[0:15] Alec: Hello and welcome to the SME Business Show with me, Alec Drew. Each show focuses on one particular topic and so we invite an expert from that sector to share their knowledge, insights and tips to help you get the most out of your business. Today’s topic is outbound calls and how it relates to lead generation, surveys and events. And I’m delighted to be joined by Gerry Delaney, CEO of Kendlebell.

[0:38] Gerry: Hi Alec, delighted to be here.

[0:40] Alec: Hi Gerry, great to have you here. Let’s start with lead generation and what it’s all about. out, you know, what is lead generation?

[0:46] Gerry: Lead generation is where we would make calls on behalf of a company who would have a contact list of customers or potential customers that they want to contact to generate more sales. Could be perhaps launching a new product or new service. And we would make those initial calls to generate interest for the company.

[1:07] Alec: Is this like a sales call?

[1:09] Gerry: No, we wouldn’t do sales as such because then you’re into issues around, could be technical issues around the product or service, or obviously pricing and pricing strategies. So we wouldn’t get into that as such.

[1:19] Alec: Who typically is using this sort of service?

[1:22] Gerry: Well, you know, basically any company can use the service. Anyone who wants to grow their sales, you know, they have a sales team maybe in place. They’re quite expensive. They’re maybe involved working on a particular project or contract. We can be generating leads for them. So when time comes free for them, they can follow up those leads. They have a pipeline in place for them to move on straight away, rather than them having to make the calls.

[1:45] Alec: Yeah, I suppose a lot of people might think this is sort of old-fashioned in this world of technology in which we’re in.

[1:50] Gerry: Yeah, no, absolutely not. I mean, obviously, you can use technology to generate sales, but depending on the nature of your business, you know, people want to talk to people and, you know, get a feel for, you know, what you do. So, the personal touch is still very important in business.

[2:05] Alec: So, what do I need to do to sort of start the process going here?

[2:07] Gerry: Well, first of all, you need a contact list, and we would spend quite a bit of time. The first thing we would do is get to understand your business. That’s critical. Then, obviously, develop a script and a contact list, and once we have that information, we can start making calls. And also, the critical thing is, what are you looking to get out of it? So, what is a win for you? That’s very important.

[2:32] Alec: Let’s say I’m somebody who doesn’t have a database. How do you manage that?

[2:35] Gerry: Well, there’s two things we can do there. Either we can put together a database for you, or alternatively, you can buy in a database. There are providers out there who specialise in that. So if you want to target finance directors in a company, in a particular sector, maybe the hospitality industry, you can buy in that targeted list.

[2:53] Alec: Can I expect to get from the sort of work that you’re doing on my behalf?

[2:56] Gerry: Okay. I mean, what we would aim to do in terms of the project that we would agree with is to generate actual real leads, interest, people who are interested, talking to your salespeople. Now, that could be existing customers or potentially new customers. We might perhaps, again, if you ask us to, we would diary in appointments for you. And we’d also give you feedback in terms of maybe sentiment as well that, you know, they might have towards your company or towards your product or service.

[3:23] Alec: Oh, that sounds great. And in terms of creating a script, who creates the scripts for these sort of calls?

[3:28] Gerry: Yeah, ideally, better that you do it. You know your own business, but we’re delighted. We would always get involved in it anyway. So we would ask you, first of all, to let’s see your script that you’re working off. And then we give you feedback. We know what has worked in the past. You don’t want the script to sound like it’s a series of questions that you’re asking. It has to be conversational and give a relaxed…

[3:49] Alec: Not an interrogation.

[3:50] Gerry: No, exactly not.

[3:52] Alec: You’ve been in the business a long time. What sort of return on investment do companies expect to get out of this?

[3:58] Gerry: Again, that depends on a number of factors. I mean, and I’ll give you an interesting example of one, but it depends on your sales value. You know, are you selling something that’s 100 euro, 200 euro, or is it 5,000 euro sales? Obviously, sales value is critical. Is it recurring income or is it one-off sale? I’ll give you an example, and this was a non-financial sort of measure. We did a project for a software company a number of years ago. They gave us five large pharmaceutical companies that they wanted us to contact. And for them, a win was not getting a sale. They didn’t expect to get a sale. They wanted their name on the list of that pharmaceutical company as a possible provider of software.

[4:39] Alec: I know certainly if I’m going to give you a database, let’s say 500 names, you’re not going to go wading into that. You run something like a pilot system for running that, don’t you?

[4:48] Gerry: I would always recommend, that’s part of what we recommend right from the start. So what we’d suggest is run a pilot, maybe again, it depends, maybe 50, 100 calls. Very quickly, you’ll see, is the script working? Is the contact list working? You may find that the people you hope to contact are the wrong people in the company. So, you have to tweak that, maybe look at the target list again. And also, very quickly, you’ll see what sort of response we’re getting and in terms of return that you’re getting, whether it’s worth your while. So, before you commit as a company, or we commit as well, because there may be projects that just don’t work, then the pilot is critical to that exercise.

[5:26] Alec: That makes a lot of sense. and in terms of, I’ve spoken to people in the past and they’ve said this sort of system just hasn’t worked for them. Have you any idea why that might be the case?

[5:34] Gerry: There are certain industries it just doesn’t work and I would very quickly tell you if I thought this isn’t going to work. And again, that’s why the pilot is critical before you commit. It may be the person you’re, particularly with a lot of SMEs, the person you need to talk to is the business owner. They’re not necessarily working in the business. They could be involved in other activities, trying to get a hold of them the time of day you’re trying to get them. So very difficult in certain situations. Hospitality is one where maybe you need to talk to the chef in a restaurant or a bar, and of course, middle of the day is the wrong time to try and contact them.

[6:10] Alec: In terms of a sort of lead generation, what else can we expect from it?

[6:15] Gerry: We would also update your database, so very critically in that, so hopefully you get a good number of leads, but also maybe the person, and we’ve seen this where we’re dealing with your existing customers, the person you have in your database is not the person you should be talking to anymore. So, they will give us the name of the person, give us their email details, telephone numbers, or alternatively, they will tell you that some feedback maybe on your product or service, which is very useful, even though that was not necessarily the purpose of the call. So, we would feed all that information.

[6:48] Alec: So, that’s a sort of bonus from what happens there. Totally. I suppose the final question in this This part of the chat is about timelines. So I’ve now engaged with you. What can I expect as a timeline to start seeing some results from?

[7:02] Gerry: Okay. Well, once we’ve got the script in place, we have the contact list, we’ve agreed that we can start very quickly. So we can start literally in a matter of days, assuming we have the resources available, which we usually do have people we can call on. So there’s no reason why if we were talking today that we could be going again, we could be going with this next week or in two weeks’ time. So very quickly you can move on. But it is important to be aware of certain times of the year, July, August, December, not great times to be contacting people. So, again, we would advise you in relation to that.

[7:31] Alec: So, some sort of foreplanning would be well advised in terms of that. Yeah, yeah. I suppose just switching the topic slightly, I just want to talk about surveys because, again, this is part of outbound calls. Tell me more about a survey. What is a survey?

[7:43] Gerry: Well, a survey is where we would be provided with a contact list and script by you and And we would contact, and it could be existing customers or potentially new customers, to get feedback in terms of sentiment. So customer sentiment, perhaps are they happy with their service? Are they happy with the product, any issues they have? So it’d be a series of questions that you’ve agreed that we would carry out on your behalf. Again, any company could do that. A lot of government bodies use that because they’re obliged maybe under legislation to survey customers. So, for instance, a good example is housing. Organising associations have to do a survey every year of all their tenants and get feedback how they have been relationed to that. Commercial companies would do it, use it from a planning point of view, to plan maybe, you know, for budgets for the following year, maybe to get feedback on new products, new services, or what the customer is planning to do in their business, which will help you to plan within your own organisation.

[8:40] Alec: So I know it sort of gives a level of credibility, but when you talk about this sort of onus on people to get surveys. Is there any sort of accreditation you need to fulfil that obligation?

[8:53] Gerry: In certain situations there can be, but generally, you know, that isn’t an issue, you know. But there are some organisations where the statutory requirements that they have to follow, so obviously we would have to be approved to be able to do that. But generally the sort of information we’re, you know, looking for doesn’t fall under that. situation.

[9:16] Alec: How do I ensure I ask the right questions?

[9:18] Gerry: Well, again, we would help you with that in terms of, you know, I’ve seen surveys where people had 40 or 50 questions and I said, and probably a lot of those questions you get that information without having to contact somebody. It might be information available on the website or whatever. So we would try to get the survey down to a small number, you know, maybe five, six, seven in certain situations. And again, it’s understanding your business. What are you trying to get out of the survey? what’s important to you.

[9:47] Alec: Yes I suppose like a lot of small business owners out there I’m trying to think to myself how do I use this information?

[9:52] Gerry: Well again in most cases the organisation that carries out the survey this information will be fed back to senior management and more than likely up to the board level and because there may well be a requirement so in fact one law firm that we work with they carry out a survey of customer sentiment after the finished legal work for the the customer. And that is obviously the partners in the firm review that to see are there any issues arising in terms of what they’re saying to the client on the one hand and what the client is actually experiencing on the other side. So that’s very important. So very senior level. And again, as I’ve mentioned, government bodies that could be fed back into the various department that they report into.

[10:37] Alec: And do you tend to find that participants are actually very upfront and honest about answering these questions.

[10:44] Gerry: That’s one where training is important in terms of our staff. You have to be very careful in the survey that you don’t lead the person. So quite often our client will want you to record on a scale of one to ten, you know, their satisfaction and you do not say is that a seven or an eight. You have to leave it for the person to decide where they want to fit in on the scale. So the training is very important in that. Again, you know, the The planning around that is obviously important in terms of how you word the questions.

[11:14] Alec: How many people do we typically need to conduct a survey to get some sort of valid results from it?

[11:19] Gerry: Well, again, if you’re talking statistically valid, then you’re into a different sort of situation. It’s not an electoral poll, no. And we know how they’re used. No, more how they’re used. They’re accurate at the point of time, but how they’re used might be slightly different. No, I mean, you could do a survey. It could be literally, if you have a small customer base, large customers, it could be 25 customers, 50. Typically though, a lot of customers, we’re talking maybe 100 or more that you’re carrying out. We work with a number of companies who we’re doing regular every month or every quarter. They’re obliged or they’re, they want to do maybe 50 surveys every quarter, every month. So, you know, that’s really up to them to determine what.

[12:02] Alec: So they’re getting a consistent feedback.

[12:03] Gerry: Exactly.

[12:04] Alec: And they’ll see the data and how it relates then.

[12:06] Gerry: So really that’s their call unless they want something statistically valid.

[12:10] Alec: In terms of GDPR, I mean, I come back to this again because everybody’s talking about GDPR and how it relates to them. I suppose I bounce it over to you. How do you ensure that you’re dealing with compliance?

[12:21] Gerry: Okay, well, again, you know, it’s something we ask the client to confirm to us in terms of how they’ve gathered the database that they have. We would also, in our initial script, when we’re talking to the person we’re serving, we’d explain that the information is confidential. Also, that we’re not going to seek any personal information or other financial information. So, that’s something we would ensure. GDPR has changed things. Quite often we get asked, you know, where do you get my telephone number or, you know, that type of thing. So people are much more conscious of it.

 

[12:54] Alec: How are you sort of confident that you’re reaching the right people?

[12:58] Gerry: Okay, well, again, that is really up to you, you know, in terms of working with the client at the outset, you know, who do you want to target? So, for instance, we did a survey a number of years ago, a couple of surveys for county councils where they were planning their strategy for the next five years in terms of retail shopping. So again, an issue there was that they asked us to buy telephone number lists. Now they were all mobile phone numbers. So you weren’t necessarily, that person may have moved from County Wexford to County Donegal. So you weren’t necessarily talking to somebody in the right area. And also that would have an impact on demographics because a lot of people don’t have landlines now. So you weren’t necessarily talking to, you were maybe talking to a particular age cohort as opposed to getting a total sort of coverage over the whole population that was required.

[13:48] Alec: From your experience, are you discovering many people are sort of getting frustrated from getting these sort of phone calls around surveys?

[13:53] Gerry: Well, they will get frustrated if the calls, another thing we do, and we do this in all cases, whether it’s lead generation or surveys, is we always advise our client as part of the pilot to send out an advance email to the target person. So, again, the housing associations are a good example. They have all their tenants. They have the list. They send a text out to them, tell them to expect the call. The tenants are used to getting it every year, so, you know, they’re not in that sense, and they’re happy enough to take the call. But again, you know, you tell them how long you think the survey is going to call a couple of you don’t say a couple of minutes and then run for 10 or 15 minutes. So that’s, again, my brevity, you know, keeping a tight control is very important.

[14:33] Alec: I suppose one of the biggest challenges for your own organisation must be about the number of scammers that are out there and all these unsolicited calls coming in. Very important.

[14:43] Gerry: And again, what we do is we would always, when we’re carrying out any of this work, we would have a telephone number and contact details for somebody in the organisation. So if a person is a bit concerned, we say, look, you can ring John or Mary. This is their telephone number to confirm that the call you’re receiving is bona fide and not a scam. Happens occasionally.

[15:03] Alec: In terms of timeline, how quick can I expect to get back results from these sort of surveys?

[15:08] Gerry: Well, again, you know, we feed the information quite often. The survey information would be recorded online on a shared document so you can actually see the results coming in. But again, you know, within days, depending on the size of the survey.

[15:24] Alec: One of the questions that could be asked is, could I not do this myself? I mean, I have a team of people sitting around. Could I get them to do it under spare time?

[15:31] Gerry: Certainly you could. Certainly you could. The difference, though, is they probably get pulled away to other work, other projects. So, you know, if you want somebody to make 100 phone calls, it might take them a few days with interruptions. It’s less efficient, whereas we can dedicate somebody straight away. They deal with it. You get your response back quickly. Plus, you know, you may get a more consistent sort of feedback. And also, you know, the person we’re talking to might be prepared to give us some information, which they mightn’t say directly to one of your people. So that’s useful as well.

[16:03] Alec: Let’s just talk about costs around this whole area. Give us some idea of how that works out, or how you, you know.

[16:10] Gerry: I mean, the main cost is we charge on a per hour basis, okay? So, whatever number of hours we put in. We don’t charge generally for the setup unless it is, there is significant setup. So if, say, myself or one of my business partners have to spend quite a bit of time on setting up information, or perhaps you want us to log into your CRM system, diary system, so we obviously have to get familiar with that. So there may or may not be setup calls, but generally we don’t charge it. So it’s basically the number of hours that the person is on the phone making the calls.

[16:44] Alec: So let’s say I want to start the whole process. What do I need? Do you have a sort of briefing script or you have something? So how do you help me get the ball rolling?

[16:52] Gerry: Yeah, well, after we’ve had our initial conversation, I have a good understanding of your business, good understanding of what you’re looking for, what constitutes a win for you in terms of, well, then, you know, we document all that and we feed that back to you so you have effectively a document from us setting out what we’re going to do and when that will be done and what information you can expect back. So that’s all agreed up front.

[17:15] Alec: That makes a lot of sense. And I suppose as we move on to the third and final part of this chat, we’re talking about events and webinars and conferences. What role do you play? Because I think one of the biggest challenges we all have today is ensuring that people turn up, having sent out so many invitations. And we know it’s very fickle these days.

[17:33] Gerry: Yeah. And, you know, a lot of companies, if they’re running a webinar or running an event, I mean, it goes back to what you asked earlier. They send out information by email and then nobody necessarily looks to see, well, what responses are we getting? and then suddenly they find, you know, there’s a webinar coming up or there’s a conference and a lot of people who they were expecting, maybe they didn’t happen. So, you know, they can pull us in, we can make the phone call to the person, the contact, I would always ask for if we can have a booking contact so we can go straight into the booking system, book them into the webinar, book them into the conference. We can do that because if the person has to go back and do, oh, I’ll do that later or do it tomorrow, it probably won’t happen. So when we’re talking to them, we can book them into whatever the event is. That obviously makes conversion rates much better. It’ll also, you’ll find, again, it goes back to what we discussed earlier, they may have sent the invitation to the person who’s not the right person, or they want to bring a colleague, even better. They want to bring two or three, not just, and you’ve only asked one person to it. So again, you know, that’s a benefit to you.

[18:38] Alec: If I’m not mistaken, you don’t handle the whole payment side of this?

[18:41] Gerry: Generally, no. I mean, because again, you’re into GDPR issues around credit card details, and it also extends the call. And, you know, as you asked earlier, people don’t really want long non-calls. So we would get them in the book and then the company would send out an invoice through whatever means they actually do that through their own systems.

[19:02] Alec: Many organisations sort of organise things nearly on the fly. So what sort of lead time do you need to make this work?

[19:09] Gerry: Prefer more than less. I mean, we had one where they came on to us on a Monday and they had a webinar the following Wednesday, 10 days later, and they wanted it. So very quickly, we got the list, we got the links, and we started making calls that week and they started to fill up the webinar very quickly. The one that was the following week, that was much easier. But again, we focused on the one that was first, obviously.

[19:33] Alec: In terms of numbers, what’s the sort of minimum number you like to work with that makes it sort of financially viable?

[19:39] Gerry: Yeah, I mean, obviously if it’s a small number, it’s not, you know, probably more than 100 again. 100 is your sort of, you know, target sort of number, at least at that sort of number, and upwards, it makes it worthwhile.

[19:52] Alec: Many organisations are now sort of running Zoom webinars and things like that, which means that you have an international audience. Are you able to manage that on their behalf?

[20:01] Gerry: We can do that, and we do it, in fact. And again, a project we were involved in recently, they were running an Irish company running a conference in Florida. So they were inviting US and Canadian people. We phoned those people in the evening in their business hours as opposed to our business, our enquils, had a couple of Australians they were hoping to get in Japanese, so we made those calls as well. So we can cover the whole globe, that’s not a problem.

[20:25] Alec: And in terms of effectiveness, have you any stats around the effectiveness of this sort of service?

[20:30] Gerry: It would be probably more through way by testimonial. I mean, the stats very much are determined by what you expected, if you can identify in advance. So very much testimonials. Generally, we will, you know, if you give us a list of 100 and for a webinar, you know, we would probably sign up 20, maybe 30 people who aren’t on the list. Plus, you’ll also get the corrections to the list. And, you know, people maybe can’t go to the webinar this time, but can you send me the recording? Or are you running another one in three weeks’ time or three months’ time?

[21:06] Gerry: So straight away, you’re getting a booking for that webinar at that stage.

[21:11] Alec: Are you asked on occasion to follow up after these conferences to do a survey on what the sentiment was?

[21:18] Gerry: Occasionally, occasionally. But a lot of companies do that, use online systems. So when you’re at the conference or on the webinar, straight away you get an email back, and give you a response in terms of were you happy with the webinar did it cover what you expected it to cover any other topics of interest to you in the future that type of thing so they tend to do that online and.

[21:41] Alec: What sort of percentage of the list that you get do you contact well.

[21:44] Gerry: We contact everybody we’d always contact everybody and we’d attempt three calls we’ll go beyond three calls if need be if we think it’s worth doing that and we feed back the information you know we’re not getting replies or the wrong person. Again, that sort of database information to keep your database up to date. We’ll feedback that information, but we try to contact everybody. And again, because having a dedicated person with no other interruptions, you know, they can hit, say, 100. They can do that. Might even do it in an afternoon or certainly over a sort of two-day period, they can cover that.

[22:18] Alec: I suppose the final question here I have to ask you, how do we avoid people getting annoyed with these sort of phone calls? Because, you know, people are pretty short-tempered these days on the phone.

[22:26] Gerry: Yeah, it’s been more an issue since GDPR came in, but also with COVID, a lot of people working from home. So if we’re phoning them at home, they may not want to take the call. So a very important part of it is the advanced email. So telling them to expect a call, what the purpose of the call is, so that, well, if you’re ringing into a company, then you get past the gatekeeper. It’s easier to get past the gatekeeper. but also when you get to the person if they’ve read your email they’ll say yeah I’m interested in attending or I’m interested in doing the survey and then you can keep the call much tighter or no I didn’t get your email resend it or I’m the wrong person to talk to and they give us an alternative so generally if they get advance notice you have less issues then if they don’t want to talk to you they’ll tell you very quickly.

[23:13] Alec: And you can help a company with that scripting of that email?

[23:16] Gerry: Exactly.

[23:17] Alec: Where can people find out more about all of this?

[23:19] Gerry: Well I’d be delighted to talk to anyone My email address is gdelaney@kbelloncall.ie or you can go to our website www.kbelloncall.ie. Be delighted to talk to you.

[23:31] Alec: A special thanks to our guest today, Gerry Delaney, CEO of Kendlebell, for coming in and sharing so many valuable tips around the whole area of outbound calls. If anything we discussed today resonated with you, why not reach out to us across any of the social media channels, SME Business Show. Thank you for your company and we look forward to seeing you again soon.