInfo or Owler to get an idea about the company’s size and capital. Then to estimate a fair wage, we will round down from the state average to fit a reasonable BDR wage for the company. The general average we quote people, is around $700 a week direct deposit, for a small company producing under $5 million in annual revenue.

We have a monthly subscription to d7leadfinder.com (the professional plan), which enables us to pull thousands of phone numbers for any business category, in a matter of 5-10 minutes. This will put the company names, phone numbers, and emails into an Excel file; and then we will import that into a power dialer program we use called phoneburner.com (also called the professional plan). While we do not charge anything for our D7 telemarketing list data, we do ask our clients to subscribe to a PhoneBurner username and password for us: this costs about $180 a month.

You can do a demo with us if you’d like; and we can take notes on that. But usually what we will do is use the pitch you’re already using on a short YouTube video or your pitch from text on your website; and simply create a rough draft telemarketing script based on those things; and then email you and your sales manager back and forth a few times, maybe for a day or so, and receive any editorial feedback from you. We can do this on a Word document or a Google Doc; and you can give us editorial feedback in the form of red letter text, on spots where you think the telemarketing script could use some adjustments or improvements. By the 2nd or 3rd draft, we’re usually ready to rock and roll, and begin cold calling. It’s just like in high school English class, when you write a rough draft paper, and your English teacher edits it, and then you produce a final draft for the grade. Along the way, over the course of several months, as we learn new things in our cold calling conversations, we might make slight adjustments or changes to the script, to make the elevator pitch flow out easier. But elevator pitches in cold calling scripts don’t need to be complicated and lengthy; telemarketing isn’t about long-term relationship management, or account management, or demos, or any type of closing activity; and so, cold calling usually does not require extensive detail, or elaborate schemes of rebuttals for objections. It’s just a basic soft selling approach to needs analysis with a few qualifying questions, and a brief elevator pitch about the product’s features and benefits, to see if this might be a solution that solves any needs or problems they might have with their business. The objective of cold calling is to hunt for people who are willing to set aside a moment to listen to an elevator pitch, request that an informational email be sent to them, do a follow up call in 7 days, and then ask them if they’d like us to set up a demo for them, as this is essentially an appointment setting activity.

I’m an independent 1099 contractor, which means that I’m always doing 2 BDR jobs at the same time. PhoneBurner allows me to call 220 times a day. What I do is split that down the middle and call 110+- times a day for each of the companies I’m telemarketing for. My goal is to set 3-5 demo appointments a week on your Google Calendar or send you an email with written lead data that you can use on a different type of calendar. But its easier for me to use a G-Suite account (or Google Workspace); and to set appointments for you with your G-Suite account, in order to invite people to video calls through Google Calendar or Calendly. Since I’m an independent contractor, I would only be available for one strategy meeting a week. Most of my time is wrapped up with cold calling. But usually strategy meetings are unnecessary as Skype, or Google chat, or email is good enough to keep each other posted on updates and issues that may arise along the cold calling journey. PhoneBurner also has a “Call History” tab that you can look at any time; and see exactly how many calls I’m doing a day, which lists I’m calling; and what time of the day I’m calling. At the end of the day, or by the next morning, I will email you a BDR activity report called “BDR Tasks Performed,” which will have the total tally of my dials, leads, emails sent, and any update notes for a given day. I also add these daily activity reports up at the end of the week; and will send you a weekly summary BDR report by email.

As a telemarketer, it’s important to bear in mind that this job is to hunt down people in which there is a probability or a likelihood that they might have interest in a demo and buying. But this is hard to determine sometimes, because people can change their minds, be dishonest with you to rush you off the phone, completely forget and end up becoming a no-show to the appointment, etc. I’m not a psychic, so I don’t know with 100% certainty what people are thinking all the time: but by using a soft selling approach to needs analysis, emotional intelligence, a respectful courteous tone of voice, and qualifying questions: logical inferences can be made about who should be reasonably considered as a “lead” and put on your calendar for a demo appointment. But we don’t see the role of the telemarketer to be one in which the concept of “return on investment” (ROI) is a dominating consideration. If anything, ROI responsibility mainly falls to closers or account executives, at the end of the sales process when prospects are turned into customers and begin to make their first payments. However, telemarketers or BDRs, are at the beginning of the sales process: their job is simply to hunt down and find any new prospects which could possibly be turned into customers someday by you or an account executive. ROI becomes a measurable thing when you can look at your entire marketing and sales budget, alongside the income that has been received from customer payments. ROI is a “big picture” financial analysis thing, which takes a look at all of the cash flow related to your whole sales team: but a BDR is simply a person at the beginning of the sales process, trying hard to drive new leads into your sales pipeline. Hence the name of our company…Lead Drivers.

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