PROOF

Methodical optimization of teleservices operations increases yield by 3.5X and reduces cost per lead by 71%

SITUATION: The European unit of a Fortune 500 financial services company was in the midst of doubling the size of its sales force across the six largest economies in the European Union. In support of this move, the marketing operations team was tasked with scaling the delivery of leads for the sales force. The incumbent process had the following characteristics:

  1. Outbound telemarketing/telesales represented the vast majority of all leads produced;
  2. Each country manager had complete control of the selection and management of the teleservices vendors;
  3. No standardization of targeting, methods, reporting or metrics existed;
  4. All campaigns were disparate, unstructured and ad-hoc in nature;
  5. No integration between the teleservices vendors and Siebel existed – each sales executive received leads via email and manually entered them;
  6. It was common for sales executives and teleservices agents to call on the same account at the same time;
  7. Lead rejection by sales executives was high.

The pan European managers of the lead generation process determined that they needed to revamp the process and add automation before they could increase the size and scope of the program. Further, they determined that region wide standardization of methods would be necessary to assure peak performance within the channel. However, due to the language and cultural differences across the prioritized markets, it was determined that the country managers would retain control over the selection of teleservices vendors.

ASSIGNMENT: The client’s objectives were as follows:

  1. Employ new methods that would significantly reduce the cost of a lead by increasing the efficiency of the process, in advance of scaling to larger output;
  2. Assure comprehensive data collection about the process to form a foundation for organizational learning and continuous optimization of performance;
  3. Provide a singular platform to assure automation of mundane tasks that rob time from sales executives and to drive economies of scale across the participating markets.

Massini Group was selected to correct the following process deficiencies:

  1. Incomplete or inaccurate knowledge of the companies and contacts that the teleservices vendors should be calling on;
  2. Inappropriate allocation of teleservices resources to targets, including instances were valuable targets were being ignored while too many calls were being made to unproductive targets;
  3. Dislocation of processes designed to manage the flow of leads from marketing (profiling and scoring) to teleservices (validation, contact gathering, lead generation) to sales management (lead routing) to sales executives (follow-up and pushing to closure in Siebel).

KEY STRATEGIES: Massini Group began the process by characterizing the current performance of the program. This effort involved consolidating the data associated with all aspects of the program into a single comprehensive reference database, including:

  1. Target account lists, including current customers and priority/named accounts for suppression;
  2. Modeling outputs designed to assess the expected spend for each company;
  3. Known contacts with mappings to roles and responsibilities;
  4. Results of teleservices efforts to date, including call dispositioning, attempts per target and work-in-progress results.

Following consolidation of these sources, Massini Group applied the following processes to the data:

  1. Application of comprehensive and consistent codification of attributes at the company, contact and touch level;
  2. Development of key metrics for program performance based upon Massini Group’s Dialogue StrategySM relationship management framework;
  3. Assessment of program performance relative to 1,000’s of best practices benchmarks developed by Massini Group.

Massini Group was able to identify three critical process issues resulting in below par performance in the program:

  1. Prior modeling efforts were sophisticated, but highly sensitive to gaps in source data, of which there were many in the customer data – this lead to inappropriate exclusion of large numbers of attractive targets;
  2. The teleservices vendors were overstaffed relative to the number of targets being supplied – resulting in general overcalling of the available targets and much higher than normal costs per lead;
  3. A significant number of viable leads were falling through the cracks in the system, further hurting the ROI of the program.

Massini Group set out to methodically correct each of these process issues.

ENGINEERED PROCESSES: Massini Group’s first objective was to assure that the program targeted the entire available market based upon the criteria supplied by the client’s sales force.

The client had contracted with a local business intelligence company to build a model that predicted spend based upon a robust number of key attributes such as total assets, trailing 12-month profit and number of employees. The model output placed all members of the available market in categories based upon the resulting score. Massini Group determined that the model defaulted a component score to zero if the reference data was not populated in the corresponding attribute. This oversight caused the model to reject a large number of viable targets. Massini Group corrected the model by adjusting for cases where the subject company would have met the minimum criteria if it had fully populated data. This increased the size of the available market by 135%.

Massini Group’s second objective was to make adjustments to the operations of the outbound telemarketing and telesales efforts to support scalability at a higher level of performance. The first task was to baseline the performance of the vendors prior to modification of the process to assure that whatever changes were going to be made actually improved results. The initial benchmark, in terms of hours of telemarketing per lead, was 24.5. Massini Group noted that this figure was well above best practices that it had observed, and was likely due to overcalling records.

The first chart describes, in general terms, the shape of the outbound telemarketing yield curve. Note that the yield per call starts low, moves to a peak and then falls off steadily.

The second chart describes, again in general terms, the shape of the outbound telemarketing cost per yield curve, and shows that as targets are saturated, the cost per result increases very quickly.

Massini Group worked to assure that no target received more calls than it should. In part, this effort was aided by the output of the first objective, in the sense that a larger number of targets meant a lower propensity to overcall on a target by target basis. Massini Group’s client wanted to have complete control over the outbound telemarketing process as a whole. Massini Group deployed its web-based telemarketing management system, eTRC, to assure that each of the country lead generation managers had total control over their calling efforts.

The basics of the eTRC platform are as follows:

  1. Accessed via https using Internet Explorer or equivalent;
  2. Each teleservices agent, teleservices operations manager, regional sales director and sales manager has their own login which controls access to targets, programs and results;
  3. Program setups, scripting, targets, history, outcomes and reporting are codified using an EU-wide standard, but are delivered in six languages;
  4. Outbound calls are integrated with follow-up emails – email response triggers a real-time notification to the originating agent;
  5. All aspects of results of the program are available in real-time to managers at all levels;
  6. Call operations management is supported by dispositioning schemes that control the number of calls made to each target – output statistics support management of campaigns to completion within specific timeframes;
  7. The entire lead flow is automated, from initial call to transfer of lead to QA, routing to sales directors, confirmation by sales directors, delivery to sales executives and posting into Siebel, including email notification for actions required by sales directors and sales executives;
  8. A comprehensive set of metrics is available for all phases of the lead flow and can be cross referenced to channel, lead source, campaign, vendor, agent, sales director, sales executive, country and region.

Massini Group used the capabilities of the eTRC environment to manage the process to significantly improved productivity and cost – reducing the number of telemarketing hours per lead by 71.0% to 7.1. Further, the eTRC assured that all leads were correctly and promptly routed to the appropriate sales executive and ultimately into Siebel without the sales executive re-keying the data.

RESULTS: Massini Group utilized in-depth knowledge of the operation of a teleservices-based channel to increase the lead generation rate by 3.5X and reduce the cost per lead by 71% within the first quarter of operation. The principles that Massini Group utilized to achieve this result included:

  1. Assuring that the program could achieve economy of scale by comprehensively identifying the total available market;
  2. Assuring that the number of teleservices agents was effectively matched to the number of available targets to optimize results relative to the telemarketing yield curve and the telemarketing cost per yield curve;
  3. Providing a definitive method for codifying the targets, applied resources and outcomes of the program in support of optimizing the performance of the teleservices channels;
  4. Assuring that all leads produced were correctly and automatically routed to the correct sales force for follow-up – reducing the number of lost opportunities to zero.

Find out how to bring accountability to every marketing campaign, with metrics that impact the future as well as report on the past in this Using Measurement to Optimize Your Marketing Investment white paper.

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