If new clients for your business is a pure numbers game, then you have to look at ConnectAndSell. This is one Sales 2.0 offering that I have to rave about! A friend of ours recommended CAS a year ago and at first were reluctant. It seemed like a predictive dialer/call center offshore mashup and didn't resonate and for the price seemed like it would be questionably worth it. But then over the summer a good client of ours told us they were achieving results with it (thanks Char!). So we finally gave it a shot.
ConnectAndSell is what we thought, an autodialer on steroids, topped off with humans guiding it. It's actually like an outbound sales control room with prospects popping up every couple of minutes for a pitch. It's INTENSE and I don't recommend more than a 2 hour session at a time.
What kind of results are we achieving? It's all about "connects", so let me define it. A connect is when the CAS system delivers a prospect you have targeted for a live phone call where you can start with "Hi Joe Prospect, this is Steve the Sales Guy, how are you?" Think about how many true connects/pitches one of your outbound sessions might yield today. Two or three an hour with a full hour of dialing? Well, the CAS community brags about hourly connect rates of 8-10 connects per hour (CAS humbly promises less than that, but they know you get more). This results in 10 pitches an hour with prospects you want to be pitching. How long do you think it takes one of your sales executives do 10 pitches? Ask them, you might be suprised at the answer.
Basic ROI study: from one of our clients outbound telesales projects selling $1200 maintenance and support licenses for an open source IT analysis tool that is downloaded freely. They typically connect with an average of 23 targets per day, send 6 quotes out (25% interest rate) Close 1 of the 6 over time (16% close rate). So an average week's production is 92 connects, 23 quotes, 3-4 deals per week for $4800 in revenue. By adding just two CAS sessions a week to this rep, the production is increased to 167 pitches per week, 42 quotes, and 7 deals per week's effort for revenue of $8400. Less the additional management cost and service fees to CAS, it has resulted in a net increase of $2400 per week.
Knowing a good thing when we saw it, Green Leads decided to tune the CAS system and do one better. We fed the machine with validated lists from our research group, which are all direct dials and nearly 100% accurate. We have actually achieved hourly connect rates as high as 22 connects. Need I say more? We've been doing it to augment our production and have even been hired to just take over CAS sessions for clients. ConnectAndSell has been a great addition to our arsenal and I'm sure you can use it to your benefit as well. If you have an inside sales team or outside reps that do outbound calling and the law of large numbers is factored into your ROI model, then reviewing ConnectAndSell has to be on your to-do list.
Read more about how it works in great detail at this blog post by Arron Ross, ConnectAndSell: 100x ROI in generating pipeline!? (p.s. I really like Arron's posts, seems to be on a little hiatus, wish he would come back).
