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A&P Telemarketing was born out of our own inability to find the service we needed. Originally purely a sales training company, we developed a sideline selling our own services that now markets the services of dozens of small and micro businesses. I guess our Genesis is a bit like a lot of classic business ideas, such as Sarah Tremellen who set up the Bravissimo bra brand for big-busted women like her, or entrepreneur Ivan Massow who set up an insurance brand aimed at gay people like him. In both of these cases the business people learnt from their own experiences that there were gaps in the market and they decided to cater for them themselves. A&P is primarily a sales training company, but for some months it was just another customer to the telemarketing companies we were interviewing. Four years ago we had very little budget but knew that calling our prospects directly was the best way to get appointments with them. But all the telemarketing companies in Sussex wanted hefty set-up fees and at least £2000 commitment before they would even talk to us. At the other extreme, individual telemarketers could not commit to a regular number of hours for us and were rarely professional enough for us. We did not need complex and detailed appointment setting, we needed someone to make a quick call and then we would do the selling. So we decided to set up the operation ourselves. As serial networkers, we started to realise that a lot of other small and micro businesses only wanted a few hours of calling per week to generate leads. Our economical and scaleable service was born - no minimum hours and low charges all around. From a couple of sub-contract telemarketers, we took on our first full-time employee last year and now have a manager to look after all six of the telemarketers we currently have on the books. Most of our business is from small local businesses that only take 3-10 hours of calling from us per week and that keeps them as busy as they want. Also, the telemarketing is a wonderful complement to our sales training activities. We can try new techniques in a real life scenario and learn a lot from the telemarketers themselves. Plus we have our own resource to set appointments for the training business, a profitable cash-generative division and a wonderful way to employ mature experienced people that find it difficult to get flexible work elsewhere. We turned our frustration into a profitable business. I think a lot of business ideas develop like that. The trick is to channel the negative emotion into a positive direction and make sure you get the right support networks around you. |
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