It’s easy to get so wrapped in the way that you make purchases – that you forget that there are other ways people like to buy…

Look, if I had a dollar for each person that told me that direct mail, print advertising, Yellow Pages, radio advertising, and other such “old school” media didn’t work – I’d be sitting on a 250 foot yacht somewhere in the Caribbean, bathing in a hot tub filled with hundred dollar bills, drinking Gout de Diamants out of a diamond flute…

But surprisingly, no one has yet to be generous enough to “pay up” after they made such an audacious claim, and I (so graciously) proved them wrong.

And that brings me to my point…

Another infamously “dead media” that we’ve used to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars and add anywhere from 10% – 25% of additional found revenue to our business each month is…

Drum roll please…

Telemarketing!

Perhaps telemarketing was never gone, per se – after all, most of the biggest companies still rely on it to some degree – but telemarketing has been gone from most small business strategy plans since as early as 2000.

Write this down: using a multimedia approach when making an offer will increase sales.

Whether you’re adding a phone number to your website (still not sure why so many companies hide their phone numbers), an order form (an absolute must), or making outbound calls to your prospects and customers – there’s a profit center just waiting to be tapped.

A little while back, I purchased Russell Brunson’s book, Dot Com Secrets (https://dotcomsecretsbook.com)…

For those of you who don’t know him, Russell is the owner of DotComSecrets.com and ClickFunnels.com. He’s widely recognized as an Internet guru – and a damn good one at that… 

About a week after I bought it, I received a phone call as a result of my purchase.

The gentleman asked me a few questions (wisely getting me to say “yes” a few times), then wanted to know if I was committed to growing my business (of course I said “yes” – this was a great prequalifying question).

He told me about an opportunity for me and four other individuals to meet with Russell online for a three-hour session revealing the blueprint in his book. The cost was only $177 if I purchased now, or $197 if I purchased after I agreed that I received value from the training session.

The whole call took 15 minutes, and I suspect this effort brought Russell many thousands of dollars.

This telemarketing agent was not a skilled salesman (in fact, it sounded to me like he was talking to me from a prison cell), but he asked the right questions, and because I knew this was related to a credible expert (Russell), I paid attention.

So, why would Russell Brunson, famous for internet marketing, be reaching out to me with this offer via telephone? I didn’t get an email or any other notification of this offer… Just a call.

Why would he do this?

In short, because telemarketing works.

Now, before we get into the “how” – something important to note:

The automated sales calls are getting a bit out of hand these days – pre-recorded messages that just spam anyone and everyone in hopes of capturing a lead. These don’t offer any value to the person receiving the call, and are more of an annoyance than an opportunity.

So, part of the value of telemarketing in this day and age comes from a real person calling. Even if they aren’t an excellent salesperson, an actual human who can ask/answer questions, and provide a more personalized experience is far more likely to grab a prospect’s attention.

This is where it gets exciting…

I told you that we’re bringing in an extra 10%-25% in monthly revenue – with only one salesperson!

Here’s how it works out…

Let’s just say that (on the low end) we only grew our income by 10% per month. Over the course of 12 months:

That’s a 120% increase in revenues!

…Simply by giving our prospects an additional way to complete their purchase.

In many cases, prospects called because they had questions that were not immediately answered to their satisfaction on the website…

Or they were on the fence, and wanted to be sold and reassured that they were making a smart decisions…

Or they don’t like entering their credit card online and wanted to enter this information in person…

Let alone the outbound efforts we made to capture sales.

We started this campaign with a client a few months ago, proved that it worked, and are now using a little Predictable Profits Magic to super-size the numbers for geometric growth.

In fact, our goal is to double the revenue from this salesperson for a whopping 240% increase.

Here’s how we’re doing it…

My salesperson’s average sale is $2,000.

It takes him 45 minutes to close a deal…

And he closes 33% of qualified prospects into customers.

The problem is that, on most days, he’s lucky if he has 3 qualified conversations – the rest of the time is spent cold-calling the existing customer list or speaking to unqualified prospects.

This raised the question:

How can I optimize this situation so my salesperson is spending more time closing deals and speaking to qualified prospects?

The answer: fill his calendar for him.

The first step was to leverage our multimedia approach to sell more calls using email. Rather than my salesperson spending hours making outbound calls looking for a qualified prospect, we created an effort to have people schedule a call with him.

In this instance, we sent an email to the prospect offering them a free 30-minute assessment, giving them the opportunity to identify the gaps in their performance and opening the door for the salesperson to plug in a solution.

We drove the prospect to schedule an appointment using http://www.YouCanBook.me.

The result? One email filled his calendar for 2.5 weeks.

The last time we did this, it resulted in over $24,000 in sales.

The prospect receives value from the call and my salesperson receives a warm lead…

Now that we’re seeing that it works, we’ll automate the process with Infusionsoft and test it using two methods.

First, we’ll send an invite to schedule a call to a group of prospects immediately after they opt-in… The second test will be to trigger an invite immediately upon the prospect achieving a certain lead score.

That’s the first strategy that’s working well…

And the second method – inspired by reaching out to my good friend Paul Lemberg, founder of Sales Voodu – was to hire an appointment setter.

Here’s how the numbers work out:

A good appointment setter will make 50 calls every 4 hours and schedule at least 1 appointment. Most of these calls will be no-answer, wrong numbers, or people unwilling to schedule a conversation.

If I pay an appointment setter $15.00 an hour, that’s $90 every 4 hours… Or put another way, I’m paying $90 per appointment.

Are you following me?

If this person dials the phone for 8 hours a day (though that might be a little aggressive) and makes 2 appointments per day, that’s 10 appointments per week.

That brings my telemarketing expense to $900 per week.

If my salesman continues to close one out of every three qualified prospects, we just increased our sales revenue by $6,000 per week – or $24,000 a month.

The gross revenue is: $6,000 (sales) – $900 (for the appointment setter) = $5,100 per week.

Grossing $20,400 more per month, or $244,800 a year!

…And that’s with ONE appointment setter.

Because my salesperson can handle at least 6 qualified conversations per day (or 30 per week),  I should theoretically be able to hire 3 appointment setters for every one sales person.

In a best-case scenario, this would translate into an extra $734,400 in found gross revenues per sales person.

Then we hire another sales person… More appointment setters… And continue ramping up sales as long as we have enough leads to keep everyone busy…

And that’s how to add more profit to your sales efforts.

Looking for more tips to improve your outbound campaigns? Check out this related piece on increasing the response to your cold email outreach.