By Angela Garfinkel, President
Return on Investment (ROI) is one of the primary metrics that sales organizations use to measure the real performance on a telemarketing services program. The basic formula for return on investment is the sales revenue generated by the campaign divided by the cost of the campaign. Most companies work hard to get 5:1, 6:1 or even 7:1 return on investment. Other organizations find that the best ROI numbers range from 2:1 to 4:1. Still other organizations are happy with any ROI that is at least 1:1.
Whatever the target, it is important to carefully identify how your organization recognizes revenue (the first half of the equation). If you are selling a product or service that bills monthly and the average customer is retained for 24 months, then the revenue would be the monthly billed dollar amount times 24 months. If you’re selling a subscription where the customer is billed for 12 months in advance, but you have a cancellation option during the 12 months, then forecasted refunds should be included in your revenue calculation.
What do you do if you are generating leads or setting appointments for sales opportunities? Same thing, you need to find a way to forecast your revenue generated. At first ROI will seem almost non-existent. This is obviously due to the fact that you will be what you’ve sown at a later date. Non-sale campaign ROI needs to be looked at over a longer course of time. To figure this out you will need to know two things, exactly what percentage of your leads will become a sale and what your average order size. Once you know this you can easily calculate your forecasted ROI for a lead gen or appointment setting campaign.
It is an excellent idea to track ROI for every telemarketing campaign, offer, and list that you can uniquely identify. In an outbound telemarketing organization, that can be fairly simple because you can assign a unique identifier to every call and then you can make sure that all orders entered into your order processing system are coded with that unique campaign identifier. That makes it easier to run reports for both revenues and expenses associated with the various telemarketing initiatives you are tracking.
With targeted B2B telemarketing programs, the list segments can be smaller on an individual basis. At Quality Contact Solutions, we often blend the lists together to ensure dialing efficiencies and then we dynamically pop scripts and offers based on the campaign ID assigned to every calling record. We can also track disposition codes and the time spent in every campaign based on the data records tied back to each unique campaign. The benefit is efficiency while at the same time clearly understanding ROI for various outbound telemarketing programs.
In summary, tracking your telemarketing campaign ROI is a pivotal component to gauging the success of any telemarketing program. If you’re not doing this now, start. Determine your organizational targets and begin diving into the numbers. At Quality Contact Solutions we provide high quality, results-oriented B2B telemarketing campaigns that help you achieve sales results. Let us help you achieve your sales and marketing ROI goals today. Give us a call! 1-800-963-2889. Or email me at angela.garfinkel@qualitycontactsolutions.com. I’d love to hear from you!
Angela Garfinkel is the President and Founder of Quality Contact Solutions, a leading outsourced telemarketing services organization. Angela has the pleasure of leading a talented team that runs thousands of outbound telemarketing program hours on a daily basis. Angela can be reached at angela.garfinkel@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516.656-5118.
