Small Businesses and the $11K Call

For many small business owners, telemarketing is a vital marketing tool for raising awareness and boosting sales. With telemarketing-driven sales increasing 50% over the last five years, accounting for $900 billion worth of goods and services in 2006 alone, small business owners find themselves needing to leverage this practice in order to survive.

The cost of complying with federal Do-Not-Call (DNC) legislation, however, can be daunting. Compliance comes with a price – the price of software upgrades, training personnel, and implementing practices that adequately cleanse inaccurate call list information. And these business expenses do not include fines imposed for calls placed to DNC-restricted numbers, inadvertent or otherwise, fines that can add up to $11,000 or more per call!

"Given the current economic landscape, it is imperative that small businesses maximize every opportunity for sales while avoiding extraneous expenditures,” says Dean Garfinkel, CEO of Compliance Systems Corporation (OTCBB: COPI), a telecom service company focused on providing compliance technologies. Garfinkel offers the following advice to small businesses that telemarket:

• Document Your Work. Comprehensive and clearly documented "good-faith” efforts in the name of Do-Not-Call (DNC) compliance can help ensure against haphazard inquiries by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC).
• Protect Your Brand. Recognize that you are still accountable for the compliance of freelancers, salespeople in the field, or outsourced employees working under your company umbrella. The negative publicity gained from irresponsible calls can earn you costly fines sabotaging your customer-base expansion efforts.
• Compliance Is Imperative. Firewall your phones with a DNC blocking service, especially one that provides third party verification.

Compliance’s flagship, patent-protected product, TeleBlock®, automatically screens and blocks outbound calls against federal, state and in-house Do-Not-Call lists. The company’s Regulatory Guide is available to online subscribers and is regularly updated with all pertinent DNC information. As telemarketing sales continue to grow, companies such as Compliance Systems continue to prove that the investment required for small businesses to protect their brand from DNC liability need not be prohibitive.

"In our history, we’ve never had a client place even a single call in violation of DNC lists,” says Garfinkel. "There are plenty of companies that, in hindsight, would have been glad to pay for a service like ours instead of facing the massive legal battles and fines levied for improper calls.” For more information, log onto: www.callcompliance.com.