Call Center Consulting

When business is doing well, it’s only natural to want to scale your sales force. It’s a seemingly simple formula. More sales reps equal more growth.

Customer Acquisition or Retention?

When it comes to inside sales compensation plans, many companies fall into the trap of focusing squarely on customer acquisition. When they do so, however, customer retention may suffer. Because the cost of keeping a customer is one-fifth the cost of acquiring one, deciding whether to direct your efforts toward acquisition or retention is essential. In most cases, a business is more likely to shore up its long-term health by retaining and growing current customers. Thus, if their inside sales compensation plans prioritize customer retention, they are more likely to be successful. 

Let’s look at how two companies have addressed sales to existing customers in their compensation plans. 

It may feel like you have to run faster and faster to keep up on the treadmill of customer acquisition, growth and retention. To do so, you may need to establish a call center or expand an existing one. If so, should you go in-house or outsource your call center needs?
To help you with this decision, I compiled a list of the benefits of outsourcing your B2B call center as well as some concerns you need to address.

A marketing manager, Susan, was doing a stellar job with her online and offline marketing campaigns, generating leads by the bucketful. As soon as she received them, she passed them over to the sales manager to distribute among the sales force, expecting to receive praise and thanks for her outstanding efforts.

But she heard nothing. Complete silence.

Eventually, she stormed into the sales manager’s office and asked, “What’s going on? Aren’t the sales people happy with the leads? Why aren’t they out there closing the deals?”