Market Analyst
Dun & Bradstreet
Canada
Pinnacle Security Triples Sales
Background
Pinnacle Security is a leading door-to-door home security sales organization that launched an Inside Sales Department to supplement their summer sales and open new markets. Pinnacle implemented a hosted predictive dialer by Five9 in April 2009 to increase call productivity. The lead response team immediately increased dials 267% over manual dialing.
Sales and call center veteran Steven Hall came on in July of 2009 after the decision to go with Five9s had been made. His goal was to build an efficient real-time lead response organization.
Challenge
After a few weeks of analysis Mr. Hall noticed three problematic trends:
- A negative change in sales rep work ethic.
- Dialing inefficiencies.
- Poor data visibility.
“The [Five9] predictive dialer led to a very passive culture,” explained Mr. Hall, “people had time to be reading books and magazines—filling time waiting on the dialer to bring them a connect. It definitely wasn’t consistent with the strong company culture we had developed through years of door-to-door selling.”
Mr. Hall analyzed the call, lead, and sales data and asked the following questions:
- How well were all leads?
- How many attempts were made per lead?
- How fast did leads age?
Analysis found that 17% of the leads had never been dialed, while others had rarely been dialed. The predictive dialer increased call quantity, but could not alter the priority of leads being called. It also quite often produced “dead air” at the beginning of sales calls, causing people to hang up which meant missed opportunity and revenue.
Mr. Hall suspected that the leads cooled off quickly (after 2 weeks, the value had depleted). His current predictive dialing solution did not have enough reporting visibility, and could not call while leads were hot and continue calling more often to optimize contact ratios. He decided he had to make a change and began searching for a more sophisticated lead management and dialer solution.
Obstacles
Mr. Hall knew he needed a lead management CRM database for better visibility, capturing, and routing of leads. This ideally should be tightly integrated with a dialer technology to increase overall productivity.
Mr. Hall quickly disqualified several companies because they couldn’t route leads the way he wanted. Because of the passive culture shift, he knew he didn’t want older predictive dialers.
During the time he was evaluating technology solutions, Mr. Hall’s lead costs rose. He identified the optimal number of leads to purchase for each rep to keep sales high and costs low. The cost of leads continued to underscore the precious value that had to be wrung out of every lead.
Solution
Mr. Hall remembered InsideSales.com from having worked with it at Prosper, Inc., his previous employer. InsideSales.com met his sophisticated requirements including visibility into lead status and penetration. However, now his concern was downtime that the team might experience trying the new solution. InsideSales.com recommended a test or shootout with two of Mr. Halls inside sales reps using the newer InsideSales.com technology against the rest of the team using the Five9 predictive dialer.
The inside sales reps were concerned they would lose commission testing a new solution. Mr. Hall guaranteed that they wouldn’t lose income if it didn’t work as planned. These sales reps were great workers, but historically had average sales results. The two reps using InsideSales.com had the exact same script, dial targets, and leads as the old predictive dialer.
Mr. Hall expected the InsideSales.com solutions to perform better, but the dramatic increase truly surprised him. He explains, “The sales rep concerns about changing from the predictive dialer to the InsideSales.com PowerDialer were unfounded as their personal sales tripled within one month!” Mr. Hall said he would have been happy to keep results the same. What a bonus!
Mr. Hall’s team experienced what InsideSales.com now calls “Predictive 2.0”: the ability to predict when to call and who to call to actually increase sales, moving beyond the older Five9 predictive technology that predicts only how many lines to dial.
Results
The InsideSales.com Solution addressed Mr. Hall’s concerns and the passive culture from the predictive dialer quickly changed. The reps are in control of their dialing and are making a LOT more sales. Six weeks after launching InsideSales.com throughout the team, monthly sales are already up 27% while the rest of the company catches up to their increased sales volume. In addition to the increased sales, Mr. Hall experienced another benefit from the new partnership with InsideSales.com:
“Visibility is huge,” Steve explains, “at any given time we know exactly how well we are consuming our expensive leads. And we even went back and recalled all of those leads that hadn’t been called by the predictive dialer and were able to make additional sales even though the leads had gotten pretty old.”
Products Pinnacle Security is Using
