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Sales people like to think they can smell money. Unfortunately, when they guess they are wrong more often than they are right. Massini Group employs structured processes to assure that all the deals are found and that you win your fair share
A structured calling process is a mechanism by which a specific set of targets is addressed in a specific way to assure the maximum probability of sales success.
Massini Group has engaged in years of research related to the incremental probability of sales success given additional allocation of resources – namely one more call. The result is an operating principle that Massini Group calls the yield curve. It is a plot of the probability of sales success given a specific number of attempts. Although its specific characteristics vary slightly by company, market and segment, the overall shape is always the same.
The yield curve starts at its lowest point at one attempt or one call. It then rises sharply through the second and third attempt and then falls somewhat gradually through four, five and six attempts until it moves to and stays at nearly zero for all subsequent attempts. It is notable that the yield curve resets after a “resting period,” which may be anywhere from 1 month to 6 months depending again on the company, market and segment.
The problem with depending on agent intuition without any formal guiding structure is that it always results in the same coverage pattern – the vast majority of the targets receive zero or one attempt and the remaining small minority receive a very large number of attempts. In other words, all of the targets end up at one of two suboptimal points on the yield curve. Another way of looking at it is that the unguided process results in a large amount of unfinished work and a small amount of target obsession.
Massini Group’s recommended alternative is based upon a principle that we call uniform treatment via pass management. This requires that your environment be able to serve up calls to your agents in a specific sequential order. If this is possible, then it can be organized in such a way that all targets receive one attempt before any receives a second, except in the case where the target requests a call back at a specific data and time.
This process allows all targets to be part of a completed pass – or one attempt. There are several advantages to this, including :
- each of the six key performance metrics will follow a specific curve, meaning that the first few days results can be used to predict the ultimate outcome ;
- the agents will thrive based upon finding all of the connections made on a particular day at the same stage of progress – meaning that they can hone their pitch based upon the uniform workload ;
- a deliberate decision can be made at the end of each pass to trade-off incremental sales productivity against the total number of sales for the target set - a process that Massini Group commonly uses to balance total sales versus cost per sale.
Misalignment between the number of targets and the number of agents will always have a negative impact on the ROI of a telesales program. Massini Group has team right sizing tools backed by 2500 successful campaign benchmarks.
It is an almost inescapable trap to both successful and challenged telesales and telemarketing operations – having too many agents for the available targets.
If a telesales operation is successful, the demand for more of the same will drive the number of agents up. If a telesales operation is not successful, the most common issue cited, by both internal and outsourced operations managers, is the need for more headcount to reach the goal.
Unfortunately, it is seldom gauged when more agents becomes too much of a good thing. Generally it happens in one of two ways :
- a limited number of targets is overcalled and become saturated, resulting in catastrophic reduction in sales productivity ;
- the above saturation is noticed and the alarm is sounded for more targets – commonly these new targets are marginal and produce at a lower than average level;
In either case, the result is the same, the cost of sales goes up and the total number of sales goes down until the entire program collapses under its own weight.
Massini Group research indicates that the key to optimal numbers of sales, minimum cost per sale and a long term sustainable environment is proper balance between the number and composition of the comprehensive marketing universe and the number of agents addressing it.
Massini Group employs a mathematical model derived from measurements of over 2500 successful campaigns to solve for the optimal number of agents given a specific number of targets and a specific campaign duration. Also taken into consideration in this process is the optimal “resting period” between campaigns in an on-going program to assure that the target set does not become saturated.
The Massini Group model also supports calculating the optimal number of targets required for a given number of agents and a specified campaign duration or the optimal campaign duration for a given number of agents and targets.
Some of the results of the application of this approach include :
- minimizing campaign costs ;
- optimal trade-off between total sales and cost per sale ;
- highly accurate forecasting of campaign ROI ;
- highly accurate forecasting of campaign start and end date ;
- elimination of agent costly downtime or reduced productivity.
Buying commonly does not happen on your schedule, therefore it is paramount to sales success that you remember what happened on the last call. Massini Group has specific advice about results coding that your team can manage and that will boost your results significantly.
Failure to record the result of a marketing response, telemarketing call, telesales call or face to face sales visit almost certainly will result in some degree of starting over from the beginning with each marketing campaign.
Massini Group has repeatedly measured that previous response history or previous call disposition accounts for 50% or more of the likelihood of success on a subsequent effort. So why do so many marketing and sales organizations fail to do so on a regular basis? Generally the flawed logic is something like this – if I do not take the time to record the results of the last call, I can complete more calls. The problem with this approach is multi-fold, the least of which is that as a result many more calls are needed to accomplish the same results.
Massini Group recommends capturing outcomes for all activities at the following levels within a marketing reference database :
- touch ( prior to response ) history for all discrete response oriented media, like DM and EM ;
- response history for all discrete response oriented media ;
- individual call history for telesales and telemarketing ;
- opportunity or lead disposition for telesales and telemarketing ;
It is critical to capture the outcome of an interaction if it is not the intended outcome ( a lead or a sale ) or even if it is not positive. Massini Group has found that many companies only capture positive outcomes. This practice leaves absolutely no guidance for changing the organizational entry point, opening, message, offer, product mix or price for the next effort.
The second most vexing challenge that companies face is using touch history, response history or call history once they have it. The core of this problem is the lack of abstraction – the process by which similar situations are summarized and rolled up so as to be manageable.
Massini Group has pioneered, tested and confirmed the efficacy of codification systems that offer just the right amount of detail to be useful without the number of choices becoming too large to comprehend. These systems generally have no more than 20-30 values. The values are also organized as to be hierarchical, allowing for a simple summary for high level reporting and manipulation. All of which makes them convenient to use.
Massini Group is commonly asked, “How many calls should my agents make in an hour?” Although it depends, Massini Group knows how to maximize sales by maximizing sales productivity without causing a riot in your call center.
The mathematics that describe the sales process are not that different from those that might be used to describe a search for diamonds in a diamond mine. In each of these cases there are a few fundamental principles :
- going faster is a good thing because it allows more ground to be covered ;
- going faster almost necessarily means you are not looking as closely as you might otherwise have ;
- it is important to cover all of the ground so that you don’t miss something ;
- once a particularly productive spot is found, it is okay to slow down ;
- sometimes finding a handful of smaller diamonds is better than searching for a long time for a large one but coming up empty ;
- stumbling upon a large one while looking for smaller ones will happen once in a while.
The key to answering the question is optimally balancing the coverage of the search and the depth of the search. Massini Group analysis of over 2,500 business to business benchmark campaigns definitively suggests two very different, but successful, modes of operation :
- when the number of potential targets is large in relation to the number of agents making calls, speed will always win out over depth, consultative selling and the associated higher conversion rate – the conversion rate just does not get high enough to compensate for the associated slowdown ;
- when the number of targets is small in relation to the number of agents making calls and the value of each of the targets is large, a slower. more consultative process is superior as long as the target set does not become saturated.
This leaves one unanswered question – which mode is optimal for your program? A rough rule of thumb might be :
- slower consultative selling is best for enterprise and major account lead generation and appointment setting ;
- programs targeting mid-market or upper SMB might benefit from either and it is best to run a test ;
- lower SMB programs will almost always benefit from faster approaches that apply a broader “skimming” strategy whereby the maximum number of targets is touched on a lower touch frequency.
Massini Group can very specifically answer these questions for your environment by comparing your operational parameters and performance metrics to best practices benchmarks of both modes.
Contract terms, product lifecycles, switching costs and technological advancements give each business a discernable tempo. Using proprietary statistical analysis, Massini Group will find the buying patterns that will increase the ROI of the resources you apply via the telephone.
Another way to think about a discernable tempo is as a pattern of sales success relative to measurable timeframes. The following are common reference points from which the pattern can be characterized :
- time since last call ;
- time since last not interested disposition ;
- time since last contact ;
- time since last pass through maximum attempt threshold ;
- time since last sale ;
- time to or since expiration of contract ;
- time to or since expiration of service coverage ;
- time to or since end of product life / product support ;
- time since last product upgrade ;
In many operations, this data is so difficult to build and or manage that these concepts are not included in targeting and resource allocation decisions. Massini Group experience suggests this is a mistake. In fact, on average, Massini Group is able to increase sales performance by 27% by building and utilizing this type of data in a telesales and or telemarketing environment.
Massini Group’s process for building and utilizing this type of information is as follows :
- construct a comprehensive master target site list to govern the process ;
- append dates and times to each target site and contact from the list above by matching to internal data sources ;
- whenever possible, collect detailed call-by-call results with target, agent, campaign, date and time and disposition applied to all ;
- derive operational “time since data” by processing call history relative to each of the reference points above ;
- build a relative time line for all targets by measuring the time difference between applied resources and each of the above reference points ;
- calculate the relative performance of the program at various points on the time line and identify optimal relative time to call based upon highest conversion rate and lowest cost per sale ;
- project the time line out into the future for all members of the master target site list ;
- target sites and contacts at a time on the time line in which sales conversion is highest or cost per sale is lowest ;
- repeat the process on a monthly basis and reap the rewards in more sales at less cost ;
One of the biggest challenges in improving sales performance is diagnosing the problem and choosing an appropriate corrective action. Massini Group’s 15 years of research has resulted in a mathematical model with 13 key parameters that takes the guess work out of the process.
It is notable that the explanations for performance issues vary so wildly from vendor to vendor – even from quarter to quarter for the same vendor in the same environment. Very little time is generally spent describing whether or not the proscribed corrective action from last quarter has had the intended impact in the latest quarter.
All of this suggested that the science did not exist that established causality between the controls available to call center operations managers and the results achieved by the telesales and/or telemarketing teams that they manage.
Massini Group has worked for approximately 15 years to establish causality between controllable aspects of the telesales and/or telemarketing process and the results that are achieved. The result is a mathematical model, based upon 13 key parameters, that is useful in predicting performance in advance based upon the configuration of the environment and the objectives of the campaign.
Massini Group approaches this problem using the following methodology :
- whenever possible, collect detailed call-by-call results with target, agent, campaign, date and time and disposition applied to all ;
- abstract dispositions from 40+ telesales vendors into a common vernacular ;
- apply this to as many campaigns as possible – currently more than 2500 ;
- utilize the resulting aggregate data set to develop various measurements of operational aspects of the work – such as targeting, resource allocation, processing methodology, operational controls ;
- utilize the resulting aggregate data to develop various measurements of performance, such as target disqualification rate, decision-maker reached rate, dialogue rate and sales close rate ;
- apply statistical analysis to establish causality between operational aspects of the work and performance measurements ;
This process allowed Massini Group, in approximately 1999, to establish its first mathematical model for the prediction of telesales and/or telemarketing performance. Since then, Massini Group has continually revised the model by applying the same methodology in campaigns in which principles of uniform treatment have limited the variability in the execution of the campaign – thus making the results even clearer.
How much time are your agents spending deciding who to call next? Massini Group research indicates that it can be as much as 60% of all calling hours. Massini Group will win over your operations team by designing an implementing effective queue management.
Sales involves a lot of rejection. Human nature causes us to avoid rejection because it is unpleasant. Unfortunately, this aspect of human nature commonly results in a pattern of behavior that results in less than optimal sales performance. It is much easier for a telesales or telemarketing agent to attempt talk to someone for who they have low expectation of rejection than it is to attempt to talk to someone for who they have a higher expectation of rejection. In other words, it is easier to talk to someone with whom they have a relationship than it is for them to talk to someone with whom they have no relationship.
Over and over again, Massini Group has measured this phenomenon in terms of distribution of dials across telesales or telemarketing campaigns. The pattern has the following features :
- a very small proportion ( 20-30% )of the targets receive a very large number of the dials each ( 5-15 );
- a very large proportion ( 70-80% )of the targets receive few or no dials ;
- a large proportion of time spent dialing is spent on deciding who to dial, as opposed to dialing, which results in lower than optimal dials per hour per agent.
From a campaign perspective, this has the following undesirable impacts :
- target coverage is lower than it should be ;
- non-uniform treatment of targets makes forecasting results impossible ;
- results will be lower than they should be ;
Massini Group recommends a queue management method in which all targets receive a dial in a specific order. The order is determined by an algorithm, not by the agents. The algorithm is designed to assure uniform treatment of targets, normalization of operations and optimal sales or leads results. The agents spend less time talking themselves out of a call and more time engaged in calls that result in a positive outcome.
The agents must be required to make / take every call supplied to them and to disposition all of their outcomes. Behind the scenes analysis must be used to assure that agents are not “gaming” the system by selecting and overusing a “trash bin” disposition. Left unchecked, this activity can be akin to a “land rush” mentality, in which agents compete for the most desirable targets.
To the extent that your agents or operations managers exhibit resistance to this process, Massini Group has tried and tested remedy – plenty of stories about other skeptical outfits that dropped their opposition once their commission and bonus checks got much larger.
There is no better way to excite executives than to say you can achieve a specific result and go and do exactly that – unfortunately it is harder than it sounds. Massini Group’s structured calling methods gets its clients to goal – month after month.
So why is it so hard to predict sales performance in advance? The answer is change. Change happens all the time in the business world, yes, but more importantly, unintended change in the foundations of the telemarketing or telesales operations can severely impact results.
In order to predict the performance of a telesales or telemarketing environment you must first control it. Massini Group collects all of the aspects of this type of control under the heading of operational discipline. Operational discipline means running the environment substantially the same way over and over again so that :
- baseline performance can be measured and used to predict performance into the future ;
- one change at a time can be made to isolate and measure the impact of that change independent of all other possible changes ;
In order to achieve operational discipline in a telesales or telemarketing environment you must :
- choose a period of time in which all tactical and strategic elements of the campaign must remain constant – Massini Group usually chooses a calendar month ;
- utilize representative sampling of the campaign’s marketing universe to build the targeting select and thereby assure that the composition of the targets remains constant throughout the month ;
- assure that all of the targets receive uniform treatment – the same number of dials per target – Massini Group employs pass management, or in other words, all targets get one call before any get a second unless a specific appointment is set ;
- keep the opening, main message, main offer and any incentives constant for the entire timeframe so that the agents will become fluid and conversational in their delivery ;
- measure all aspects of the environment that contribute to sales success and assure that they are functioning within acceptable tolerances ;
Based on environments such as this, Massini Group has compiled a library of 2,500 codified and quantified campaigns. Further, we have used statistical analysis to isolate the 13 key parameters that impact sales success on the telephone.
With these metrics and benchmarks, Massini Group is able to understand, monitor and control all of the aspects of telesales and telemarketing that can cause results to fall below goal, well before they have had an impact on your monthly objective.
The most common reward for making goal is a new larger goal. Addressing the new objective requires change – but to what? Massini Group is adept at growing results by building predictive testing methods to manage campaign, channel and head-to-head vendor optimization.
Testing without structure and a control case is merely guessing. Guessing suffers from a number of challenges, namely :
- good guesses are often made to look bad by environmental variability ;
- bad guesses are often made to look good by environmental variability ;
- it is often difficult to peg exactly what caused a better result, when it occurs ;
- results achieved in this way are difficult to sustain over time.
Effective testing, that which produces better results that are predictable and sustainable, ultimately requires some degree of precision related to establishing the cause and effect relationships between tactical changes to the work and improvements in performance.
In order to isolate and establish these relationships, technically referred to as causality, a test must include a control, or a case in which the variable being tested is absent. All other aspects of the test and control must be the same. This method of changing one variable at a time is key to assuring that the measured outcome is predictive and sustainable.
Therefore, effective testing requires control over all of aspects of the environment in which the testing is being implemented. Changes in the following can skew testing results :
- variability in the composition of the targets between the control and the test ;
- variability in the composition of the targets in the test and those in the on-going effort ;
- variability in processing methodology between the control and the test ;
- variability in processing methodology between the test and the on-going effort.
Massini Group employs proven structured methods for managing testing environments that are designed to evaluate alternative openings, messages, offers, incentives, agent compensation, channel constructs and vendors. These methods assure that the test results are predictive of results that can be sustained as long as the environment remains the same.
Massini Group also is adept at planning and executing an on-going, continuous improvement process in which a challenger approach is always being compared to the current champion approach.
Massini Group runs multi-channel and multi-vendor testing environments in which it is responsible for maintaining a level playing field and interpreting results so as to optimize program productivity by seamlessly moving work volume to the leading participant.
In depth customer knowledge drives new business – acquisition, cross sell and up sell. However, failure to correctly apply firmographics, corporate hierarchy or purchase history can leave your vision fuzzy. Massini Group customer database consolidation and predictive analytics will add clarity.
The aphorism "know thyself" has been attributed to numerous ancient Greek sages, with the most well known being Socrates. Said to refer to the ideal of understanding human behavior, here we refer to it in the sense that understanding what has made you successful with your current customers will make you more successful with your future customers.
There is definitely a large amount of specialized knowledge, craft and skill associated with doing so successfully. A great deal of good can be done with any of the growingly common forms of statistical extrapolation or predictive analytics such as :
- projected account spend / profitability ;
- propensity to buy / respond / be the decision-maker ;
- touch combination correlation to sales success ;
However, Massini Group has rescued numerous strategic targeting, segmentation and campaign management predictive analytics projects that did not pay enough attention to the accuracy of the process by which firmographic data was appended to a customer file to be used as independent variables. False positive matches, duplicate matches at different levels of the corporate hierarchy yielding wildly different attribute values or simply inadequate levels of data population can yield results that are downright nonsensical.
The key to successful predictive analytics is unflinching attention to detail in the initial phases of the effort. Massini Group insists on deterministic validation of all appended data from commercially available business reference sources and a minimum input data population rate of 90%. Massini Group commonly achieves these levels of accuracy with a combination of commercial vendor matching with after-the-fact match validation and manual research and assignment of previously unmatched records.
The second most common pitfall in the use of predictive analytics is inferring more detail than is truly available. Massini Group asserts that simpler is always better. Highly complex multivariate models are highly sensitive to inherent bias in the input data set. Further, when they are applied to a comprehensive marketing universe for the purposes of providing strategic direction, limitations to the data population of that larger data set can result in fundamental breakdown of the process.
Another class of highly effective predictive analytics is based on simple correlation analysis based on solid and auditable codification of variables with large numbers of values, such as abstracting contact titles to organization function and level or coding campaign responses into simple message directions and relationship stages.
The single most common sales challenge that Massini Group finds in blue chip companies is failure to truly exploit the depth and breadth of the marketing universe. Massini Group will help you see and prioritize all the deals and that will cause a spike in sales.
Many of the issues commonly referred to as data quality are actually errors of omission in the development of appropriate structures for targeting telesales and telemarketing campaigns. Massini Group has consistently measured select defect rates in rented lists at 50% or more. In other words, more than half of the records delivered by list owners are likely to poorly conform to the selection criteria.
Massini Group recommends a different approach - developing persistent knowledge of all of the targets in a market or segment, starting at the account, company or site level. A marketing universe is a comprehensive list of all of the companies that meet your criteria for high probability of sales success.
The marketing universe is useful as a hedge against a number of problems that plague sales and lead generation efforts, namely :
- failure to address the total available market, resulting in missed opportunities due to lack of visibility ;
- long sales cycles resulting from excessive effort applied to targets that are not yet ready to buy ;
- high program disqualification rates, resulting in excessive cost per sale ;
- high campaign lead rejection rates resulting in excessive cost per lead ;
- lead distribution or territory assignment issues ;
- account and site duplication.
The marketing universe is also a useful tool for marketing and sales operations planning, as the driver for :
- total available market sizing and segmentation ;
- sales territory sizing, placement and opportunity balancing ;
- program right sizing and investment planning ;
- management of current relationship and next best touch.
A marketing universe, when used as a foundation for program and campaign management will have the following positive impacts :
- assist in prioritizing direct sales activity toward the largest opportunities or those most likely to buy ;
- assure that telesales teams will be able to address all opportunities above a specific minimum revenue and/or profit threshold ;
- allow campaigns to be specialized for a specific task, like account validation, contact gathering, pre-qualification, lead generation and closing by attaching the last relationship status to each member of the marketing universe.
Massini Group has repeatedly used these methods to achieve lift in the 200%+ range.
Data points become knowledge when they are abstracted, cross-referenced and linked to other data points. Massini Group uses proprietary codification, data overlays, matching and statistical extrapolation to build marketing reference databases into strategic marketing and sales assets.
Researchers in human cognition, or the way that people think, note that intelligence is based on the number of associations, or linkages between basic facts that a person is able to make related to a specific subject.
The same conclusion can be applied to sales and marketing data. Unfortunately, many companies depend on the functionality of their CRM, SFA, or ERP system to cause this to happen – however, it is highly unlikely to occur without concerted effort and constant behind the scenes processing.
Turning marketing or sales data into actionable knowledge is dependent on a few fundamental data manipulations :
- de-duplication and consolidation designed to eliminate data dispersion caused by multiple versions or copies of accounts, companies, sites and contacts ;
- highly accurate matching as in matching responses to contacts, contacts to sites, sites to companies and companies to accounts - failure to do so will result in an incomplete picture of the situation ;
- appending rich sources of external data to the working data set via matching ;
- codification in which SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes or titles are uniformly and accurately mapped to a set of meaningful values that can be used for selection criteria ;
- abstraction in which multiple sources and representations of data are determined to be the same and aligned and consolidated - this especially applies to questions and answers asked via hundreds of campaigns or even the general messaging direction and relationship stage of each campaign in a large set of campaigns ;
- extrapolation in which known data on complete records is used to infer and fill in missing data on other records.
Massini Group refers to a single consolidated database that is subject to these types of processes as a marketing reference database.
Although a CRM or SFA tool can be used as a marketing reference database, best practices suggest that it be separate from the system that manages the daily interactions of the sales force.
Sometimes referred to as a double funnel model, the practice is organized so that marketing campaigns and lead generation programs work on the marketing reference database and only "promote" accounts, companies, sites and contacts to the SFA or CRM once it has be confirmed that a bona fide opportunity exists. This methodology is useful in focusing sales people only on the targets that are ready for their attention while marketing focuses on building awareness and conviction and qualifying leads.
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