Onshore vs offshore appointment setting

Dials are the cost. Meetings are the output. A team that books 1.3 meetings from every 100 dials needs far fewer dials, and far fewer of your prospects' patience, to fill a calendar than a team booking 0.3. The full dataset is in inside 218,000+ Australian cold calls.

• Context. A caller who works in the Australian market every day knows the industries, the regions and how local businesses buy.
• Senior conversations. Decision makers give a cold caller seconds. Holding that conversation, and handling a pushback without losing the thread, takes experience.
• Hours. Australian business hours are the caller's normal working day, not a night shift.
• Judgement on qualification. Deciding whether a buyer genuinely fits, rather than booking anyone who says yes, protects your team's time.

The number that matters is not the hourly rate. It is how many qualified meetings you get, how many of them actually happen, and how many become pipeline. When you compare quotes, ask every provider, onshore or offshore, for the qualified meetings they book for clients like you and exactly what they count as qualified.

Then add the costs that sit outside the invoice: your team's time managing the campaign across time zones, meetings that turn out to be the wrong person, and the impression a poor call leaves on a buyer you may want later.

Nousu is priced starting at $7,000 a month, with a performance guarantee from month two. See pricing.

• High-volume, scripted calls where the outcome is simple, such as confirming details or appointment reminders.
• Customer support that needs cover outside Australian business hours.
• Back-office work around a campaign, like data entry and desk research, where no conversation with a buyer is needed.
• Markets outside Australia where the offshore team shares the buyer's language and time zone.
• Budgets where hourly cost is the deciding factor and conversation quality comes second.

If your job looks like one of these, an offshore team may serve you well. If you need senior Australian buyers to agree to a meeting with your team, the data points onshore.

• The telemarketing industry standard applies to anyone who makes or arranges telemarketing calls to Australian numbers, including numbers that are not on the Do Not Call Register.
• Calls can only be made from 9am to 8pm on weekdays and 9am to 5pm on Saturdays, with no calls on Sundays or national public holidays, unless the person has agreed to a call at another time.
• Calling line identification must be on, and the call must end straight away if the person asks.
• Sending your prospect list to an overseas provider is usually a disclosure under the Privacy Act 1988. Under Australian Privacy Principle 8 you must take reasonable steps to make sure the overseas recipient does not breach the Australian Privacy Principles, and you can stay accountable for what it does with the data.
• Work contact details, such as a work email or direct line, count as personal information.

This summarises the rules, not legal advice. Our guide to Australian calling laws goes further.

They can handle simple, structured calls. For a senior B2B buyer deciding whether to give up an hour, they are not yet a replacement for an experienced person. More in AI voice agents for B2B cold calling in Australia.

Written by Harry Constant, Founder, Nousu Collective.