Of all the direct marketing disciplines, outbound telemarketing and direct mail have the worst reputation. Indeed, it's a commonly held view in direct marketing circles that outbound telemarketing is in terminal decline.

Continuing bad press around "silent calls", poor quality agents and call centres in general have created an impression that it's a dying channel, used by primarily by unscrupulous double glazing salesmen.

Outbound consumer telemarketing, in particular, has had a terrible press and is being squeezed hard by the growth in the Telephone Preference Service, which makes it illegal to call registered consumers with sales calls and had greatly reduced the pool of prospects.

However, the reality behind the headlines is much more complex. Most will applaud the fact that poor quality "volume" telemarketing is on its way out. Far fewer are aware of the fact that business-to-business outbound telemarketing is a growing and highly effective route to market for UK businesses.

Almost every company uses telemarketing in one form or another, but the vast majority use in-house resources. Usually this simply means a beleaguered and costly field sales team who are constantly under pressure to make sales calls to fill their diaries with appointments. This has got to be the worst possible use of a business' most valuable resource, but it's astonishing how many companies still follow this model.

If you are in this situation, you should give serious thought to setting up a specialised telemarketing team, either in-house (if you have the space, time and expertise) or using an outsourced agency. A good campaign will deliver a steady stream of well qualified sales leads and appointments.

Get it right and instead of endlessly struggling to motivate your sales team to keep calling prospects, probably only speaking to one or two every hour, they will be spending whole week doing what they are paid to do: closing new business face-to-face.

A good telemarketing campaign should produce other benefits too. A well structured and managed campaign can simultaneously deliver demand generation, market insight and a cleaned and profiled prospect database.

It isn't possible to combine "pure" market research and the generation of sales leads or appointments in one call. However, one of the unique advantages of business-to-business telemarketing is that there's scope to actually engage in a live dialogue, which is much more powerful than just sending a message to your market and hoping for a response. If market intelligence is not gathered through calling, then companies are only getting a fraction of the potential benefit of telemarketing. Finding the reasons why prospects won't buy is often more useful than finding the reasons that they will.

In common with most direct marketing channels, legal compliance issues have grown over the last few years. For outbound business-to-business telemarketing, the most prominent development has been the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS), introduced a few years after its consumer equivalent.

Worryingly, anecdotal evidence suggests awareness of the CTPS is close to zero in the general business community. Most UK businesses have never heard of the scheme and will happily cold call in ignorance of the legal consequences of dialling up a CTPS-registered prospect, which could result in a fine of up to £5,000 for each breach.

It's relatively straightforward to make sure that you are on the right side of the law by regularly screening your prospect database using a data agency, or by using an outsourced agency to carry out the calling for you. However you achieve compliance, the good news is that B2B telemarketers are not generally finding that the CTPS has had a significant impact on results.

Companies that are using the channel well are seeing the benefits every day; those that do it badly risk falling behind. If you are running a sales team, you are almost certainly already using the telephone to find new business, but it probably feels like a long hard grind and you may actually be breaking the law.

The best single piece of advice I would give to any sales manager is treat telemarketing as a priority. Make sure you are on the right side of the law and make sure that dedicated, specialist callers are working for you. Once your sales team has a diary bursting with high quality appointments success should follow.