A Brief History of Telemarketing

How it All Began

Women like to talk – That’s no secret! One day some housewives wanted to sell their cookies and started calling around to find themselves potential cookie buyers, and it worked! They sold their cookies and kept on baking and selling them via phone calls.

So telemarketing was born!

At that stage no one was a professional, but the ladies learnt slowly but surely what lines were and weren’t most effective and tweaked the script as their different wares changed and as their various clients responded.

By the mid 60’s the industry of telemarketing slowly but surely evolved and started becoming better recognised. Training for telemarketing professionals began. Now if you’ve ever been cornered by a bad telesales person, you’ll know just how important great telemarketing sales training is and how much value it adds to the conversation with the potential client/customer.

So the industry grew, along with the growth of telephones throughout the world. Telemarketing became increasingly popular and was seen as a very effective research & sales tool for many companies.

Growing Pains and the Good that Came from That

Unfortunately telemarketing has a bit of a bad history with making unsolicited calls, calling at inappropriate times, calling personal numbers that have not been authorised, or knowingly authorised for commercial calls – The list of complaints goes on and on But as the industry has developed, so have restraints of what are acceptable practices and certain legislation has come in to play too, to ensure these practices are enforced.

The service level offered by telemarketers has also been upgraded due to the ability to more accurately measure effective telemarketing communications with clients or potential customers.

Where Telemarketing Finds Itself Today

Today, one of the main advantages of telemarketing, over other forms of direct sales, is the human interaction, which, if handled by a trained professional, can be highly effective. Telemarketing is also very cost effective and has shown to be very efficient in closing sales where other methods such as internet marketing have failed.

If you’re considering telemarketing and looking for a top team to help you with achieving your sales, marketing & research goals, call us today. We are ready to be of service to you and help you dramatically increase your sales.