It only October, yet the holiday ads are already on the television and decorations are popping up in the store windows already. Thanksgiving and the December holidays will be here before we know it.
So, it certainly not too soon to start thinking about the holidays and how they will or will not affect your marketing plans and outbound teleprospecting activities.
A frequent question that we get from our clients is whether they should halt outbound teleprospecting around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Some companies even question if there any point to conducting outbound teleprospecting activities during the month of December at all.
To help our clients with this concern, we have analyzed the results of multiple outbound teleprospecting campaigns that were conducted in 2011 during the Thanksgiving holiday and throughout the month of December. All campaigns were B2B focused and targeted IT decision-makers, across multiple industries. These campaigns had a minimum of 5,000 target contacts.
When comparing our agent production, specifically the number of conversations and leads, obtained during Thanksgiving week (Monday-Wednesday) to the production obtained on the same campaigns during the previous week, same days, here what we found, on average:
- 3% more conversations took place per agent during the Thanksgiving week
- 31% more of the conversations were deemed qualified leads during the Thanksgiving week.
Furthermore, when comparing our agent production during the entire month of December (excluding the actual Holidays) to the production obtained during the life of the campaigns, we found the following stats on average:
- 5% less conversations took place in December
- 16% more of the conversations were deemed qualified leads during December
Generally, we have found that while our agents may or may not have quite as many conversations (up 3% during Thanksgiving week, but down 5% during December), people who are at the office just prior to a holiday tend to be a little less busy and therefore are more open to having meaningful conversations with our teleprospecting agents. This is one of the reasons that we obtain more leads per conversations just before a holiday. Additionally, during December, many decision-makers are working on budget plans for the next year and/or they are looking at how much money they must spend before the close of the current year. These factors also increase the number of leads per conversations.
Based on this data, we recommend that you do not halt teleprospecting activity during the holidays. In fact, November and December may be an excellent timeframe to ramp up your efforts!