Phase 2

The trial is when we actually get on the phone and start prospecting for you. During the trial, which can take anywhere from four to eight weeks (at a rate of 10-30 hours per week of actual calling,) we implement the telemarketing program that we designed in the Telemarketing Plan.

The first thing to keep in mind is that trials are not "practice sessions." Trials, that is, our efforts in Phase 2, are designed to generate real business for you, to find real prospects who are, hopefully, going to close. The goals of a trial include making money for you. But more than anything else, the trial is designed to prove whether or not telemarketing is going to work, and be economical.

As you probably already know, marketing is a risky business. You can spend thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign (and we all know lots of people who have done it,) without having any idea that it will pay off (and then, of course, it often doesn't.) We all know people who have spent tens of thousands of dollars on sales reps without knowing whether they'll perform, or on printing brochures for a direct mail program without knowing whether they'll get a profitable response rate. We even know companies who have committed thousands of dollars for telemarketing programs without testing, trash their market, and then can't get their reputation back.

At JV/M, we can't guarantee your success, so we test everything we do so that we can minimize your costs and risks, and maximize your chances of success. To do that, we design a trial that is controlled and monitored so that if things aren't working, we can fix them before they get out of hand. For example, we look at the results, the objections, the responses and the feedback from the market and use that to improve the appointment rate. We look at what the telemarketer is saying, and how he or she is presenting your products. And we listen to what the prospects are saying, or not saying, to see if we can find the need, and the "soft underbelly" in the market that we can attack to make money for you. If we're lucky, we get lots of good appointments without having to change a thing. But we don't count on luck, we create it by conducting a trial.

Without meaning to sound negative, the fact is that there are lots of things we have to look at when we try to grow your business, because there are lots of things that have to work in order for you to be succeessful. And if we approach the problem with overconfidence in our Telemarketing Plan, or hold a pre-conceived -- but wrong -- notion about what will work, we are doomed to failure. So we look at the results as they come in, usually on a daily basis; and we adjust the campaign to maximize the quality and quantity of leads.

In at least 50% of the cases, something in the trial has to change from what we thought when we wrote the Telemarketing Plan. It may be the script, or the telemarketer, or whom we target, or the attention-getting initial benefit statement, or the qualifying questions, or the way we articulate your value proposition, or even the segment we're going after. Most things are okay, but if that one thing isn't fixed, the whole campaign can fail.

It may sound trivial, but the first thing we do is try to get you your first appointment. It's not usually projectable, but a non-zero response rate tells you that we're probably somewhere near the target. If we can't get anything, we have to go back to the drawing board. Is there no market for the product? Is telemarketing unable to connect with a decision-maker, or pursuade him or her to consider you as a potential vendor? If we get a non-zero response rate, hopefully in the first 5-10 hours, we know we haven't completely blown it.

Assuming that we get a non-zero response rate, of course, we always want more leads and appointments. So, just as seconding a nomination is as important as the nomination itself, we then look for the second and third -- and more -- appointments, while all along we're modifying the script, teasing the data base, and working the communcations issues. Hopefully, at some point, we get a sense of the pace: how many hours (or dials or contacts,) per appointment are we taking.

In some case, one appointment every four hours is good, in other cases one appointment every hour is good. In other cases it might take ten hours of calling to get a good lead. Whether it's cost-effective for you depends on your close rate and your margins, so there is no rule of thumb (which is why the success criteria is discussed in the Telemarketing Plan.) But the trial will reveal, at some point, whether we're able to generate appointments for you, how much on average they're going to cost, and how much you're going to make.

As important as the number of appointments is, the quality of the appointments is equally important. If we get you a hundred appointments, but you can't make any money on them, what good have we done? On the other hand, if we get you one appointment, and it closes for a $100K net profit, do you really care that we only got one? Maybe, maybe not. But success is a function of both quantity and quality, and we are driven to maximize both.

The trial usually ends with both of us knowing whether it worked or not, and whether it's worth continuing to work together. We can provide the service and the leads, and if you can close them and make a decent profit, JV/M should probably be part of your ongoing marketing mix. The trial is all about proving it in with a minimum of cost and risk by both of us.

Trials usually last from fifty to 150 hours, and cost $35-$45 per hour. And, to be candid, we don't make any money on trials any more than we do writing Telemarketing Plans, so we try to keep them as short as possible. The goal is to figure out whether outsourced business-to-business telemarketing and appointment-setting can be profitable for your business as quickly as possible, and at the same time we're trying to figure out whether selling your product or service can be fun and profitable for us.

This is because what we're really looking for is a long term relationship with you. We understand how hard it is for you to find and keep good people who can grow your business (after all, we have the same problem.) But we have good people, and they're all looking for their next "hit." If it can come from prospecting for your business, that's what we want to be doing. We want to get on the ramp; that is, Phase 3.