Sales Results Tripled (and more) and Sustained for 18 months +
Note: Platinum Fundraising is a really cool fundraising organization in Ft Lauderdale and incredibly dear to us, as the owners have become great friends. We spend a ton of time at this site and love all of the people. It’s been so much fun watching them grow and succeed.
Platinum Fundraising sells its highly successful fundraising program to schools and non-profit organizations. Client generally do far better with Platinum’s fundraising solution than all other fundraising options they try. When we met Christy and Tony, the owners, they had recently formed an outbound call center. There were three OB reps and one fairly new sales manager (first management job). Prior to this, all sales work was conducted in person, by reps in the field. The outbound center’s sales people averaged three sales per week. The goal was to at least double sales and sustain it, with hopes of growing sales even higher. At the start of our work, sales were flat. Three sales people, nine total sales per week, had become the norm.
Unique Challenges
- The most unique challenge was the lack of coaching and management structure. Since the center was so small, everyone wore many hats and coaching was not done consistently. This had to change if the new sales approach was going to work, long-term.
- The sales people approached calls with somewhat of a “cheerleader” mentality; lots of enthusiasm and friendliness, along with tons of sweetness.
- Missing was the boldness and strong emphasis a sales person’s voice needs. “Your fundraiser will be a great success if you use our formula and work hard to accomplish it.”
Training Provided by Call Center Training Solutions
- Training’s Big Idea: Make sure your own “personal amazing” is coming across on every call. Knowing that a) no one wants to do fundraising (but they must), and b) Platinum has the best program for fundraising, sound impressed with the program as you present it and be bold about helping raise money for the kids and all their needs.
- Training’s Big Idea for leadership: Accountability leads to personal bests. Reps increase their respect, loyalty and love for you when you help them achieve personal bests. Bring out their awesome. Job enjoyment will always be high.
- The first course trained at Platinum was Call Center Floor Management for the small leadership team.
- The implementation of a more effective coaching strategy, both one-on-one and spontaneous floor-coaching, started the following week.
- Throughout the month, multiple one-two hour training sessions were conducted by CCTS for the reps on all topics of selling, voice control, boldness, leaving “call-to-action” voice mail messages, etc.
- Throughout the initiative, reps continued to use the original script provided by Platinum, only with the improved tone and bolder approach.
- The script was modified and changed as needed over the next 18 months.
- For over a year, CCTS continued to provide as-needed coaching and training for reps and leaders.
End Results
Platinum sales increased dramatically. They were able to hire and grow the rep team to a total of about ten reps. Sales per week quota grew from the original three sales to nine. Most sales people were able to regularly hit this goal. Some of the stronger reps were able to achieve 20-30 sales per week. The best part is the level of confidence heard in these strong, effective (but still sweet, friendly and caring) sales reps. They love the work they do and their numbers have increased dramatically as a result of their better selling and better managing efforts.
Another great side note is how gratifying it has been to watch the leadership team go from good to great in the time we have worked together. They have built and sustained a strategic coaching vision and plan that would improve the results in any call center where it is applied.