# B2B telemarketing agency: what it handles and what you remain responsible for > B2B telemarketing agency: its role, pricing factors, requirements for qualified appointments, and responsibility for the calls. Source: https://scalon.fr/en/blog/b2b-telemarketing-agency --- [← The blog](/en/blog) Prospecting You can delegate the calls, and even the list, to an agency; you still need to define the target and goal together. What the agency handles and what you remain responsible for. By [Valentin Morterol](https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentin-morterol/) · Co-founder of Scalon The short answer A telemarketing agency calls your prospects and passes the booked appointments on to you. Before signing, settle who supplies the list, how a qualified appointment is defined and what gets billed. For calls to a business, legitimate interest is enough according to the CNIL (France's data protection authority) if the offer relates to its line of work; since August 11, 2026, calling a consumer in France requires their consent. Get the list of businesses in your market, with the contact details available: tell us which one. Published on October 23, 2026 · Updated on October 24, 2026 ## In this article - What does a B2B telemarketing agency do? - Choosing a telemarketing agency: what the quote must spell out - Contact rate, appointments, conversion: what the agency must report back - Outsourcing your sales prospecting: what you gain, what you lose - How a prospecting campaign runs, from first call to appointment - The call list: a closed business location can still be on it - Telemarketing rules: who answers for the calls the agency makes? - What Scalon does before the call, and what it does not do ## What does a B2B telemarketing agency do? A telemarketing agency calls potential customers for you, to sell your products or services. The activity is also called telephone prospecting; a high-volume operation is called a call center. In practice, it takes on four tasks: - receive your list, or build it itself; - conduct each conversation using a script you have approved; - classify the responses: who is interested, who is not, and whom to call back; - pass the appointments it books to your salespeople. Above all, check that the agency has experience prospecting businesses like the ones you target and knows how to reach the decision-maker. What Insee says about this sector Insee (France's national statistics office) classes this activity under [outbound call centers](https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/6670636) (NAF code 82.20Z, the French activity classification code, which also covers inbound calls). The call center sector had 1,300 companies in 2019, according to Insee (study published in December 2022), inbound calls included. Insee notes that demand for the sector's services is "partly linked to the increase in outsourcing" of those services. Two questions remain: what the prospecting service costs, and who answers for the telemarketing done in your name. On that second point, the law also targets the client who hires the agency. ## Choosing a telemarketing agency: what the quote must spell out The official sources consulted do not provide market rates for telemarketing agencies, so this article does not quote any. To understand what affects the quote, ask: - How long does the campaign last? - Are you targeting large accounts or small businesses, and how hard are they to reach? - Who supplies the list, you or the agency? - What is billed: calls made, contacts reached or appointments booked? - Is pricing based on a flat fee or on performance? Ask for a quote that separates preparation, the list and the calls, with the duration, the planned volume, what triggers billing, any extra fees and the total. Then compare two agencies using the same target audience, volume, and goal. Next come the selection criteria. Does the provider know your industry and the length of your sales cycle? When the agency calls prospects, who usually answers: the decision-maker or someone at the main switchboard? Also ask which prospecting tools and which CRM (customer and prospect tracking software) it uses, and whether the call reports flow into yours. Reporting must show the failures, not only the successes. Finally, ask how long it takes to launch the campaign: this varies from one provider to another. One last point, often forgotten: the written contract. It sets out who does what with your prospects' data (see below). ## Contact rate, appointments, conversion: what the agency must report back Three metrics are enough to assess a telephone prospecting campaign. The **contact rate**, or reach rate, is the share of calls that reach someone. It is calculated like this: contacts reached, divided by calls made. A **qualified appointment** meets criteria you agree on before the campaign: company size, need, and who attends the meeting. For example: a meeting with the person who makes the buying decision and who agrees to a demo. Ask whether a canceled appointment, or one held without that person, is still billed. The **conversion rate** measures the share of appointments that become sales. It is measured on your side, not the agency's. Have a definition written into the contract. Each provider defines "contact" its own way: anyone who picks up, or only the decision-maker. The same figure can therefore describe two very different realities. ## Outsourcing your sales prospecting: what you gain, what you lose You can delegate the calls, and even preparation of the list, to the agency. You still need to agree with the agency on which businesses to target and what the campaign should achieve. Keep that limit in mind before you sign. To compare an agency with hiring or equipping your own reps, see our guide to [outsourced B2B prospecting](/en/blog/outsourced-b2b-prospecting). Handing B2B telemarketing to a third party has real advantages. Your salespeople stop cold calling and focus on sales meetings. The campaign starts without hiring or training a prospecting team. Volume can grow without adding to your sales team. There are real drawbacks, too. Your sales pitch goes through a third party, who knows your product less well than your salespeople do. And the result depends on a list you no longer control, if the provider supplies it. Three criteria help you decide between doing it yourself and delegating your prospecting: - **volume**: if your salespeople have time to call every location you target, in-house is enough; otherwise, ask the agency what volume it handles, over what period and with what follow-ups; - **product knowledge required**: the more technical the offer, the more the first call needs a salesperson who knows it inside out; - **sales cycle**: a short sales cycle can accommodate an intermediary; a long sales cycle depends on the customer relationship your team builds. **Prospecting local businesses?** Get the list for your market, your area and your target, ready to call. ## How a prospecting campaign runs, from first call to appointment A telephone prospecting campaign follows five steps. The outbound calls themselves account for just one of those steps. 1. **Define the goal and the target.** Decide whom to call and what you want to achieve: an appointment, a demo, or simply qualifying the prospect. 2. **Prepare the list.** This step decides who you will talk to (next section). 3. **Draft the script for you to approve.** The first seconds matter more than the pitch: a good script gets the other person talking, as in our [cold calling script example](/en/blog/b2b-cold-calling-script). The script includes prepared responses to the most common objections. 4. **Call and follow up.** A business that does not pick up on the first try is called back at another time. 5. **Report and hand over.** The provider hands the qualified appointments to your salespeople, with the call notes. These steps also apply to a campaign run in-house. The difference is who carries them out, and who checks each one. ## The call list: a closed business location can still be on it The call list determines who you will talk to before the script even comes into play. A long list is not a good list. It has three possible origins: you supply it, the provider builds it, or a third party sells it. In the second case, ask which source it comes from and what verification was done. Many lists start from the Sirene directory, the register of companies and business locations kept by Insee. Yet Sirene records "the declared information," Insee writes. According to the government service API Entreprise, a location is marked "closed" once a closure declaration has been processed. A business location is the place where a company operates, separate from the company itself. A location that closes without its closure being reported can therefore still be listed as "active" in Sirene. On October 24, 2026, among the business locations active in the Sirene directory that Scalon links to a Google listing, 1.1% have their listing marked "permanently closed" by Google, about 1 in 92. For the caller, an "active" status is not enough: check that the location is really open before calling. Calling that location wastes a caller's time, whether the caller works for the provider or your team. Before you sign, ask one simple question: how does the provider check that a location is still open before calling it? Also distinguish two deliverables. A list of people gives named contacts. A list of business locations identifies places to contact and includes information about each one: whether it is open and whether it fits your target. B2B targeting starts at the business-location level, well before you identify the right people to contact. To measure what an off-target list costs your team, the [prospect quality calculator](/en/tools/sdr-cost) starts from your own numbers. ## Telemarketing rules: who answers for the calls the agency makes? For calls to businesses, the rule is the one set out by the [CNIL](https://www.cnil.fr/fr/prospection-commerciale-par-telephone-hors-automate-dappel-quelles-sont-les-regles): contacting someone in a professional capacity "can be based on the organization's legitimate interest when the purpose of the solicitation relates to the profession of the person contacted." You must inform the person and provide a "simple and free opt-out." For calls to a consumer, the rule is stricter. Since August 11, 2026, cold calling a consumer by phone requires their prior consent. [Article L223-1 of the Code de la consommation (the French Consumer Code)](https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000051830285/2026-08-11) covers a call made "directly or through a third party acting on its behalf." A business that benefits from illegal telemarketing to a consumer is presumed liable, unless it proves it is not the source of the violation. The agency therefore does not relieve the client of responsibility. If the provider processes data on your behalf, the CNIL requires a written contract. Its processor guide puts it this way: "a contract or other legal act specifying the obligations of each party." Before signing, three questions to ask the agency: - On what legal basis does it call your prospects? - Where do the phone numbers come from? - Who handles a complaint or an opt-out request? Need the list for your market? We send it with the contact details available, for the scope you choose. ## What Scalon does before the call, and what it does not do Scalon presents itself as the agency that finds the local businesses to prospect. It makes no calls and does not replace your prospecting tools: it delivers the data. To help you evaluate the actual data, Scalon offers a free sample of 100 qualified locations, with no commitment. It delivers a market map in the form of a file of local business locations, each qualified individually. Each location gets a score out of 100 (fit score) that shows how well it matches your target, with a verdict, a written reason that explains the score and signals specific to your line of business, including recent signs that the location is still operating. When reviewing the file, focus on the written explanation. The file is also compared with your CRM: ask whether the locations already in it are removed from the delivered file or only flagged. The method fits in one sentence. Thirty minutes of scoping, data collection by area, human review of borderline cases, then delivery as a spreadsheet (CSV/XLSX) or through an API (a direct connection to your software). The telemarketing agency, or your SDRs (the salespeople in charge of first contact), then call locations whose activity has been examined. Scalon does not deliver profiles of people. The agency or your own team remains responsible for calls and follow-ups; under the GDPR, the list provider and the party conducting the outreach each have their own obligations. The Essentiel plan starts [at €2,000 excl. VAT per year](/en/pricing). It includes a twelve-month license covering one line of business and one geographic area, with one update and one CSV/XLSX file. A setup fee is added in the first year, and calls are not included: ask for the setup fee and the first-year total in the quote. ## Method The closed-listing figure comes from Scalon's graph, which links business locations in the Sirene directory to their Google listings. We count locations active in the Sirene directory, in their latest version, that Scalon's graph links to a Google listing through a reliable ("green") link; only these reliable links count. A listing counts as closed when Google marks it "permanently closed"; a location linked to several listings counts only if all of them are. The links are those in the graph on October 24, 2026 at 9:19 a.m., after the new index was added (713,735 new reliable links since October 23). The Sirene data dates from September 1, 2026; the Google listings were collected between October 2025 and October 12, 2026 (median date: September 21, 2026), so a closure that Google already shows may not yet appear in that Sirene data. Only 5.3% of active locations are linked to a Google listing: a location with no linked Google listing is not counted. A listing whose status is unknown counts as not closed: the 43,953 locations linked only to listings with an unknown status are counted as not closed, which pulls the rate down. The measured share, 1.09%, is accurate to within 0.02 percentage points (95% confidence interval: 1.07% to 1.11%). ## Sources - [Le secteur des centres d'appels, Insee (décembre 2022)](https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/6670636) - [Immatriculation, cessation ou modification des données au répertoire Sirene, Insee](https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/1401387) - [Données établissement (Insee), API Entreprise](https://entreprise.api.gouv.fr/catalogue/insee/etablissements) - [Article L223-1 du Code de la consommation, Légifrance](https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000051830285/2026-08-11) - [Prospection commerciale par téléphone (hors automate d'appel) : quelles sont les règles ?, CNIL](https://www.cnil.fr/fr/prospection-commerciale-par-telephone-hors-automate-dappel-quelles-sont-les-regles) - [Guide du sous-traitant (édition septembre 2017), CNIL](https://www.cnil.fr/sites/cnil/files/atoms/files/rgpd-guide_sous-traitant-cnil.pdf) The list for your market, your area and your target: we send it within two business days. More on this topic - [Phone Prospecting: How to Succeed, With a Script and Examples](/en/blog/b2b-phone-prospecting) : Who to call, what the law says, and a call script ready to adapt. - [Automotive prospecting: who to target, what rules apply](/en/blog/automotive-prospecting-france) : Which repair shops to target, how to reach them and the rules for calling or emailing them. - [B2B Prospect List: Build or Buy?](/en/blog/b2b-prospect-list) : Building your list from Sirene or buying one: both routes compared. [All articles →](/en/blog)