How Many Telemarketing Attempts Does it Take to Reach Your Prospects?

How Many Telemarketing Attempts Does it Take to Reach Your Prospects?

For years Marketing Managers have thought that calling a prospect more than three or four times brought about diminishing returns. Thus, they would hire an external agency or use an internal call center and provide a prospect list with instructions to make 3 attempts to every prospect.

However, new data shows that these past statistics no longer hold true. Examining 464,024 telemarketing records across 12 high-tech companies targeting Managers, Directors and VPs, TeleNet Marketing discovered eye-opening statistics.

  • The average number of Telemarketing Attempts for a completed conversations to occur is 3.68
  • The average number of Telemarketing Attempts for the daily call production rate** to drop, and thus begin to reach diminishing returns, is 5.76

Average refers to the middle value of the data set used in the calculation.
Call production rate refers to number of completed conversations per day

Furthermore, if your prospect audience is comprised of C-Level executives, then the average number of attempts for a completed conversation to occur jumps to 7 attempts, and diminishing returns is not met until more than 12 attempts.

Considering this data, companies that utilize a “3 attempt and kill” telemarketing approach, are not allowing enough time to achieve the average number of attempts needed for a conversation to take place. Moreover those that stop telemarketing once the average of 3.68 is obtained are only uncovering approximately one half of the leads that can be reasonably achieved from the prospect list.

Marketing Directors have many budget constraints, which often lead them to make a decision to target a prospect universe with few telemarketing attempts. However, based on our new statistical data, this approach is not the most effective way of generating results. So, what should companies do when faced with budget constraints? TeleNet Marketing recommendations analyzing your prospect database in order to identify a “sweet spot” ‘ which could be based on a number of factors including, but not limited to: industry, size of company, geography, installed environment, and/or title. Once your list is narrowed, employ a 6-attempt strategy for optimal results.

Note: The above data was furnished by TeleNet Marketing Solutions to MarketingSherpa in July 2007 and is highlighted in their research article “Exclusive Data: How Many Telemarketing Calls Does It Take to Initiate a Lead Gen Conversation?"

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