The CRAP Report

Although I didn’t get the chance to see it last night, Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” reunited the Seinfeld cast.  I love Seinfeld!  Even my Mom loves Seinfeld (she’s hosting a Seinfeld SceneIt party at her house this weekend).  One of the funniest moments from Seinfeld was when Jerry and George were mistaken for a gay couple.  Upon their vehement denial that they were a couple, they quantified their protest with, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”  You know, I think that way when people confuse teleprospecting with telemarketing.  I want to distance myself from telemarketing because, though there’s nothing wrong with telemarketing companies, that is not what I do.

David A. Weiss spoke about the differences between the two earlier last month, and he makes the distinction between the two by saying that most people, when they consider telemarketing, think that it is those annoying phone calls that you receive during dinner time, trying to sell you the local newspaper.  A great example of this is in the movie Boiler Room, when the main character, Seth Davis (a broker working for a crooked brokerage firm) fields a call from someone selling the Daily News.  Seth brings the telemarketer to task for giving up so soon.  I see a few differences between “telemarketing” and teleprospecting.

First of all, telemarketers are usually used when selling directly to consumers, a la the Daily News in the example above.  Teleprospecting, however, is a business to business effort.  When you’re trying to sell directly to customers, you’re really concerned with taking the order, and that isn’t the case with teleprospecting.  With teleprospecting, you are one part of the overall sales process.

Second, telemarketers stick to their script.  That is their job, right?  They’re trying to get through their script and get to the end so that they can ask for the sale, subscription, vote, etc.  Teleprospecting is very different.  Teleprospecting reps have the responsibility of qualifying the suspects that they’re calling.  That requires that they be versed in the product/services/solutions that they’re calling on.  Teleprospecting reps need to have lengthy discussions about business pains and how best to solve them.

Lastly, I see the overall goal of a telemarketing effort to be very different from a teleprospecting effort.  Telemarketers are closing sales.  They want you to buy their service with you from them over the phone today.  Teleprospectors are not closing sales at all, but rather, they are gathering intelligence for either their sales rep or their clients’ sales reps, in an effort to put fully qualified opportunities into their pipeline.  Make no mistake, teleprospecting has a close, it’s just that the close is a scheduled appointment rather than a transaction.

Hopefully that clears up the differences between telemarketing and teleprospecting a little bit.  And now, when you see me outside of the office and you want to talk shop, you know that I’m not part of a “telemarketing” firm.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that…