Too many people use a stop/start approach to telemarketing. They telemarket when work dries up, then stop doing it when work picks up. The problem with this approach is there will usually be a delay between the time you start telemarketing and when you get new business.

To get the best results out of your telemarketing, you need to be continually ringing new contacts and at the same time ringing existing prospects so you’re gently nudging them along. Many marketers follow a 90-day cycle and contact all their prospects regularly every three months. At some point you need to decide when it’s no longer productive to keep ringing someone and when to put that time and energy into developing new contacts instead.

This decision needs to be based on the data you develop from monitoring and measuring your results, and on listening to your intuition. In Telesales (2003, pp. 154–5), Stephan Schiffman says he was called in to help a Fortune 500 company improve the efficiency of its telesales force. When he analysed the numbers, he found that virtually no sales were closed on the fifth or subsequent calls, yet telemarketers kept on calling.

By skipping the fifth call and making new calls instead, sales jumped 28 per cent in a month. On the other hand, I know of a company that persisted in ringing one prospect after most people would have stopped and on the ninth call gained a lucrative client.