Introduction:
New sales leadership at this UK energy supplier sought a higher-octane, performance-driven approach to residential outbound sales. They contracted with Firstsource for a team of skilled sales associates doing mainly outbound voice calls on leads provided by the client, with a small volume of inbound sales on voice calls and email.
Challenges:
No visibility or access to the incumbent’s systems, processes, scripts, dialing strategies and no output data on any of the campaigns run. The goal was to improve sales performance and the quality of interactions with the customer while staying compliant in this highly regulated sector. Firstsource was tasked first with beating the performance of the incumbent supplier, and that of the in-house team.
How we made it happen:
Complete redesign of the outbound sales process
This involved moving from the incumbent’s “black box setup” to a transparent and collaborative way of working. This meant selecting a dialer that was fit for purpose, a refined proposition with new scripts, improved data cleansing, and a new dialer strategy. The dialer strategy uses a combination of lead demographic data such as location, age, past call attempts, and dispositions to assess likelihood to purchase and assign the lead to the best campaign as well as further optimize the best time to call (BTTC).
The redesigned process went through a rapid ‘fail-fast trial’ to identify what works and what needs refinement before being embedded as a practice.
Profit-centric approach
The initial set of performance indicators focused on the quality, compliance and sales conversions achieved by the team. However, Firstsource and the client soon moved to running the operations as a P&L, focusing on cost per gain and contribution to profit.
New platform for email interactions
Firstsource’s proprietary iLeverage platform is used for all email interactions with prospects, giving the client full visibility of all inbound correspondence for the first time.
Data-driven, collaborative approach
Firstsource analytics provides continual insights into conversion rates, sales performance, associate behavior, and interaction outcomes. We hold regular collaboration sessions with the client to review the latest in customer objections and how we can handle them. These include listening to calls that reflect new trends and sharing information about the product.
A sales culture with a buzz
We hire people who are up for a challenge, give them training that brings the job to life, so they live and breathe the skills they need. Our coaches and people managers are on the floor working with the team and our leadership and the client put a lot of effort into making the job fun and energizing with competitions and incentives with compliance and quality of sale being table stakes.