The Challenge

A leading U.S.-based logistics company that serves a global footprint wanted to grow the incremental revenue it generated from its embedded base of small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers. For years, it had outsourced some of its sales operations to TTEC and it turned to us for help as it sought to grow the sales generated by its SMB base.

TTEC salespeople who worked for the client used varying approaches to sales calls, leading to major differences between top and bottom performers and inconsistent customer experiences. Best practices weren’t being efficiently shared among the team, so bottom performers had little opportunity to learn from top performers’ successes.

The Solution

TTEC started by analyzing the behaviors of our top and bottom performers among our sales team. Using speech analytics – specifically word clouding, which aggregates frequently used keywords and phrases – we were able to determine which words and phrases were trending among certain groups of callers.

We then compared individual salespeople’s word clouds against the word clouds of the top performing group as well as the bottom performers. With these insights, we started coaching salespeople to incorporate the keywords and phrases that were bringing success to the top performers – and to steer clear of what low-performing salespeople talked about.

From there, we implemented an ideal call flow map, which is prominently displayed at all salespeople’s workstations. The maps helped guide them through calls in a way that’s based on proven best practices. They outlined what topics to include, and in what order, during calls.

To reinforce the use of the ideal call flow and reward salespeople who consistently demonstrated best practices, we created a dynamic stack ranking system. It used not only traditional sales metrics, like number of sales and conversion rates, but also soft skills measured by the speech analytics platform, such as call flow adherence. Salespeople who exhibited the desired behaviors were financially rewarded through a monthly stack rank contest.

The Results

Through the work we’ve done optimizing the expected call flow, TTEC salespeople working with the client reached levels of conversion rate and revenue success previously considered unattainable. Monthly sales per salesperson jumped 65%, incremental revenue by salesperson rose 32%, and call flow adherence improved by 25%.