Stoffer's Soapbox

Intelligent Call Routing - Is LiveOps the Answer?

In most outbound sales-focused call centers, leads are assigned rather haphazardly, often based on some rudimentary skill sets or based on giving a higher volume of leads to the better sales reps. If these call centers learned to be more precise in lead allocation - and ensure that the right lead gets to the right salesperson - they could find a pretty significant lift in conversion rate and profit.

Some call centers have moved up a rung in sophistication by allocating leads based on propensity to convert - i.e. the majority of leads from the highest converting lead sources go to the best sales reps (of course there is a balance here - if you give new or low performing reps only the worst leads, they will never have a chance of improving). This is better but still not optimal - the highest converting lead source for one sales rep is not necessarily the highest converting for another.

Now imagine nirvana - a system that would dynamically determine which reps are best at converting which leads - for example, Susie is best at selling to associate's degree prospects from the South while Jon is best at selling to potential MBA students in the northeast. As the leads come in the door, the system would then allocate them across the call center to optimize whatever KPIs management wants optimized. Well, nirvana exists and it is called Live Ops. David Hornik of August Capital explains how LiveOps works in a recent blog post:

"LiveOps is in essence AdWords for people. The platform is able to measure and manage each individual agent in real time and route calls based upon the performance of each agent. And that routing doesn't simply rely upon data about the agent. It also relies upon information about the call coming in. If a call to the LiveOps' service is to sell a Ginsu Knife, the agent with the best track record of selling and up-selling will get the call. If, on the other hand, it is a call concerning front line product support, a different agent may have the best record of quick and effective resolution of support matters."

Perfect, right? Well, not if you have already invested millions in your call center infrastructure that still sits on the books. The only way to use LiveOps is to either outsource operations to a LiveOps call center or rip out your entire call center infrastructure and install the LiveOps Hosted Contact Center. If LiveOps or someone else would introduce a similar intelligent routing capability that sits on top of Avaya, Genesys, Cisco and other legacy call center platforms, they would have a huge profit opportunity.

Lead Contact Strategy: Bill Rice Promises an Answer

Bill Rice responded to my post yesterday, "Calling Internet Leads: How Often, How Much", by starting a series on his Better Closer blog devoted to addressing that very problem! Bill promises, in his next few posts, to explain how he (or a PhD in statistics he is lucky enough to have on staff) can use game theory to "construct an effective search strategy or pattern that will maximize your contact rate and reduce your time to contact." Can't wait to hear what he has to say!

Calling Internet Leads: How Often, How Much

There is a multi-billion dollar market in Internet lead generation for big ticket item services (mortgages, education, etc.). So you would think someone would be able to tell me the optimal strategy to reach these leads. I have talked to virtually every large telecom equipment vendor, publicly traded outsourcers, a boatload of consultants and a number of software providers and no one can give me a simple answer to two not so simple questions:

1. The holy grail would be a one size fits all answer to "what is the optimal strategy, across channels, to convert leads in a consultative inside sales environment?"

2. Clearly, there is no holy grail answer possible as each company and industry and consumer segment has its own characteristics. So the next question is "what approach or methodology should I use to arrive at an answer?" Surprisingly, no one has given me a good answer here either.

The easy answer is to focus on telephone contact only,  act as a telemarketer and just dial the heck out of leads until you reach 70-80% list penetration, rest the list, and then dial the leads you could not finalize again a few months later. But, as a consumer, would you enroll in a school that dialed you twenty times and never left a message (for me, that twentieth dial would be a big "place me on the Do Not call list").

A more intelligent telephone strategy would be to figure out, based on lead characteristics, what are the best times of day to reach a consumer. There are global and segment-level optimums and this is a very attainable strategy.

The best strategy would be to reach the customer through the channel they want to be reached and when they want to be reached - this could be via an active channel like via outbound dialing, IM or email campaigns or a more passive relationship-oriented channel like an RSS feed or school-sponsored portal.

Easier said than done - has anyone had any success in a consultative sales focused organization optimizing lead conversion, in the long run, and across channels?

Pull vs. Push Lead Management

Do your sales reps only work new leads? Are thousands of old leads sitting dormant in your sales rep's lead management system? Do you depend on your team leads to reallocate leads and are they doing so effectively? Are you sales people ignoring leads with certain demographic characteristics? Do you have lots of leads allocated to reps who are no longer with your company? Bill Rice has an interesting PDF on his Better Closer blog that talks about a pull system for leads: "Pull your way to success."

In a pull lead management system, leads are served up one at a time - when a salesperson closes out one lead they need to click to get the next one. In contrast a traditional push system will push out a certain number of fresh leads to a sales rep. per day.

As I've discussed with Bill recently, a pull system also enables a company to test different contact strategies by deciding which leads to serve up to reps (based on lead source, age, time of day, frequency it has been worked previously). In a push system where the leads are "owned" by reps, each rep. has their own contact strategy. I'd argue that global optimization of contact strategy is more effective than leaving it to individual reps.

Bill writes "A push methodology will create an environment where sales people expect leads to be "given to them." This type of environment builds a sales attitude with less respect for the prospect and the importance of follow through on that prospects inquiry. In contrast, a pull methodology creates an expectation that every lead is "earned" by meeting the last customer's needs or at least
responding quickly to their request. If you are building a high velocity sales team, a significant edge goes to the pull methodology."

Definitely food for thought - a pull system is almost a no brainer for a greenfield operation, but it is a massive change to implement in an incumbent large sales organization.

Maximizing conversion with the right lead contact strategy

In the online education, online mortgage and other related industries, leading companies have hundreds of thousands or millions of leads in their database. This begs the question: what is the contact strategy that optimizes conversions in the long-term.

Of course speed to contact is one of the biggest drivers of conversion (the source/quality of the lead is the other biggie). Jeff Soloman posts about speed to contact in the mortgage industry, observing that leads contacted in the first 15 minutes are 70% more likely to convert than leads contacted thereafter.

It is not that difficult to get even a large salesforce to call back customers quickly .