Above The Rest Telemarketing Same Operators as Advantel Search Advantel Boston Massachusetts

I worked for this company as a telemarketer, on an Independent Contracting Basis, for several years. This was in the early 2000s, when it was named "Advantel." David Andre ran the company at that time. He was good about paying me in a timely manner, and reimbursed for any phone charges as necessary.

What I did not approve of was his method of delivering service to his clients, in conjunction with the unreasonable demands placed on his telemarketers. I was yelled at by David on more than one occasion, for not accuring a sufficient number of "leads." He often told me that he had "promised" the client three or four leads earlier in the day. I felt that this was unrealistic of him, and it put a great deal of pressure on us as telemarketers. We had to work between a time period of 5-8:45-9ish pm, so we only had four hours to produce the required leads, which was impossible on many occasions. The client may not be familiar with telemarketing, so he may not know this...but Dave certainly was, and making promises to deliver a certain quantity of leads misled a number of clients, some of whom I was asked to get in touch with directly, when they wondered why I wasn't able to produce as he had promised I would.

Promising people sales leads may be an easy activity, but telemarketing is not. Not only were the newly-emerging "call intercept" and call blocking features making this line of work more difficult, but also, many of the services they were offering targeted specific populations. No matter how good the telemarketer was, many clients called would not need the services the client was offering.

For example - Many of the companies I called for involved sending reps out to assess hail or storm damage to people's homes; in these cases, many of the homes had brick or other weatherproof forms of siding, others were out of the immediate storm area, some didn't wish to go through the process, etc. Yes, if a client is marginal, a good telemarketer can give the necessary push in the right direction - but if the client doesn't believe that he needs it because the storm didnt hit his street, then all the pushing in the world is not going to make him change his mind. Sometimes he'd have us ask the homeowners if they would allow the techs to go out and inspect the properties, and leave estimates if they found damage, which counted as leads...but this did not generate enough business for the client on some of these accounts, and several of his clients were unhappy with this.

It just seemed like the longer I worked there, the more impossible the assignments became. He seemed to be promising more and more leads to the clients, but the products/services were less and less easy to "move", had more restrictions, etc....and hence, it made our jobs very difficult. I just wanted to provide another viewpoint on this issue, since I had a bit of an "insider look" at how the company operated. I personally think that it would have been effective and ethical for us to have gotten leads to Dave of actual appts/committed sales, then if the client wanted the contact information, he'd have to pay for it. Then we could have been paid by the commission, rather than by the hour (which really isn't supposed to occur with ICs anyway.)