Outbound Telesales

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Outbound Telemarketing
How do you capture the attention of your targets to make sure that they recognize the value of your products or offerings?

The answer is different for every decision maker in your database.

Massini Group realizes this and understands that you must be able to communicate at an individual level to your prospective customers. The telephone is still the most scalable, direct way to engage your targets in a specific value based selling environment. Massini Group, through their tools and experience, bring you established best practices that are centered around maximizing sales as well as controlling cost of acquisition. With our support we can ensure that your program includes all of the elements essential to be considered industry standards best practice. These elements include;

We are not a prepackaged, seat license solution that you must count on your sales agents or partners to solve for. We are actively engaged consultants that have worked across industries in the B2B selling space and help you prioritize your programs opportunities. Where inefficiencies exist, we will provide recommendations and solutions that are focused on filling the biggest holes first.

Whether you have an internal team, have hired external agencies, or have a mix of both, it becomes impossible to utilize the data generated, if reps are not using standardized tools and standardized assumptions in how they treat the lead set. Massini Group, in response to this issue, built the first OTM CRM that is dedicated to B2B SMB selling. We have eliminated the need for automated dialers and proven across industries, that with proper data hygiene and structure the number of decision makers reached per hour can increase over predictive or progressive dialers. Subsequently these decision makers are significantly more likely to convert to a sale because they have had a more personal and less frustrating customer experience.

We train your sales agents to use our simple CRM tool, the enhanced Telemarketing Resource Center (eTRC), and monitor disposition usage to ensure that new reps understand primary and secondary call objectives and disposition leads accordingly. Reps that are new to the program can begin using our tool efficiently within one day. Let’s get them on the phone selling!

Our tools also are set to give you, the performance owner, visibility and control to the program in a centralized fashion. This can be executive level reporting all the way down to individual dial and appointment kept metrics. If a rep misses a callback leads can be reassigned to ensure that no sales conversation goes neglected. In our work with some of the world’s best B2B selling programs this simple ability to move appointments between reps and ensure that no callback is neglected typically accounts for an initial 20% lift in performance.

The eTRC allows for the structure required to drive month over month improvement and allows programs to avoid the EKG sales trends.

With OTM comes compliance risk. Massini Group operates in the B2B space, not only to make our clients more efficient, but to reduce and eventually eliminate brand damage and liability for our clients. As leads are centrally distributed, it becomes possible to maintain DNC and other internal compliance accountability at the source of leads. If you shut a lead off for “Do Not Contact” or “Do Not Solicit” reasons through a centralized tool you can ensure that no more calls are made instantly. This feature alone has reduced complaints and associated resources dedicated to dealing with complaints exponentially. Massini also collects do not call requests from calling agents and can feed them to your internal sources to ensure that they are excluded from future OTM campaigns and maintained internally for use in other sales channels.

Structured allocation is the process by which Massini Group works with your team to ensure that it is understood what attributes exist and matter when it comes to selling your products. Examples of this can range from firmographic data elements that are available from sources like Dun & Bradstreet (employees, revenue, square footage, industry) to location data (zip code, MSA, state, city, etc.) to elements that are germane specifically to what you do (technology use profiles, geographically dispersed offices, product qualification, propensity or value model scores). Massini Group takes these attributes and ensures that leads are selected in discrete representatively sampled packets and evenly distributed in statistically identical campaigns, providing the following benefits to your program ;

 

  • The relative value and composition of a campaign month over month is understood as it relates to performance.
  • When multiple vendors, teams, or agents are working on a campaign, you can ensure that the data is representatively sampled, ensuring that variance in performance is due to relative skill and not blind lead opportunity bias.
  • This allows for specific coaching and understanding of improvement and becomes more and more significant as a campaign gains historical data.

One of the biggest time sinks in call centers comes from an often well intentioned place. As reps research accounts and decide where to place their next call, they are opening themselves, and you, up to opportunity costs that are massive. If you can build a clean, well-organized queue that contains appropriately concentrated opportunity the reps can spend less time worrying about who they call and more time calling. This function also allows for creation of less traditional teams including ‘work-from-home’ calling and the tying together of multiple subagents into one virtual team.

 

This centralized queue management structure ensures that as soon as a call is completed the next call in the queue is made available to any rep that is assigned to the campaign. The records are assigned to that rep and they are responsible to place the call against that lead. If their conversation progresses to the point of a follow up appointment, then they assume ownership of that lead and sales cycle. Program managers can monitor the size and conversion of these sales pipelines to ensure that reps are not ‘hoarding’ leads or removing sales opportunities from the larger team.

Massini Group wants to ensure that month over month your data is driving improved performance. This requires reviewing progress made at a campaign and individual contributor level. This decision process includes two variables;

  • What subsets of leads are performing at a high level or underperforming?
  • What agents or agencies are seeing success with specific types of leads and can we skew the distribution of leads to maximize skill sets?

 

By understanding the effort (dials) required to make a sale we can help you make calculated decisions on where you assign your work effort. This process also includes sizing the allocation to the work capacity. How many reps, what level of penetration, how many calling days? These assumptions allow your sales channel to always reach the most productive list penetration and prevent you from exhausting lead sets and having performance fall before the next set of leads are delivered.

Having managed two decade’s worth of campaigns for our clients we can firmly attest to the power of organizing outbound calling efforts into distinct Monthly Blocks of Work. This structure enables :

  • Right sized selection and distribution of leads designed to hit the optimal list penetration target for your environment.
  • Predictable and sustainable sales performance month over month, year over year.
  • Performance tracking by all attributes to provide valuable insights into the fitness of your program, facilitating month-to-month adjustments in selection and distribution criteria where the right leads are pushed to the right parties based on measure, proven skillsets. Constant fine tuning of the Monthly Optimized Blocks of work are key to wringing every ounce of efficiency out of your program.

Once the decisions have been made regarding how many leads are required and to whom they are assigned, Massini Group doesn’t believe that you should have to wait a month to adjust strategy. Allowing performance to be tracked by all attributes allows for simple and quick adjustments to ensure that the most current performance data is utilized and that you can enable corrective action in near real-time.

When selling to accounts with revenue large enough to warrant assigned account managers an individual can manage a customer’s journey and know when to push and when specific opportunity exists. In the SMB space, where your customers should feel no less valued, it is not financially feasible for a single individual to manage and maintain an account relationship. It would also be irresponsible to leave a single sales rep with account assignments that where visibility was not accessible.

 

Massini Group has nearly 20 years of experience in the SMB space to ensure that responses and activity is captured correctly, and appropriate lead treatments are applied based on that data. Whether you are collecting and institutionally using existing contract dates, or you are understanding existing depreciation or lifecycle schedules for your prospects, business rules and recycling timeframes will be essential in making sure that your leads are not only actioned at the correct time, but with the correct messaging.

Controlling this in a centralized manner will improve responsiveness, eliminate brand damage from colliding sales efforts, and increase likelihood to close significantly. We have seen sales efficiency increase by as much as 75% over rep managed timing when proper lead processing methodologies are in place.

Within your organization there are multiple potential sources of data. OTM provides a quick and relatively inexpensive way to respond to buying indicators. Massini Group routinely will assist in an audit of internal data sources that could be leveraged into a lead feed. If a lead feed it deemed viable Massini Group will work with your team to help build processes or feeds that will bump high priority leads to the top of the queue as they come in. This include things like web forms, email engagement, abandoned inbound activity. For one of the top US telecommunication providers Massini Group was able to drive 50% year over year sales growth by identifying a web-based buying indicator that was going completely ignored.

As data is actioned by different agents and agencies differences in treatment or interpretations of dispositions or expectations can greatly impact the quality of that data. Through a hierarchical dispositioning methodology, it will become quick and clear as to what is expected to be collected on a call. By answering a few simple questions, the reps will not need to interpret the meaning of the dispositions, just simply indicate what happened on the call.

  1. contact made with targeted account?
  2. reached DM?
  3. engage in DM dialogue?
  4. outcome with DM?
  5. outcome with non-DM?

The issue of inaccurate lead dispositions or inconsistent interpretations of statuses plagues many programs as decision are made based on data that is inconsistently harvested. Massini Group not only recommends dispositions structures specifically for your environment, they also provide outlier auditability to ensure that any rep, especially new to the program, is assigning lead dispositions in a manner inconsistent with the program, those dispositions are reviewed and coaching is enabled, often within the same day.

There are many variables that impact performance within a specific time period. Massini Group prides itself in creating a variable controlled environment that allows for testing of new offers, sales strategies, messaging, promos and other tactics to ensure that variations in performance can be correlated to the variables being tested and not seasonality, randomness of lead assignment, user assignment, or training variables.

 

This allows OTM to be a very good source of marketing feedback data and an early indicator for marketing teams as they evaluate strategies and tactics. This data can be fed back to invested parties via API data feeds or automated aggregate reporting.

Many of the conventional OTM tools are focused on either consumer selling or account-based selling (think Salesforce.com). Massini Group can build tools that overlay or synchronize with Salesforce.com to ensure comprehensive data collection or can provide their own tools to ensure this. It is critically important to collect every transaction that was attempted by the sales team. This includes positive outcomes (Sales, DM reaches, Scheduled Callbacks) as well as negative outcomes (Not interested reasons, disconnected phone number, etc.) and almost most as importantly indeterminate outcomes. These indeterminate outcomes include things like answering machines, ring no answers, DM not available. These dispositions over time provide valuable data to marketing and sales enablement teams. Sets of data can be isolated that need to be addressed via alternate methods in order to penetrate. Examples of this would be;

  • 3rd party phone append services
  • Dispatch of D2D sales channels for high value accounts
  • Gatekeeper promotion incentives
  • Evaluation of lead viability using other data feeds (email open, email click through, D2D verified correct business, digital engagement, etc.)

This allows a program to appropriately dedicate resources and spend on 3rd party data only where it is required.

By utilizing the principles of standardized treatment and the structured allocation process, you will be able to test performance across agents, teams, and partners. Statistically representative campaigns allow for performance variation to be attributed to individual performance over time. This allows you to make well informed decision as you create new campaigns and allocate sets of leads.

This also allows for identification of specialized skill sets. Not all agents or agencies are better or worse. Skills can be identified with selling different product sets as well as navigating prospect campaigns versus cross sell/upsell campaigns to existing customers.

Call centers in different regions and of different backgrounds often have differing cultures on the floor that can make them better suited to do different types of work. Understanding the differences using scientifically selected data can ensure you get the right people in the right places.

Massini Group knows that in todays market you need to have you marketing and sales arms tied together. Via a partnership with SalesRabbit we can help you implement these same processes and methodologies with field sales as well as create a pipeline directly to this team. Via predefined business rules we can help guide opportunity back and forth across direct sales channels as efficiencies and COA determine as most beneficial.

As lead history is centrally tracked all touches can be used to inform future sales efforts.

While this is a feature that many CRM solution offer, Massini notes that the reports are only as good as the data that is feeding them. Massini group offers real-time reporting that is designed to isolate actionable insights and drive immediate coaching and adaptation. We give you the ability to view success or struggle through multiple lenses and take corrective action specifically where it is needed.

You will be able to answer the following questions about your program with certainty;

  • Are the phone number associated with my leads valid?
  • Are targets answering the phone when we call?
  • Are my reps skilled at reaching decision makers?
  • Are the reps informed enough about the product to speak confidently and engage dialogues?
  • Once engaged are my reps able to close the sale?
  • Are we setting callbacks only when necessary and keeping our appointments?
  • Which individuals need further training?
  • Who can I identify as “Best Practice” and use to transfer skill and knowledge?
  • Are my reps engaged throughout the entire workday and giving me full capacity effort?
  • Why are my results down? or why was today successful?
  • How many reps did I have online and making calls?
  • Are there leads that are assigned that are going under covered and what is the opportunity cost?

 

These are a few examples of the questions that we help our clients answer every day and they work to drive growth and hit stretch objectives.

Because we collect every touch and have those touches tied to the specific accounts we allow program owners the ability to search the platform based upon phone, number, company name, address, etc. Once a record is located you are then able to see a complete view of call history (dates, times, outcome, notes.)

This is very useful when inbound calls are generated or if there are complaints. This allows you to know, to the agent level, who has interacted with your targets and specifically address any potential training opportunities.

Massini Group allows drill downs into reporting to the account level. Using this data in the capacity of performance allows identification of calls that would provide the greatest coaching opportunity. This becomes a much more efficient and accurate way to measure qualitative performance that live monitoring or requested calls from vendors.

Call requests are delivered directly to the calling party upon selection in the eTRC. Calls are then uploaded to a secure FTPS site to be scored by Massini Group’s team of OTM call coaches. Calls are scored are scores are wrapped up into a report card for review by agents and managers. Calls could also be requested by sales channel owners.

Call scores are stored and improvements can be measured overtime as coaching is implemented and specific training issues are addressed.