Welcome Back to Our Listen Letter
In this is second episode, Ryan Pereus, CEO & Founder of SHP, shares some company updates on systems and processes, plus what’s been happening at SHP over the past few months.
We started this Listen Letter because over the last year as the world went remote, we realized our ability to communicate, inform, update, interview, and inspire not only our community, but our internal team became more difficult.
We’ve also learned that many of the updates we share with our internal team, we also share with our clients and prospective clients. So, why not have an audio drop for everyone to look forward to.
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Welcome Back to Episode 2 of SHP Inhouse!
I apologize, it’s been a couple of months since I’ve done an episode. I hope for the future that we will come back to this a little bit more. But here we are. It is December 20, 2021, Christmas week.
If you celebrate that kind of thing, Happy Holidays. We are closing out year one post-COVID. It’s been an incredible bounce-back year for our team, we definitely took some hits and so did our clients. So, there was certainly some rebuilding that had to be done in a couple of different ways. And we really worked hard this year to reinforce processes, hire specialized team members, and help our clients to be successful, to help bounce back from that year. So… A lot to update on.
And I’m excited about the New Year and the momentum that cold calling and outbound prospecting has for 2022. Are you guys ready?
SHP company and process updates
SHP Inhouse episode two, six months later.
A lot of things have changed, so this will be a fun update!
I’m just going to bounce around each Department and kind of from a corporate level as well to give everyone some insight on what has been happening.
It’s one of my favorite things about sales, until you’re converting 100% on everything, there’s always something that you can improve, and that’s what keeps us going regardless of the results. We’re always going to look to improve those results.
Update Number One- Project Management Team
This Department is like our little coding team, our little group of software engineers that hunker down … They brainstorm and look at the current processes we have, always searching for ways to improve and then put in systems to maintain any improvements. That’s a good system. They are the technical side of our business. So, it kind of cross-sections with the IT Department as well, and might even be splitting up into project management and IT as two separate departments.
But for now, we kind of consider them within project management. So this is kind of the data management side, compliance, technical application, impact improvement, and functionality. So, this team works a lot with that. And boy, have we made some updates. One of the things that we are realizing more and more is that our clients need to have the most seamless and best experience possible when engaging with us.
And it’s hard to think about, especially when your natural proclivity is selling and not technical user experience. It’s been a journey to get to the point where we’re able to provide a lot of automation for our clients that help just communicate consistently what’s going on with their campaigns and also to team members internally. Right. But that’s a pretty big part of what the project management team does.
An example of that, we dial our sales dialer that we primarily make all of our calls from is Vanilla Soft. We mentioned that last time, but we now have automation that automatically transmits data into the call trackers live, so you can see the lead activity or call activity in real-time.
Then, there are automatic emails that are sent once a lead has been generated. Whether it’s considered a nurture, warm appointment, or a survey, these are sent via email to all the appropriate parties based on that account’s request, the account manager, and the caller involved, as well as a quality lead email. So if there was ever any issue with the lead, someone can “reply all” immediately and have everyone involved.
That has been big. It allows us to better interact and make changes to be sure the prospect is getting the right amount of attention. We’re also looking at developing a database internally for every single dial that we’ve ever made.
My background comes from working with an analytics software company and learning a lot about how much data can help you make decisions. Which kind of spawned some ideas as to what is possible with our business. We work with so many dials and things like that every day that it’s become rather important for our whole entire operation and how we do things.
We like to look at:
- the time of day we called
- the number of conversations by a caller
- the number of not interested nurtures or
- the number of warm appointments and
- all the conversions that go with these segments of data
It’s about being able to say, this is the best time to call, these are the industries that are best to call in, and why a caller may experience more success calling. Those are types of things that we want to house as a whole because if we have access to a massive database, we can really analyze so much more.
This helps teach us how to place our team members better by having a mega dump of data that we can choose from. Our Project Management team is currently working on this process, so we’re trying to think of all the different ways that we can improve on the technical side.
One last thing on the Project Management end – Call Trackers. Our call trackers essentially act as our reporting tool for our clients and reporting system. We’ve added a live Decision-Maker convo or DM Connect Rate by the round. This is important is because it really helps our Client Account Managers decide, “Hey, is this list the kind of list that we want to go after?” And, “How many rounds should we choose for the contacts that we have uploaded to call?”
For example, if you have a cell phone list mobile list, you may get conversation rates really early on in your dials, but then as time goes on, it ends up decreasing in the number of pickups you get. Right, since you’re calling people’s mobile personal numbers. However, you can also see the opposite type of impact.
When you’re calling corporate, you can actually get MORE as you find out information about who the right person or contact is – once you get extensions, things of that nature. So you might end up needing more dials on those types of contacts. We are able to provide that data in real-time.
We used to offer this as an add-on but found it so vital for our clients, especially those new to prospecting and just learning how to outbound.
We hope to have more data on this soon. But just looking at some past data on a campaign that we’ve done with and without confirmation calls, we’ve seen an increase of 50 percent in show rates or run rates because of appointment confirmations resets. We are also fully remote currently, our processes have changed a bit because of that, we’ve had to have a much stronger, robust internal infrastructure in order to operate, communicate and execute on our complete operation from a digital perspective.
Update Part Two – Operations
We hired a Cold Call Director (Hi Rich!) and a team underneath to support our operation. And why that’s important is because our operation is growing rather rapidly, with about 30 client SDRs currently making between 2700-3500 calls per day as a whole.
There’s a lot of support that needs to be done in our operations side to ensure that our team members have all the right tools, technology, resources, and knowledge for all the different campaigns they call on, as well as the staff to provide them with the right information and driving them forward -up and up!
Just recently we hired our new cold call director, Rich, who has quite a bit of experience in outbound prospecting and lead generation from a human-to-human perspective. It’s awesome to see someone who has managed 40 plus people before come in and kind of instantly make an impact with our team to get them all on the same page, rowing in the same direction, that we see our results increasing and they have.
With that comes a lot of new processes. We have online training videos, courses they have to take, and we train everyone on the H2H Methodology.
The H2H Sales Scripts is the way that we speak to people from zero to one. We say about 60% to 70% of any cold call conversation is going to be sales language, while 30% to 40% in a cold call conversation is going to be product or service knowledge, provided by the Account Manager and our client.
There’s a lot of focus on that sales skill and ability to convert because they do call on different campaigns. It’s awesome to see that support and able to grow to 30 employees with each SDR individually making, depending on how long they’re working, 80 to 150 calls a day.
In terms of the New Business and our content marketing team. This team here is working very hard to reach people that are searching for what we do.
The New Biz and content team are consistently identifying those places on the web where people are looking specifically for cold calling and lead generation. We’re working a lot with sales education content, cold calling (got to cold call) and we’re working with some internal strategies to help these individuals or businesses who are looking for help, to find an expert cold call team. And it’s not an easy task.
Some people don’t know that cold calling is the form of lead generation that can work, or that people still do it in 2021. And it certainly is alive and well with the rates that we’re seeing.
Update Part Three – Account Management
From our Account Management side, we have four account managers and counting. These are like your Outsourced Sales Managers. We’ve really worked with them to build and improve our sales strategies based upon the data that we now have on what’s successful.
They are constantly looking at the market and message.
How is this market? How is this title? How is this data? Is it correct? Is it the right ballpark that we’re in? How are the SDRs successful with this messaging? Can we make tweaks? Can we use a different strategic template for the conversation?
Just kind of continually tuning those knobs, we’ve been able to see success with our clients because we’re able to get the live feedback from those calls and the call trackers.
See you in 2022!
That is quite an update we just went through. Some of the departments got to hear a little bit about what’s happening and 2022 has a lot to come.
So, I will save some of our plans for next year for the next episode, but I hope this has given you a six-month update enough to feel like there’s been some continuous improvements and some good news coming and has already landed so…
Happy New Year! Happy Holidays and we will catch up in 2022. Thanks for joining!
ICYMI – Listen to Episode #1 here
