Telemarketing is a loaded word that most people associate with negative and annoying phone publicity. In fact, telesales have got such a reputation with most folks that it would seem counter intuitive for companies to continue employing the services of an industry that has such a reputation. However, there is one very simple reason that businesses continue to turn to telemarketing to help promote their services and products – it works. The reason that it works so well is that every telemarketer is able to talk directly with the consumer to gauge their interest in what the company is offering, find out more about their consumer habits and glean all kinds of information that a business can then use to develop new products and services that are all specifically targeted to that particular consumer.

Telemarketing was not always this adept at getting such information out of people. The shift occurred in the early 1990s when the internet was taking away business from the telesales industry. Most analysts believed that since more and more consumers were starting to make online purchases and starting to get their information from the world wide web, telemarketing would finally die. The telesales industry realized that this would come to pass unless they found ways of making themselves useful once again to the business world. Therefore, telesales service providers were no longer just the hard sell businesses that they used to be – they became full service call centers.

The shift was extremely clever as it bought the industry time to get the idea implanted into the business world’s psyche and by the time the change really caught on, telemarketing had taken on a whole new meaning. Your average telemarketer was no longer a grunt working in horrid conditions for an unscrupulous company, the modern telemarketer earned decent wages with good benefits and lives a middle class existence. The new telemarketing model was also moved off-shore so that they could provide these essential business services at a fraction of the cost. The new deal made it possible for the telemarketing agencies in developing countries to find good jobs. In fact, call centers have become one of the biggest industries in India where a burgeoning middle class is challenging millennia of tradition.

Telemarketing is still around because it has managed to constantly keep itself relevant. It is still around because business leaders like the immediacy of placing a call and getting feedback right away. When a telemarketer talks directly to a consumer they can find out exactly what they need to know. They can assess what the consumer thinks immediately about whatever product or service they are talking about and they can compile that information easily and quickly. It has proven itself to be a fantastic method of lead generation.

Regardless of what the future holds for the business world, chances are that telemarketing will always have a place in it. After all, there is no other way of getting directly into the minds of your consumer with such immediacy.