Case Study: Sustaining Optimal Outbound Sales Support While Increasing our Workforce by over 50%

The Situation: Ramping Up Outbound Sales Support for Peak Season

For car dealerships, the busiest time of year is always tax season. It represents the largest potential for sales, with a significantly increased number of people interested in buying than any other time of year.

To harness that potential, this client, a national automotive dealership with over 130 locations throughout the US, relies heavily on outbound appointment-setting calls. Agents engage with qualified leads, booking appointments for them to visit the dealership and speak directly with salespeople about buying a car.

In preparation for the upcoming peak season, the client tasked Blue Ocean with augmenting our outbound sales support workforce by 51%. The challenge was to maintain and improve performance while greatly increasing the number of agents and coaches and successfully onboarding this largely new workforce.

The Approach: Strategic Hiring and Training to Sustain Performance

We reevaluated our existing hiring profile to ensure we were looking for the right people based on our top performers. Working with our Corporate Trainers, we also reviewed our training in order to modify and enhance particular elements to achieve a more effective balance of practice, role play, shadowing, classroom learning, and assessment.

We collaborated closely between recruiters, coaches and management to ensure a seamless transition from recruitment to training to production within a supportive environment. The goal was to hire agents who could hit the ground running, reaching quality and productivity targets soon after training.

Our Associate Trainer continued to support new agents during an incubation period after training, assisting them throughout their first week on the phones. We also worked to ensure that feedback was delivered quickly. Our coach team was focused on reviewing calls immediately and reviewing statistics frequently so agents could react and adjust quickly to reach targets.

Finally, we re-examined our operational set up in order to drive a true sales culture, based on communication, coaching and celebration. In addition to side-by-side coaching, this included daily and weekly contests with both individual and team incentives.

The Outcome: Sustained Performance Throughout Ramp Up Period

Because our approach was heavily focused on strategic hiring and training, we were able to avoid the most challenging obstacle to augmenting workforce teams. Many contact centers experience a downturn in productivity, often functioning at an 80% efficiency rate in the first six weeks of onboarding such a large group of new hires. However, our strategy was successful in immersing the new hires into a supportive environment and resulted not only in sustained productivity, but in fact in improved performance.

Success of this particular outbound sales program is measured by two distinct KPIs: First is the Efficiency Rate, which measures the number of credit reports run in relation to the number of appointments made. This is an important statistic because when credit reports are run, chances are high that the lead will become a customer. The second key performance indicator is the Show Rate, which accounts for the percentage of leads who show up to the appointment they had set over the phone. Show Rates are generally higher when appointments are made for the same day or, at the latest, the next day.

Our workforce increased by 51% from September to February, but our strategic onboarding and training resulted in an efficiency rate that actually improved from 3.90% to 5.12%. Show rate also had improvement, from 22.96% to 24.20% over the six months. This sustained, and even improved, performance means that this national dealership was fully prepared to enter the peak buying season with the power to harness greater potential.