The challenge

A leading bulk oil, fuel, and lubricants distributor needed help ramping up the call volume its in-house captive sales team was producing. The team had more than five years’ experience but had minimal success, averaging just 25 outbound calls a day.

The client struggled with operating an inside sales team, since that wasn’t its core competency, and sought an experienced partner to help jump-start call volume and sales.

The solution

TTEC worked with the client to assess the roadblocks that prevented sales. We created books of business for members of our sales team that identified active, inactive, and lost accounts. We then developed a strategic outreach plan, which prioritized accounts weekly based on their purchase history. This system gave priority to customers who were likely ready to buy. Targeting those accounts that were more likely to win gave TTEC associates a better game plan and set them up for more success.

We also implemented “Winback Wednesday” for our team, during which sales reps focused on winning back former customers who had stopped spending with the client.

The results

The team of TTEC sales reps saw fast results: within a year, our team was making more calls and closing more sales than the client’s captive team that had been working at it for more than five years. As a result, the company opted to outsource its entire inside sales operation to TTEC.

Our work led to more outbound calls each day, which helped reactivate lost accounts and spurred significant profit gains for the client.

The number of daily outbounds calls our sales team made averaged 48, nearly twice what the captive team had done. More outbound calls each day led to a 9.4% increase in year-over-year profit for the company, and our more effective strategy resulted in the cost of sale dropping 7% (from 16% to 14.9%).

In addition, our Winback Wednesday effort resulted in $289,000 in profit being reactivated from accounts that had previously been lost.