Services - Massini Group

Benchmark and isolate telesales/telemarketing performance limitations.

On a fixed fee basis, Massini Group will, via comprehensive data analysis, documentation/reporting review, and staff and vendor interviews, characterize and quantify the best practices gaps in current operations and deliver an actionable performance improvement plan.

In the 15 years that Massini Group has been researching the performance drivers and limitations in internal and outsourced telesales and telemarketing operations, we have found a striking number of similarities in issues and remedies from operation to operation.

Massini Group tackles the problem using a three pronged approach :

talk to the people that run the operation to understand what level of visibility they have to the core operating principles and key performance parameters ;
examine the standard reporting and process documentation to peg the level of operational discipline and transparency that exists in the environment ;
deep dive into all of the detailed tabular data that represents the results of the operation and test all of the preconceived notions that have been previously described.

This process generally points out a number of challenges, namely :

the process is neither disciplined, structured nor organized enough to either produce predictable results or allow managers to exhibit enough control to manage improvements ;
the reporting produced by the environment does not support enough transparency to diagnose and correct issues that are holding back performance ;
efforts to optimize the process and environment are ad hoc at best ;
well intentioned and otherwise skilled people do not have the tools to make the process better.

Massini Groups action plan generally revolves around the following operating principles :

normalize the operations to allow performance causality to be measured ;
improve targeting to optimize return on time spent ;
apply discipline to allocation of resources via structured queue management ;
institute a systemic process memory to leverage previous results ;
right size the team and the targets to achieve optimal performance ;
maintain adequate throughput speed ;
assure uniform treatment of all targets so that results can be extrapolated forward ;
disassemble the process into component parts ;
assure that each part of the process in functioning to best practices levels by comparing to optimized benchmarks ;
eliminate agent target sorting and disposition gaming on the floor ;
isolate and correct process deficiencies at an agent level ;
control operational parameters to drive positive ROI.

Manage telesales/telemarketing capabilities to best practices.

On a three month pilot or annual basis, Massini Group will significantly increase telesales or telemarketing performance, efficiency and predictability via implementation of best practices in strategy, planning, targeting, operations, testing and vendor management.

Telesales / telemarketing environments generally have performance hurdles for straight forward, tangible reasons that fall into the following categories :

the environment lacks the operational discipline necessary to apply scientific, statistical and mathematical methods to process optimization ;
the skills associated with generating process reporting transparency and establishing performance causality are lacking ;
supporting systems contain inherent deficiencies that impact operational best practices, process performance transparency or both.

The challenges are commonly interleafed, meaning that the lack of operational discipline makes structured scientific approaches to process improvement impossible. The lack of fact-based support drives a proliferation of quick fixes that commonly make matters worse. The constant stream of ineffective quick fixes saps resources from much needed and fundamental improvements to underlying systems. This cycle is repeated over and over again.

Following the previously delivered performance improvement plan, Massini Group breaks this cycle by :

establishing the simplest possible level of operational discipline by partitioning the work into uniform, strategically stable, month long blocks of work with normalized targets ;
modifying processing methodologies and operational parameters to bring them into alignment with best practices ;
building the kind of reporting structures necessary to provide process transparency and support management of performance causality ;
drawing on the previously supplied performance improvement plan, attacking each process deficiency in priority order ;
utilizing sequential benchmarks to demonstrate to all constituents that the results are improving with each subsequent change ;
winning over the hearts and minds of process participants and channeling the desire to make quick fixes into more lasting and fundamental changes ;
driving longer term system improvements to support higher and higher levels of process performance ;

Massini Group is generally able to drive substantial measurable improvements within the first three months of implementation of the performance improvement plan. Further substantial improvements are generally made for the subsequent twelve months of the effort. Massini Group has been able to maintain best practices levels of performance for up to eight years and counting.

Consolidate customer data, apply firmographics and build predictive analytics.

On a fixed fee basis, Massini Group will accurately apply firmographic, corporate hierarchy and consolidated purchase history data to a customer master and utilize predictive analytics to project spend for prioritizing acquisition, cross sell and up sell activities.

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 ;
lead scoring via multivariate correlation analysis.

However, there is risk in blindly conjuring up numbers on which your entire sales strategy or lead generation process would hinge.

Massini Group addresses the opportunity to use predictive modeling to improve process function based upon the following guiding principles :

assure a high degree of accuracy in assignment of firmographic data appended to the input data sets - your customer master list ;
choose a modeling technique that can be used within your comprehensive marketing universe - a highly accurate model based upon variables that are impossible to acquire for large numbers of prospects is not useful ;
choose a modeling method that is the simplest possible way to achieve the intended objective - more complex methods are more sensitive and more prone to errors ;
use simple, quick and inexpensive methods early in the process to prove the efficacy of the approach, make quick wins and win over skeptics - leave the complexity to later iterations once your constituents are bought in ;
always validate the results via correlation to the actual results that the model is supposed to predict.

For projects of this type, Massini Group spends about 50% of the time on getting the inputs right. 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%.

At the account / site level, Massini Group commonly achieves these levels of accuracy with a combination of :

commercial vendor matching / data appends ;
after-the-fact Massini Group proprietary match validation ;
manual research and appending firmographics to previously unmatched records.

At the contact and response level, Massini Group builds highly accurate and auditable mappings of titles to function and organization level and campaign responses to message direction and relationship status.

Build, supplement or improve the total available marketing universe.

On a fixed fee basis, Massini Group will use ideal prospect profiles derived from customer analysis mated with business reference data, CRM/SFA sales cycles in progress and marketing response history to assure that your team maximizes its efforts and sees all the deals.

Massini Group is a proponent of business to business marketing strategies based upon a priori knowledge of the entire marketing universe. In fact, Massini Group has proven the approach superior to mass marketing or list based approaches in the following cases :

at one of the worlds largest software companies, Massini Group reduced the lead rejection rate from over 50% to very near 0% ;
at a large computer storage manufacturer, Massini Group produced leads 3600% more efficiently by eliminating an 81% lead rejection rate ;

In this day and age, the sources of business reference data from various sources have gotten good enough that a process can be instituted to assure that all marketing and sales dollars are spent on companies that are pre-qualified as buyer at a sufficient level to assure profitability.

Massini Group employs the following process to build a master list of target sites :

highly accurate positive identification of customer companies allows business firmographic and public utilization to be added to the customer master ;
predictive analytics are applied to project spend, profitability and propensity to buy using customers as input data and actual experience as dependent variables ;
profiles constructed from predictive analytics are applied to all of the companies in the comprehensive marketing universe built using business reference data ;
marketing response history and sales cycle history is matched to all members of the marketing universe to peg the current client relationship with each company ;
gaps in contact availability are filled by either specialized contact database overlays or brute force telephone based contact gathering ;

Massini Group commonly measures the actual market coverage as a percentage of the total marketing universe. This metric is a key leading indicator for projection of the impact that marketing spend can have on sales.

Using a marketing reference database as the foundation for marketing campaigns has a number of positive impacts :

closed loop reporting to revenue and ROI is greatly simplified ;
persistent memory of previous relationship significantly boosts message relevance and response ;

Massini Group reduced the target disqualification rate from 34% to 8% for a F100 financial services provider by maintaining a master marketing universe with a persistent record of previous telesales call dispositions.

Build and host a marketing reference database.

On an initial fixed fee basis followed by an annual maintenance contract, Massini Group will build and host a marketing reference database, in our systems or yours, that supports significant improvements in marketing and sales campaigns results via knowledge-based structured decision support.

Massini Group defines a marketing reference database as :

a single data repository that contains accounts, sites, contacts, touch history, response history and purchase history ;
populated with attributes at all levels based on append, consolidation and abstraction processes ;
with fundamental maintenance processes applied at all levels.

The following are key processes applied by Massini Group in building a marketing reference database :

consolidation of all available sources of accounts, site, contacts, purchase history, response history, purchase history with specific ID-based reference back to the originating system ;
maintenance of add, modify and delete processes based upon changes in source systems ;
consolidation of external sources of response where the marketing reference database is not used as source data for marketing campaigns ;
appending of corporate hierarchy to link sites to parent sites or accounts to parent accounts ;
appending of firmographic attributes and specialized attributes based upon matching of third party data sets – with ID based reference back to the originating source where possible ;
appending of attributes resulting from predictive analytics at the account level, site level or contact level ;
matching of contacts to sites and accounts ;
appending of contacts to sites and accounts deemed important for which gaps in contact coverage exist ;
abstraction of touch and response history into standard technology interest profiles ( TIPs ), solution interest profiles ( SIPs ), product opportunity profiles ( POPs ), message interest, offer interest and relationship status or sales pipeline status ;
abstraction of contact titles to consistent, auditable function and organization level attributes ;
field normalization and standardization, CASS processing or international equivalent, NCOA processing or international equivalent and de-duplication and merging ;
aging analysis to retire contacts without response or confirmation after a specified time.

Lead conversion improved 457% with statistical propensity analyses. Fortune 500 technology company dramatically raised lead conversion rates by using Massini Group spend projection and propensity to respond analytics in conjunction with a telemarketing pilot.... > Learn more

When intuition fails. 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... > Learn more