There is a recent trend towards outsourcing your B2B cold calling and telemarketing to companies that specialize in cold calling prospects and setting appointments for you. This article aims to evaluate the pros and cons of outsourced cold calling.

The reasons to outsource your B2B cold calling are numerous; the following are the pros of outsourcing your telemarketing services:

• Your sales reps hate cold calling; they hate the rejection. If they can receive sales leads without cold calling they would love that; it would free up more time for face-to-face meetings which would lead to more closed sales.
• You would spend less money on purchasing lead lists from companies such as InfoUSA and D&B.
• You wouldn't have to pay a big salary to your sales force to do menial tasks like dialing a telephone.
• Outsourced telemarketing companies normally provide cold calling training to their call center staff. This could include training on how to get passed the receptionist or gatekeeper and through to the actual decision maker. This gives them a competitive advantage.
• Cold calling outsourcing firms can also actually set appointments providing their clients with qualified sales leads.

These are all great reasons to outsource your cold calling to a specialist firm. But, does that actually make it worth it?

My answer to that question is NO. Actually, in most cases my answer is no. What you need to do is calculate your return on equity vis--vis your return on equity on other advertising campaigns. After all, a telemarketing campaign is just like an advertising campaign. It is marketing for new clients or prospects. If you can get more bang for your buck in an alternative advertising campaign, you should do that instead.

Researching prices on the internet, I found that one prominent B2B cold calling firm charges $1800 for 100 hours of cold calling. Let's say that in an hour they can make 10 cold calls. That would be 1000 cold calls in an hour. Lets further say that for every 10 calls they set one appointment. That equals 100 sales leads. At $1800 that would cost you $18 per lead.

Now, $18 per lead may not be bad. Perhaps you make $1000 in commission per closed sale and you can close 1 out of every 3 sales leads. On the surface, this would be worth the costs of hiring a firm to do your cold calling for you.

But before you decide that outsourcing your cold calling is a good idea, you must evaluate other advertising methods that you may use. Perhaps youd have a better ROI with newspaper ads or radio commercials? Perhaps online advertising would produce a higher ROI?

Take, for example, link ads on Google's AdWords program. You can purchase leads for just pennies per click. Lets say the keywords that you target cost 50 cents per click. At this rate, you would receive 36 sales leads for $18. Cold calling costed you $18 for just 1 lead. Perhaps the cold calling leads are better quality. But with the share numer of more leads that could be possible via other marketing methods, it may not be worth it.