Good afternoon! My name is Alex Trotsenko, I am one of the founders and managers of the outsourcing company AgainAgain

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How did B2B cold emails help us make a breakthrough?


Good afternoon! My name is Alex Trotsenko, I am one of the founders and managers of the outsourcing company AgainAgain, operating in North America and Western Europe. Besides other things, we conduct targeted searches for leads to attract new clients and prepare business meetings by sending out cold letters.

During my time working in outsourcing, I managed to accumulate considerable experience, allowing my messages not to turn into spam, but to convey to the recipients the proposals expressed in them. And today I would like to share it with you. Neither blogging nor writing articles are, in principle, my hobbies, but if my knowledge can be useful to someone to promote their own business, why not do it? So let's talk today about the so-called cold letters, which, with the right approach, will help you significantly expand your b2b client base without spending financial and human resources.

It's no secret that a cold letter found in an email inbox is more annoying than it makes you want to immediately read its contents. You understand in advance that you will see template phrases and a lot of water in which useful information will drown, and therefore in most cases, without opening it, you send the message to the trash. Or you read it, become convinced that your assumptions are correct, and get rid of the letter again.


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I’ll share my personal experience: I have interviewed about seven hundred managers of SMB companies, whom I have asked about cold letters as well. The answer has always been disappointing: the lion's share of them do not bring results.

Oh, how many such messages I have sent myself! How many of them were either completely ignored or read, but without any result! Moreover, this often happens now, but today the ratio between letters that were useful and those that were written in vain has pleasantly changed in favor of my company. I want to tell you how I achieved this.

But first of all, just a few more words about the importance of email. Many believe that this is a dead end, because calling or using a messenger to send a message is faster and more reliable. I can confidently say: no. The mail still remains one of the main corporate methods of communication in the countries of the “golden billion”. If you want to succeed, write letters. And the more letters you write, the higher the chance of success is.



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Work as James Bond by compiling a complete dossier on your potential recipient. Consider the specifics of the company’s field of activity, geographical location, its size and turnover, number of employees and current vacancies. Pay special attention to the person who will receive your letter and, accordingly, decide his fate. The more detailed you study the client, the better you will understand how to interact with him.

My company has developed a special “Google Form” into which the client enters his data before starting work, this is very helpful. At first, I'm embarrassed to say, I used a slightly modified template I found on the Internet. Yes, yes, I have typed into the search engine “The best b2b-email templates” and opened the first article relevant to the topic, as I remember now “8 great email newsletters that you will remember for a long time.” True, now there is a different text, written by an obvious graphomaniac, but that is not the point. The main thing I want to say is that you can be inspired by patterns, but you can’t take them as a basis. My only justification was my lack of experience at that moment, so the response silence was natural.


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Nowadays I use various tools to get an idea of the company’s financial capabilities, the effectiveness of its CEO, and obtain web analytics data: LinkedIn Navigator, Glassdoor, Crunchbase, Angel.co, the company’s own websites and the pages of its leaders on social networks. Any insights are good. This allows you not only to choose a promising client, but also to build a style of communication with him.


Step one: define your audience

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To buy ready-made ones is not an option. More than half of the addresses in it will probably turn out to be invalid, and the rest will not produce many results, but if you bet on quantity, you risk being identified by the provider as a spammer and getting banned. The situation is not much better with parsers, ready-made or self-written.

Manual search would be a great option, effective and free, if it did not take a lot of time and effort. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about, I happened to go through this. In fact, you will have to give up any other activity for a long time or relieve your sales managers of it, which, of course, is not good.

I would recommend a manual search, outsourced to specialists who will quickly present you with an extensive list of leads in accordance with the parameters selected in the first step. This is an ideal solution because it:

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- does not require you to immerse yourself in the process to the detriment of your business;
- eliminates the need for explanations with managers regarding missed deadlines and quotas;
- guarantees the quality of the final product at a cost 3-4 times lower than what you would have to pay if you hired your own staff of basic workers.

So outsourcing in this case is really the optimal solution, allowing you to get results without unnecessary delays and pay professionals for their work based on the fact, and not for the number of hours spent in the office.



Step two: create a database of mailing addresses


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This is the most important part of the message and will determine whether your letter will be opened in principle. Avoid outright spam (free, promotion, etc.), aggressive attempts to push your product or service, clickbait topics – all this will push the recipient away from you. Also, do not use false information; it will put an end to cooperation, even if at first they are interested in your proposal.

Write the topic clearly and concisely, immediately noting the essence: proposal for cooperation, scheduling meetings, arranging a call, etc. The title of the email, which became my first serious success, read: "Positive reviews on Google for {Name of the company}". Is it ambitious? But I really had a well-thought-out proposal with a strong foundation ready; all that remained was to present it competently.

For myself, I made a clear conclusion: it is the header that is responsible for opening emails, so first of all we try 10 options until there are 1-2 best, perfectly verified ones left.


Step three: choose a subject of the letter

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Write briefly – 2-3 paragraphs, 5-6 sentences. No one will read a long text from a person about whom they still know nothing.
Use a neutral greeting – “Hello, Dear”.

Go straight to a specific topic: “I would like to discuss...”, “I am writing to you about...”, “My proposal is as follows...”

In a business letter, you shouldn’t use phrases like “Sorry for interrupting you from your work...” You don’t interrupt. You are doing your job.

Try to convey to your interlocutor the value of your commercial offer. Give numbers, names and examples. Right after the greeting and my name, I wrote: “Our company offers a proven strategy to ensure growth in the number of clients of an enterprise and increase its rating. Thanks to cooperation with us, Texas Real Estate & Co expanded their presence in the market by 160% and Brew Lab by 180%...” And it worked because they were not vain promises of unrealistic profits, but real facts.

End the letter with a call to action, leading the recipient to think about next steps. It should be unobtrusive but clear:
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- “If our proposal interests you, we are ready to meet you this week” – without specific dates, you have given a pass and are waiting for a response.
- “I suggest calling tomorrow or on Tuesday at 2.00 p.m., if it is convenient for you, to discuss cooperation” – a person will most likely respond to a direct and polite request.
- “Please let me know if there is room in your schedule for Wednesday from 9 to 10 a.m. or 5 p.m.” – the important thing here is to make the recipient take a look at his calendar, so he will probably find a place in it for you.
- “I would be grateful if you let me know who in your company I could discuss this issue with” – works quite often and helps when you are not sure who exactly you should focus your efforts on to achieve your goal.

It’s important to remember: you’re writing a cold letter, not advertising actively, so discard frankly marketing ploys immediately.




Step four: compose your text

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No fancy fonts, pictures, hyperlinks, highlighting, HTML! You are not creating a presentation, so only plain text – businesslike, concise and understandable.

Evaluate what is written from the point of view of the person who will receive the letter. How clear is your idea? Doesn't it need clarification? Isn't it drowning in tons of water? Only when you are convinced that everything is written correctly you can proceed to sending it.

This is the result of my work:

Subject of the letter: Positive reviews on Google for {Name of the company}

Hello, {Name}!

I would like to contact the person responsible for your company's marketing. I'm guessing this is you?  

Our company offers a proven strategy to ensure growth in the number of clients of the enterprise and increasing Q3 rankings on Google services. By working with us, Texas Real Estate & Co has expanded its presence in the Texas market by 160% and Brew Lab – by 180% in less than a year, along with dozens of other businesses.

I am sure that our cooperation would be mutually beneficial and effective. I would be grateful if you let me know who in your company I could discuss this matter with.

Thank you very much,
{Name}

This letter, written after long preparation, rewritten and refined many times, brought my company 816 leads. Agree, it was worth the effort.

That's probably all. I tried to present my thoughts as briefly as possible so as not to get lost in reasoning. I hope you find them useful. If you want to speak in the comments, I will be glad to hear your opinions, and also to know if you want to read about my experience in follow up, scheduling meetings, and processing mail. It's quite extensive because promoting AgainAgain Agency in the early days made me spend many hours writing, polishing and sending emails, and also allowed me to develop excellent communication skills with clients and investors. Even today, when our reputation begins to work for us, and the growing staff of specialists has relieved me of some of my previous responsibilities, I am still using the experience I gained. If you have any questions, write, I will try to answer.



Step five: format the letters


I think there is no need to explain in detail what call center workers do. In general terms, their task is to take the call and try to retain the client:

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How did we triple the influx of customers and turn the call center into a new sales department?

I think there is no need to explain in detail what call center workers do. In general terms, their task is to take the call and try to retain the client: give the necessary explanations, answer questions, offer conditions that will interest him. Usually about a third of conversations are successful, so the lion’s share of callers disappears over the horizon, but within 3 years we managed to increase the conversion to 90%. I'll tell you how.

I'm Alex Trotsenko, owner of Againagain.agency, a company that provides bpo services. If anyone doesn’t know what bpo is, I’ll briefly explain: this is the process of a company transferring part of its functions to an invited specialist, which allows you to solve the problem competently without hiring a professional on a permanent basis, and also saves resources significantly when scaling the company. Three and a half years ago, we were contacted by the owner of Day Trucking, a Kentucky-based transport company engaged in the transportation of goods throughout the country. The owner of the company wanted to improve the efficiency of his call center, in which at that time there were 7 people who either answered calls or accepted an application on the website and called the client back. Everything is standard, so it is not surprising that the conversion rate was about 30%.

We were asked to evaluate negotiations to establish the level of their quality and the degree of professionalism of operators, and then give recommendations for their improvement. Here we need an outside performer who will not be influenced by likes, dislikes, friendships, etc.! After our analysis, a number of errors were revealed in the communication of operators with clients, in particular, they were often limited to dry answers to questions, without entering into a real dialogue, used colloquial and even rude expressions and, in general, were poorly motivated to achieve results.

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According to our recommendations, the client:
- Introduced scripts for operators;
- Introduced a reward system to encourage the use of these scripts;
- Trained operators to conduct a live dialogue with the client at a good professional level.

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As a result, in 3 years, the owner of the company had to expand the call center to 12 people, since the previous number could no longer cope with the increased volume of tasks. The company tripled sales, expanded, opened new branches and continues to grow to this day, and operators, in fact, turned into managers, not just answering calls, but providing the company with a continuous flow of customers. Of course, all this did not happen by waving a magic wand and not because we pointed out trivial mistakes to the operators.

I'll tell you more about this.



I think there is no need to explain in detail what call center workers do.

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We explored a lot of information. We established a circle of target customers, defined how they could get to know about Day Trucking, found out the company’s strengths: speed, moderate cost of transportation, the ability to carry them out both in trucks and in litas, which should have become very popular among small companies. However, the number of orders did not increase. Having tried to solve the issue on their own, but without success, the manager decided to outsource the analysis of operators’ actions, their evaluation and quality improvement to an external contractor. He chose my company.

Having collected all the necessary information, we were closely engaged in the negotiations analysis, which allowed us to identify the main range of requirements for the operator.

It was necessary to fulfill the following criteria:

- Ask if the potential customer has working experience with this company. This determines the content of the further conversation.
- Find out the details of the application in order to be able to draw a conclusion whether the client is the target one, as well as to find out the delivery features and the degree of cargo readiness.
- Present the service correctly, not limiting yourself to short answers to questions, but also not wasting the client’s time with long discussions.
- Take initiative in a conversation, rather than waiting for it from your interlocutor. In general, we are convinced that a dialogue, in which the operator takes an active position, and does not, in fact, act as an answering machine, is one of the indispensable conditions for increasing conversion.
- Introduce catch words into use. As an example, instead of “Can I fill out an application?” use the incentive to action “Let’s fill out an application.”
- Take an active part in solving the issue; suggest small but useful details for the person, showing interest in it. For example, what packaging is better to choose in his case.
- Outline the next step, encouraging the client to continue cooperation. If you set a date and time for the next call, they will return to you much more likely than if you limit yourself to the abstract “Call.”
- Reasonably reject objections, explaining that the cost is not at all overpriced, but objectively reflects the cost of resources to provide the service. Moreover, it is advisable to choose arguments for a specific person: for example, there is no point in insisting that the cleaners of your cleaning company will arrive on call in half an hour if the client does not care about speed.
- Eliminate from speech everyday expressions like “the cargo will be hung”, this is nothing, but it greatly affects the company’s reputation.
- Keep a friendly tone, be polite and smile. The latter can be felt even when talking on the phone.

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Step 1. Listen and analyze

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We have made a whole system of negotiations using two dozen criteria. When assessing the conversation, each criterion received points. 

Based on their total number, conclusions were drawn about the quality of the call, and operator errors were noted. We structured all this data and included it in a detailed report, having created scripts that the company's operators were supposed to follow in the future. True, this was only the beginning; the main difficulties awaited us ahead.


Step 2. Draw conclusions

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Then we had to convince the client that our conclusions were correct, since we were attracted as analysts, and were not given outsourcing call center jobs, and we had to justify to the manager the feasibility of using certain tools before using them. The owner of Day Trucking proved to us that there is no point in bothering clients with “unnecessary” questions, that we do not understand the specifics of his business, and that presenting a service to someone who has already called is a waste of time.

We presented reviews from other companies involved in the transportation of goods, with which we had already successfully collaborated, to prove our competence in the topic, and then spent many hours together listening to call recordings and clearly demonstrating where the operator did not “put the pressure on”, although he could, where he showed inertia instead of pushing a doubting client to make a decision where he missed the moment of the presentation. And we were heard.


Step 3. Prove that you are right to the customer

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Here we were faced with a new difficulty – a confrontation between operators who were sure that they were dispatchers and not managers. They considered it their direct responsibility to provide information at the client’s request without additional effort in order to retain him and convince him to leave the order. This is a really ordinary situation: not many people easily accept changes, but in the case of Day Trucking it was getting worse by the open opposition to our innovations from the call center manager, who, instead of helping to overcome the resistance of operators, began to actively support the rebellion of her subordinates and sabotage our work to the point of submitting corrected data to our analysts. It was so difficult to cope with the situation that at one time we even thought of offering the client to order call centers bpo and start everything from scratch with new specialists. However, a way out was found.


Step 4. Overcome employee resistance

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Since it was not possible to find a common language with the old manager of the call center – the woman supported the rebellion of her subordinates in every possible way and sabotaged our actions, we had to initiate her replacement with a person who was ready to apply the methods we proposed and demand the same from employees. Fortunately, the head of the company listened to our opinion, and the replacement took place.

At the same time, we continued explanatory work with operators, conveying the message that they are still a call center (for example, they should not engage in cold calling), but with new scripts.

Relying on the support of the new manager, we gradually introduced our own criteria, starting with the simplest ones (the question of whether there was experience of cooperation with the company). When one was sufficiently understood by the operators, we moved on to the next. It took time, effort and some sacrifices – three employees quit, deciding that they were not satisfied with our methods, but when the problem was solved, the conversion rate doubled. 


Step 5. Find like-minded people

Next, we introduced a reward system, thanks to which those operators who used the scripts as correctly as possible and worked out the criteria received more than others. Conversion growth took off again, reaching 90% in a matter of weeks.

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Step 6: Facilitate operator onboarding and provide motivation


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We have created a training system for new operators, which includes studying call criteria using other people's examples. It lasts about a month; gradually introducing newcomers to the call center work style, helping them understand the importance of scripts, introducing them to the reward system, etc.

So, over the period of three years, we turned the department of dispatchers, who monotonously read out ready-made answers, into skillful, active sales managers who know exactly how to behave with a client in order to attract him to our company and thus generate income for it. At the moment, the customer continues to improve its call assessment system, scripts and employee motivation, based on the analytical data that our bpo agency continues to collect for it. We are sure that 90% conversion growth is not the limit for his company.

Of course, you can yourself assess the communication between operators and clients, but it is better to entrust Bpo business process outsourcing to experienced professionals, who have established workflow and necessary technical equipment to perform such tasks.
This period was very important for Againagain.agency. In addition to payment for our services, we received a strengthened reputation of the company as a serious partner who keeps its promises, proved the professionalism of our employees, added new techniques to our collection of methods for working with transportation companies, and polished the case of their implementation in practice. Of course, this is a very good page in our history.


Step 7: Provide training for new employees

The pandemic and related restrictions hit the economies of many countries hard, but not all of them sank during this period or barely survived, teetering on the brink of collapse.

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How did a London-based insurance broker increase fees 27 times in a quarter?

The pandemic and related restrictions hit the economies of many countries hard, but not all of them sank during this period or barely survived, teetering on the brink of collapse. There were those who managed to take advantage of the crisis to take a leap, and it is a significant leap upward. Take our UK client Shield Insurance Broker (London) LTD for example

Shield Insurance Broker (London) LTD

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Greetings to all! I am Alex Trotsenko, head of Againagain.agency, a company providing outsourcing services. For the uninformed, I will briefly explain what is outsourcing in bpo: this is a form of cooperation in which an outside contractor takes on part of the work of an enterprise in order to relieve its employees for more important matters. It’s convenient and much cheaper than having your own in-house specialist, let alone having a team of them.

But I digress, let's get to the point. The crisis caused by Covid-19 affected everyone, including the insurance broker Shield Insurance Broker. The company had been successfully operating on the market since 2016 and had been promoting its products for several years using various tools, mainly by managers whose tasks were calling potential clients, convincing them to buy insurance and creating the application and processing it. As it turned out later, when operating offline, Shield Insurance Broker was not able to take full advantage of every opportunity to promote the company, however, its solid reputation, extensive experience, knowledge of the market and profession still managed to help the company stay afloat confidently. Until the pandemic, when sales plummeted, the manager then decided to contact me.

After analyzing the company's previous business practices, the niche it occupied in the market, and the current situation, we proposed:

- Promote products through a predictive calling services, such as VICIdial. This system allows managers to use their working time with maximum efficiency by determining when to complete a conversation with one client and connect the call to the next one. It reduces the number of pauses between calls to zero, filters out inactive contacts, and reduces the likelihood of situations occurring when a call is made but there are no available operators on the line. Number databases are called three times faster, and the manager manages to complete three or even four hundred conversations per shift, significantly increasing the percentage of completed transactions while remaining within the same time frame.
- Integrated with Salesforce, this is powerful software that allows effective management of customer information and complete transactions, thereby improving the quality of service. When applied, VICIdial and Salesforce made it possible to automate the first line of sales, turning them into a conveyor belt. Cold calling and application generation were practically eliminated from the managers who were connected at the final stage to complete insurance registration.
- Use a remote call center. It was proven that in the time of coronavirus, it became more convenient than ever, and it also allowed for unrealistic geographical expansion in recruiting employees from anywhere, including outside the UK.

In addition, Shield Insurance Broker required updated databases of potential clients, the compilation of which is also entrusted to Againagain.agency, since we have extensive experience in this area and qualified employees that are capable of solving this problem quickly and efficiently. By the way, I also consider the compilation of such databases to be a bpo segment, since purchased ready-made databases can be of low quality, and their independent compilation requires a lot of time and money, even with involvement of serious fundamental specialists in solving the problem.

All the measures taken increased the dial-up percentage to 85%, which increased the amount of insurance premiums received by 15 times in just the first month.

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Predictive calling and cloud call center


Additionally, we have established communication processes between clients and employees. For this, three channels were used:

- Contextual and targeted advertising on the Internet, setting up clients for communication and giving them the first ideas about the company;
- Actual calls, in which managers must transfer the “warmed up” potential buyers to the status of real ones;
- Mailings and correspondence in the messenger that is optimal for the client.

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Three ways to connect with clients

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Sales grew rapidly but were still unsatisfactory, since we knew that we were not using all the possible tools. The final touch was the KPI system, which assessed the activities of the entire team in real time and generated reports for each individual employee by the end of the day. Thus, the performance of all team members remained transparent, controllable and amenable to correction if necessary.

In particular, managers were assessed according to the two following principles:

- Any received application must be prepared for the operator within 15 minutes.
- Once the terms of the contract are agreed upon, the manager has half an hour to send the client a payment link.


KPI is a necessary assessment system

Naturally, not everything always went smoothly. We identified two serious problems and developed a solution for each of them:

1. 	Internet instability.
Unfortunately, this option cannot be controlled even with the best equipment and a good provider. That is why managers received half an hour from the moment they received a lead until they sent the client a link. This allowed them to have some extra time in case the Internet started to slow down.

2. 	Lack of qualified employees.
Not every person is able to quickly get into the rhythm required to handle large volumes of databases. Many employees quit without working even a few days, causing serious staff turnover. Online training had helped remedy the situation, giving new employees an idea of what they have to deal with and preparing them for various emergency situations, as well as a system of payment for mentoring and support that we developed together with the management of Shield Insurance Broker. Finally, a pool of proven employees was compiled, ready to step in in the event of force majeure, so that external circumstances did not interfere with sales.

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As a result, at the end of the first quarter, insurance premiums increased 27 times.

Predictive calling reduced more than 3 times Shield Insurance Broker's lead generation costs and doubled its application processing speed. Towards the end of our cooperation, the company was thinking about a bpo call center.

The Christmas weekend period, which fell during one of the months in the quarter, did not result in a significant drop in sales. The average volume of insurance premiums remained virtually unchanged.

Well, Againagain.agency honed its analytical research skills and decided to take a deeper course to study the possibilities of introducing software like Salesforce  into the management system of companies whose activities are related to calling.


Problems and their solutions

To provide clients with the best possible service, business processes outsourcing bpo must run smoothly, without dead ends.

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Basic steps and principles of starting a workflow for outsourcing clients

To provide clients with the best possible service, business processes outsourcing bpo must run smoothly, without dead ends. We solved this problem by developing an algorithm that allows us to install it on streamlined rails in 9 steps:

- Step 1. Determination of KPI standards to strive for;
- Step 2. Form a group for implementation into the client’s organization;
- Step 3. Distribute tasks among its participants;
- Step 4. Develop training programs for new members;
- Step 5. Search and recruit agents;
- Step 6. Train new managers;
- Step 7. Test the company's activities and agents' contributions;
- Step 8. Analytical data collection for timely process adjustments;
- Step 9. Smoothen the progress of the project towards the assigned goals.

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Business processes outsourcing bpo

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Much attention is paid to staff training. Our trainers have sufficient experience and qualifications to operate freely in the following areas:

- Creating competent training programs based on materials provided by the customer;
- Organizing Soft Skills training – skills that are not directly related to professional skills but contribute to establishing contact with employees and clients, establishing empathy, and accurately handling objections;
- Preparing various types of training materials for online workshops;
- Developing and maintaining the company's Knowledge Base, which stores manuals and answers to all kinds of questions about its work.

Depending on the specifics of the order and the client’s wishes, we provide:

- Introductory training;
- Training to update and consolidate existing knowledge and skills;
- Remote learning;
- Opportunities for self-education with access to the knowledge base;
- Highly specialized training on the company's products and services.

It is worth noting that our teachers are native English speakers, but if necessary, like any serious business process outsourcing company, we organize trainings in other languages.


Employee training

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We work tirelessly to improve operational efficiency, defining KPIs and quality standards to strive for every moment before starting a project.

In addition, we have defined for ourselves the so-called cycle of excellence, which includes:

- Search for weak points and problem areas;
- Analyze the causes leading to their occurrence;
- Search for solutions and their implementation;
- Evaluate the results with conclusions about the effectiveness of the actions taken.


Importance of KPIs

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Our agency's work as a bpo company is based on a set of solid principles.

Following the rules of ethics in work matters:

- Continuous self-improvement;
- Increase employee interest and involvement in processes;
- Set motivational goals;
- Focus on customers.

Focusing on personnel performance management:

- Cooperate with the best team lead agencies;
- Detailed activity planning;
- Build the company's Knowledge Base;
- Develop a system of bonuses and incentives.

Tracking progress and monitoring results:

- Select challenging but achievable goals;
- Manage everything that can be regarded as information;
- Create an objective system to evaluate results;
- Prepare action algorithms in case of deviation from the goal;
- Clear description of the main operational processes.


Fundamental operating principles

We rely on analytics to help us control and shape the future of our clients' companies. Our system is based on three principles:

- Customer satisfaction with the results of cooperation;
- Achieving savings through total cost of ownership;
- Efficiency of the tools used.

We base our incoming service statistics on 6 indicators:

- CSI – Customer satisfaction level;
- SL – Service level;
- FCR – Efficiency in resolving conflict situations;
- UR – Utilization rate;
- CPH – Number of requests made within an hour;
- AHT – Time period spent on processing.

To get a clear picture of what is happening, we included hourly, daily and weekly reporting in business analytics, supplemented by forecasts for further development.

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Analytics that cannot be overestimated

How do we manage to achieve high quality service:

- We clearly describe each of the quality assurance processes;
- We carefully analyze the results of checks for supervisors, coaches and managers leading the project;
- We provide feedback to agents to help them identify areas that need improvement;
- We organize trainings based on analytical data;
- We strive to find the style of communication that best suits what is accepted in the customer’s company.

Our quality improvement cycle works as follows.

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All this allows us to provide real results: an increase in the number of calls, an increase in sales conversion, customer satisfaction, etc.



Quality without compromise

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We consider omnichannel to be one of the key factors in our success, expressed in a wide range of channels through which customers can contact us. These include social networks, all major instant messengers, telephone, chats, e-mail, and bots. The customer is free to choose any option convenient for him, and we, for our part, will provide him with an employee who is able to communicate in the language used by the customer. It is extremely convenient and profitable!


Omnichannel and multilingual

We make sure that clients who entrust their business processes outsourcing bpo to our agency achieve their growth goals, solve operational problems and reduce risks along the way. That's why we continually invest in technology and provide comprehensive and thorough training to our employees. Security is our top priority, as evidenced by our compliance with PCI DSS, ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 (GDPR).

All of the above allowed Againagain.agency to confidently take its place in the bpo industry, having acquired a long list of victories and satisfied clients. Naturally, we are not going to stop there and are constantly striving for growth.


Protection and safety

As is often the case, the sales department at Overall Rating was formed without a clear plan: when the organization was small, a secretary was involved in product promotion, then an employee was hired to help her, then another, and a third.

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How does the business process of outsourcing company turn bad leads into good ones?

As is often the case, the sales department at Overall Rating was formed without a clear plan: when the organization was small, a secretary was involved in product promotion, then an employee was hired to help her, then another, and a third. Only after that, they set up a separate office with the necessary equipment... However, managers did not receive any special training. All that was required of them was to politely talk to the client on the phone and complete the deal. If, of course, it comes to that.

The problem was that sales figures remained subpar. Employees blamed poor quality leads, management blamed employees, but the situation did not change, and out of ten calls there was, at best, one deal. Then we got involved.

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I must say that according to my personal assessment, internal audit is included in the top 5 business process outsourcing, most in demand by entrepreneurs, and we have managed to gain good experience in solving them. And so, we started analyzing, not the bad leads (who would have thought?!), but the managers, their preparation and understanding of what, in fact, they are sitting near the phone for. In addition, we formulated a number of questions for the company’s management.



Internal audit.

You can’t put a random person in front of a computer/phone, give a short briefing and hope for productive work. You will either have to outsource the call center process, or make sure that your employees have certain skills and information:

- Know your organization's product.

To sell a product or service well, it is not enough to be nice to customers and give out memorized advertising phrases. The manager must have maximum knowledge about the product in order to be able to answer any question from potential buyers.
It can be very useful to create a Google document in which all the characteristics of a product or service, possible customer questions and the answers to them will be clear without unnecessary fluff. If new unexpected questions or complaints arise during the sales process, they will be included there along with a possible solution. Simple, visual, effective.

- See your goals and objectives.

If your manager doesn't have a sales plan for the day, it's probably not because he's lazy. There is a good chance that the fault lies with the manager, who did not explain to the newcomer that his job is not to come to the office at a certain hour and sit there for the required amount of time, but to competently draw up sales plans for the day, week, month, and also make efforts to execute and achieve those goals. You don’t need to think that a new employee will come to you armed with all the necessary knowledge and a desire to sell. Either train and mentor them yourself, or choose a possible option to conduct full call center outsourcing, where professionals will carry out the whole process for you.

- Understand the target audience.

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Understanding the characteristics of the buyers, their needs, and income levels allows for appropriate communication. In addition, a manager who is aware of the characteristics of his target audience will be able to guess whether it is worth offering the customer related products, or whether they will cause the indignation of the person who already had difficulty agreeing to spend money on the main product.


Does your manager have the right knowledge?

It’s a great temptation to provide managers with ready-made scripts written by a specialist, but this is a wrong approach. Each of your employees is an independent person with their own strengths and weaknesses, so the conversation plan chosen by one may be completely unsuitable for another. For example, in the Overall Rating we had the opportunity to encounter a young man who was literally seething with energy, infecting customers with it, and a middle-aged lady with a deep soft voice who built a conversation slowly and smoothly. Both of them had some of the highest sales figures in the department.

Now, think about whether they would have maintained the same performance if the manager had demanded the lady to adopt the guy’s style, be more expressive in conversation, or ordered the boy to behave more respectably? I doubt. Therefore, it is logical to give employees a complete description of the product, outline common points of conversation, specify the goal, and allow them to write their own scripts according to their strengths.

Your job as a leader is to help the manager understand and master the sales process, not to use a template prepared by someone else.


Does your manager understand the sales process?

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If the organization gains momentum, the number of managers grows. And if at the same time, the manager does not bother to control the relationships in the department, an unhealthy hierarchy can form there. While the more experienced employees (arrogant, active, self-confident) are engaged in pure calling, fulfilling and exceeding plans, paperwork – filling out tables, for example, or the sorting of contracts – are given to newbies to complete, not only for themselves but also for the others, so they end up not having time to conclude their own deals.

If something like this happens in your office, you have clearly lost control. Set a clear division of responsibilities so that each employee has enough time to make calls and complete documentation.

Are the roles assigned correctly in your sales department?

No, I’m not talking about the sales plan mentioned above, but about the sequential steps that an employee must take when interacting with each specific client.

Here, for example, is a plan drawn up for a travel agency manager:

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Acting in accordance with the timing, the manager will not waste time, will not anger the client by delaying the call too much nor provoke him to contact another agency with smarter employees.


Do your managers know how to plan their activities?


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Simply knowing your target audience is not enough; you need to be able to quickly classify the person on the other end of the phone, understand whether he fits into the portrait of a potential buyer of your product or consumer of your service, and choose the right conversation strategy and trigger. This is an extremely important and useful skill for a manager, which not only brings quick benefits, but also encourages people to come back to you again, because it is always nice to communicate with a salesperson who understands you and your needs.

All of these things may seem elementary, but you won’t believe how often Againagain.agency has to deal with complete misunderstanding of them. In the same Overall Rating, basic training sessions for managers – by the way, staff training is another widely demanded process outsourcing services – were enough for bad leads to sharply decline, giving way to good ones. Or was it not a matter of leads?


Is the manager able to classify the client based on the beginning of the conversation?

Businesses do not necessarily need to order a comprehensive business processing outsourcing bpo service to increase their profitability. Sometimes a small but professionally done analytical work is enough to get results.

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How did we not transfer the call center for outsourcing, but connected it to WhatsApp?

Businesses do not necessarily need to order a comprehensive business processing outsourcing bpo service to increase their profitability. Sometimes a small but professionally done analytical work is enough to get results.

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When Evendo Consulting GmbH first started its activities, the company communicated with clients almost exclusively by telephone. Typically, call center employees dealt with 3 types of calls:

- Calls from those wishing to purchase this or that item, that is, not yet clients, but already ready to become one;
- Calls from existing customers who have made a purchase and want to clarify any related issue or report a problem;
- Service calls made by the employees themselves within the database for the sake of possible additional sales.

The first and second options bring profit much more often than the third. However, a manager employed in the latter niche cannot pay attention to the first two, negatively affecting his sales. In addition, a service call is extremely rarely the only one. Almost always call center staff have to engage in more or less lengthy communication, ask the client to send, for example, a photograph confirming the presence of a defect to the store’s email, or ask for his email address to send detailed instructions for the product, then make a call again to solve the problem eventually, or maybe, and more than once…

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At some point, management came up with the idea of an outsource contact center, and they contacted us to solve this problem. However, as it turned out, everything was not so simple.

When the client first asked if he could receive the necessary documents via WhatsApp rather than by e-mail, his request was politely declined. However, over time, such offers became more and more frequent, and the owner of the company asked us whether it made sense to master a new messenger, and how to approach this problem.

We proposed conducting a simple experiment by transferring one of the operators to WhatsApp and analyzing what was happening. The experience was a success! The employee increased his productivity by almost a quarter compared to the time he spent working on the phone. The reason turned out to be simple: he was able to “keep several clients on the line at once, using pauses in one conversation to support a second or third. It seemed that everything was fine, the new messenger needed to be adopted! 

Of course, the bpo consulting cannot be limited to one successful solution. Further analysis of the situation revealed new difficulties began to arise because only one operator could use the web version of WhatsApp at a time. It was possible, of course, to make a separate number for each operator, but such a decision seemed ridiculous, because it was physically impossible to convey 11 numbers, and as the company grows, there will be more numbers be used to reach potential clients. Plus, this risked causing problems when transferring a client from one operator to another.

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The solution was the relatively young, but very interesting service wazzup24.com, capable of combining WhatsApp and CRM. Its huge advantage was that after integration, all operators could simultaneously correspond with different clients through an externally standard CRM interface, while for the buyer, communication took place in the familiar and convenient WhatsApp.

The second advantage was open correspondence, which, at any time, can be rewinded to the desired episode and clarified this or that point if doubt arose, or if the operator received a client from one of his colleagues and did not know the full conversation. Additionally, the staff was freed from copying correspondence into CRM, which gave them an extra hour and a half for calls and communication.
So, the problem was solved, bpo outsourcing was limited to analytics and the organization of a call center within the company. All that remained was to convey information about the new messenger to customers, and the changes were not long in coming. By the end of the year, the old method of communication – telephone – accounted for no more than 15% of all calls to operators.

This is the result we expected, and here’s why:

- Firstly, WhatsApp is widely used in Germany. Approximately 81% of local residents who generally use instant messengers prefer it.
- Secondly, many people find written communication much easier than “live” communication. Moreover, in this case, the subscriber does not have to wait for the operator to pick up the phone – he simply presses the “Send” icon and continues to go about his business.
- Thirdly, there is no need to take photographs of the product that has raised questions and send the pictures by email. Again, everything can be resolved by clicking a couple of icons.

Yet, one serious mistake was made. When trying to place in the product catalog a QR code, which would directly lead a potential customer to a WhatsApp chat once scanned, the average age of the store’s audience was not taken into account. Since these were people 55-60 years old, and not very friendly with new technologies, it was not surprising that they were not able to cope. I had to give clear step-by-step instructions.

The successful experience of service calls prompted management to move the reception of orders to WhatsApp territory. How it happened before:

- Evendo sent catalogs to its customer base.
- People studied them and, if they wanted to buy something, cut out an order coupon from the catalog and filled it out.
- Many may be surprised, but the completed coupons were sent to Evendo via regular mail, which seems almost ridiculous nowadays. But life in Germany is still quite leisurely, and the Germans are very traditional, so this is the norm here.
- 
With the transition to WhatsApp, the coupons began to be sent in the form of photos, which was convenient for both the client and the company, and also saved a lot of time.

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As a result:

- The call center remained with all operators, who are employees of the company, and received significant relief and the opportunity to devote free time to sales.
- Each manager increased his or her performance by 28-34%.
- Customers were satisfied with the innovation, which is confirmed by the increasing number of positive reviews and the positive growth dynamics of the customer base. Approximately 1/3 of the customers who dealt with the store via WhatsApp brought new customers to Evendo through the referral program, recommending the store to friends or acquaintances.

As far as I know, management is currently trying to repeat its success with Viber, but because the app is less popular in Germany, the performance is not yet up to par.

If your business involves sales and regular communication with clients, I hope the Againagain.agency experience will inspire you to try using one of the instant messengers for your company. I will be glad if my story is useful to you.




Business processing outsourcing bpo.

Colleagues who run companies similar to mine like repeating that in this field, one year of work is equal to five in an ordinary company, and I agree with them. You need a huge knowledge base that is updated non-stop, the ability to multitask, and flexibility of thinking. But all the effort pays off with a tremendous amount of experience, which I hope allows me to express my thoughts about cold calling in B2B today. 

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How to avoid calls dropping and increase sales by doing cold calling?

One year of work is equal to five in an ordinary company.

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I am sure that a person engaged in cold calling, at least 50% of the time, does not bring his company a profit that really justifies the costs of his salary, the organization of his workplace and the necessary equipment, the hours spent ... and even the electricity that his computer consumes. The outsourcing savings, of course, significantly reduces costs, but does not change the situation as a whole. I have seen many cases when a manager did not bring the company even 25 thousand dollars for six months of hard work.

In such cases, it makes sense to find other marketing channels for promoting your goods and services, for example, letters.

Although there are situations when cold calling is justified:

- You have already used all possible methods.
- You need to see the target audience's response to the new product.
- You are developing a specific partner, waiting for fruitful cooperation.

By the way, you can use not only full potential bpo, but also make a partial transfer of the call center to outsourcing, but this is true, by the way.


Observation #1. Cold calling manager has questionable profitability

We happened to deal with companies whose client base held ten lines, but what clients they were! The formula “the more good leads are, the stronger business is” lost its meaning with them.

Suppose you're in a similar situation. You know that company A needs a product/service similar to yours, and concluding an agreement promises enormous profits. You begin to process it, or more exactly, significant persons in its structure: those who will ultimately be able to tilt the collegial decision in your favor. You are looking for ways to approach them, trying to interest them. You can use letters here. By the way, in the USA this is one of the most popular methods of communication, and although I don’t know why big companies fail to innovate in this area, the fact remains a fact. But cold calling also works, and not bad.

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Observation #2. It makes sense to sell cold for the sake of a very hot profit

Today, the word “scripts” refers to the entire set of tools that the operator uses:

- The legend of the call is a reason that allows it to be “legalized”.
- Speech modules are prepared arguments that will encourage people to listen to you.
- Logical tree is modules that reinforce each other and allow you to build a conversation in the direction you need.

Low-level operators are provided with such scripts ready-made. They are written by the boss himself, his deputies, some even turn to bpo companies to get a text from a real professional, whose hiring would be too expensive.

However, a manager who concludes deals with large price tags cannot use someone else's language. Firstly, he must have an excellent command of speech modules, and secondly, he must skillfully use them during the conversation, using both his own preparations and impromptu.

One of my friends started a cold call without any introduction: “Hello! Please connect me with the head of the communications department." It did not always work, but in most cases the request was satisfied. If asked, he introduced himself, but did not provide lengthy explanations like “We offer you the setup of IP telephony and cloud PBX...”. If the friend started with an outsourcing sentence, it would hardly have worked, since the person on the other end of the line was simply not competent in resolving such issues.

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The conversation with the head of the communications department began with a greeting and a short explanation: “I would like to talk to you about a virtual IP PBX.” From the interlocutor’s reaction, it immediately became clear whether the company was interested in his product or not, and the conversation either ended or moved on to discussing details and arranging a meeting. Thus, within a day, my friend managed to provide the company with 5 to 8 potential clients through cold calls.

By choosing the right keys, you can promote anything – from hospitality outsourcing to office security services and staff catering. In general, creating a call legend is rather a joint effort of a manager and a product specialist, in which the latter must suggest product sales channels and help find the keys to them.

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Observation #3. In transactions with large contracts, scripts are more often a hindrance than a help

The various tricks that managers use when making cold calls will not matter if the key is initially chosen incorrectly. Do clients fail over and over again, refusing to move on to the next step? So you guessed wrong with the key.

As a good example, I’ll cite the experience of another friend of mine who is engaged in business process consulting and provide servicing for automatic gates, including sectional doors in parking lots, car repair shops and car showrooms, service stations, etc. If a malfunction occurs with the drive of such gates, this threatens the company with serious losses, a queue of dissatisfied customers, conflicts with masters and problems with security, but as long as everything works smoothly, even the chief engineer may not remember about the drive.

At the request of the friend, I carefully studied the market and made up a legend, after which we began calling the first car services, although my friend thought this was a bad idea from the very beginning. The reason was that we ended up with call center operators who might not even know what is the fundamental goal of outsourcing.

– Hello! – I said. – I’m calling about diagnosing sectional doors.

– Which ones? – the manager asked, not understanding.

– Yours, of course! – I spoke with friendliness and confidence.

The manager still did not understand anything and was in a hurry to get rid of me, guessing that, apparently, it was necessary to forward me with this question to the chief engineer.

Here I again repeated my words about diagnostics, after which the engineer first of all asked whether his company had a contract with us.

– No, but I hope it will be concluded, – I added cheerfully. – We carry out the first diagnostics free of charge, if everything suits you; we are ready to sign an agreement with you on customer service 24/7.

Almost no one took this message negatively. Usually I was immediately asked to set a time for diagnostics, I pretended to check the calendar, looking for an empty slot, and set a time.

The first 5 calls resulted in an agreement for 5 meetings in 5 different car services. One of the second-level managers from my friend’s company came to the diagnostics with his engineer, who carried out the diagnostics, explained what needed replacing and what could be left untouched for several more years, after which the manager calculated and announced the cost of future services. In the vast majority of cases, an outsourcing customer service agreement has been concluded.

Observation #4: If the conversion in the next step drops below 50%, the key is incorrect

The term “pain” in business refers to the needs of clients, although not every one of them really deserves such a big word. The importance of the “pain” is determined by the deadline, which either requires it to be satisfied as soon as possible, or allows you to delay time until a more convenient opportunity. For example, the approaching deadline for submitting documents to the tax office increases the degree of “pain,” while a need, the solution of which is not driven into a strict time frame, is not “pain” at all. An example close to my type of activity is business process outsourcing, since a company can begin the transition to a new system immediately or later, at a more convenient time.

The importance of the deadline is especially clear in the example of purchasing:

- Core, directly related to the company’s activities and its obligations to customers (raw materials and tools for production of goods, etc.). The deadline for such purchases is dictated by the production cycle. If the previous batch of something runs out, it must be replenished so that production does not stop.

- Non-core, designed to meet internal needs. Their deadline is vaguer and is often associated with replenishing the budget after a large order or launching a new project, when the company has the opportunity/ need to deal with outsourcing questions.

Several potential clients with “pains” marked by approximately the same deadline make up a micro-segment. The useful habit of dividing your clients into micro-segments makes it easier to calculate their “pains” and promptly offer solutions for them, increasing conversion and reducing the time spent on completing a transaction.


Observation #5. Knowledge of the client’s pain points and the characteristics of the microsegment simplifies the task

There are very few operators who really enjoy cold calling. I can immediately name, perhaps, only one case that happened at the beginning of my career, when we were first creating a call center outsourcing for a bank. At that time, I had the opportunity to meet Andreas, a cold calling manager. You won't believe it – this guy deliberately made things difficult for himself! For example, he could make a bet with a colleague that he would insert a certain word into a dialogue with a client that had nothing to do with the topic (for me it was “wall and “waves,” although it was about vacuum cleaners), and then he actually did it. What for? He was interested in challenging himself.

I must say, his cold calls went great, but then dead ends began. Creative, with flexible thinking and a labile nervous system, he turned out to be practically useless where monotonous actions were required: approvals, reminders, signing... Then I concluded for myself that when organizing a domestic call center, and, in principle, any call center, preference should be given to operators who are strong in pressure.

Yes, there are clients who readily come to you, ready to sign a contract; they just need a little guidance. But these are rare. It takes a long and difficult time to establish contact with the majority, to remain polite despite the caller’s ostentatious rudeness, and to be able to make it clear that he is dealing with professionals. And this is where pressure is needed. It’s not difficult to identify specialists with such abilities, especially since when you engage in outsourcing problem, you quickly learn to understand people. Calm, not afraid of routine, stubborn, like a sprout breaking through the asphalt, they are the ones who show the best results, and not the experts at “talking” the client on the first call, who let him off the hook on the second or third one.

Observation #6. The main sums are brought in not by cold calls, but by pressure

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A very common phenomenon when calling is the so-called cascading, when one operator makes cold calls, and then the client, who is ready for a deal, is intercepted by second-line managers. Moreover, this is done by both individual companies operating on their own and call center outsourcing company.

Meanwhile, the “cascade” system has two major drawbacks:

- Qualified leads are often lost in the transfer process.
- People are extremely reluctant to work as a first-line manager.

And if in the first case it is possible to secure the deal by tying the moment of transfer to some event, such as a product demonstration, which is negotiated by the operator of the first line of the “cascade”, and a higher-level manager is directly involved in it, then in the second case the situation will only be corrected by an increase in wages. People like Andreas are rare. If, again, we return to my experience of organizing a call center team, people are not specifically looking for the “cold call operator” vacancy, and only an attractive salary can change their minds. Decide for yourself how beneficial this is for you.


Observation #7. The cascading call center structure rarely pays off

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Nobody, with a few exceptions, likes making cold calls. Many managers, like children who put off homework until the evening and then do it with their eyes sticking together, delay the call as long as possible, increasing their duty and future problems. Do you think the only way out of this situation is the strong will that the operator must show? No.

Once I have had the opportunity to gain experience in one of the top call centers in the Philippines, where I have spotted an interesting idea. They were doing cold calling there on a promotional basis. That is, let’s say, on Monday, from morning until lunch, all managers started making calls, organizing a real storm on potential clients, and there was a strict rule that prohibited operators from being distracted by any business other than the most necessary.

In most cases, by lunchtime, the companies for which remote operators worked had accumulated enough leads that they could push through until the end of the week without distracting operators with hated cold calls.

I hope you found my article useful. Againagain.agency, like many of the top bpo companies in the world, has a lot of experience and many victories, so I think I have something to share with you in the future for our common benefit.

Observation #8. It’s better to take a difficult case by storm

The ability to build an Ideal Client Profile (ICP), accurately calculate the main needs of a potential buyer or service consumer, and accurately select among all candidates the one who especially needs you at the moment is a kind of art, but mastering it promises such dividends that well worth the time spent and effort. Today, I propose to talk about the rules for constructing an ICP and its use for conversion in sales.


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What ICP meaning and why is it so important?

The ability to build an Ideal Client Profile (ICP), accurately calculate the main needs of a potential buyer or service consumer, and accurately select among all candidates the one who especially needs you at the moment is a kind of art, but mastering it promises such dividends that well worth the time spent and effort. Today, I propose to talk about the rules for constructing an ICP and its use for conversion in sales.

Ideal Client Profile (ICP)

What is the point of building an Ideal Client Profile? This is an essential business tool, without which regular product promotion is impossible. As the head of an agency with a certificate for bpo and operating in several business niches at once, I clearly understand its importance.

A simple example: you decide to open a cafe. Moreover, you have the opportunity to choose from three options on where to do this:

- In Cairo, near the pyramids in 40-degree heat;
- In one of the popular retail chains;
- In one of the northern capitals like Helsinki or Copenhagen.

Logically, a cafe will be more popular where the weather drives people to your establishment. They represent the ideal client profile – the ones most likely to come to you for warmth and comfort.

If, instead of coffee, you sell air mattresses, your Ideal Client Profile is beach vacationers. Ice cream for pedestrians tired of the summer heat. Creative techniques for digital products – executives of companies that need them, etc. Offer your products to those who want them right now, and sales will skyrocket.

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Why do you need ICP at all?

– “So, this is the Target Audience! Why denote the same phenomenon by different terms? – you exclaim, and you will be wrong.

The target audience of a coffee shop with croissants is, without exception, lovers of caffeinated drinks and fresh baked goods, who may come to your place for lunch, or may change their mind and head to the hot dog cart. On the other hand, ICP represents the portrait of the “ideal client” – someone who desperately needs a hot drink.

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The difference between ICP and target audience

While running a firm outsourcing, I have well mastered the art of drawing up an ICP and now, I will try to fit it into a clear framework that will immediately help you understand what to look for and how to apply it.


How to calculate ICP among potential clients?

![MacBook Pro 16_ - 47.png](/uploads/Mac_Book_Pro_16_47_891bf0b7aa.png)

Look at your customer base with fresh eyes, and then try to match each customer to one of four segments:

- A – those who contact you regularly, make large orders, do not bother you with additional questions, and conclude transactions easily and quickly;
- B – a client who is clearly interested in your product/services, transfers payment without problems but periodically expresses doubts and delays the transaction process;
- C – a person whose cooperation with you is beneficial but not particularly necessary, therefore he pays reluctantly and little and the conclusion of transactions is delayed;
- D – a client who torments the consultant with questions, who makes many complaints, is not interested in the product and generally unclear as to why he came.

Now the fun begins. You need to conduct an in-depth analysis of the companies in each segment and identify their commonalities. This will allow you to create a portrait of both the best (A) and the least promising (D) client. During the analysis process, it is important to use as much data as possible, which will be collected either by you or hired marketing outsource specialists:

- All information about the company itself at your disposal;
- Data about the decision-maker, his psychology, factors influencing his decision-making;
- Demographic data – age, gender, income of people involved in decision-making.


Point 1. Analysis and segmentation

Publicly available data is inexpensive. Firstly, your competitors know them too, and secondly, you won’t achieve much based on a superficial analysis, so look for ways to find expanded information about the company you are interested in to understand what distinguishes it from others.

The first thing to do is scour Facebook and Linkedin groups for business, check out Builtwith and Crunchbase, and search Glassdoor and other job boards for jobs posted by your client. This will give you something to think about.

Find out how many remote employees and offices the company has in different cities/countries – this will show its willingness to cooperate with companies operating in other geographical locations.


Point 2. Deep search

The management of any company today uses social networks to communicate with clients, partners and other industry entities. Go on Twitter or Facebook and you can find out a lot of interesting things. When I created my outsource agency, I did not choose Instagram. However, the network can be useful.

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Point 3. Assess your communication style

Ideal Client Profile is ready. At this point, you need to confirm or refute it with practical actions, provoking the objects of study to respond. For example, send letters or emails to these audiences and observe their reaction.

If you are not satisfied, reconsider the ICP. Rewrite the letter, replace some paragraphs, add something, remove something. Polish it again and again, repeat the campaign periodically, until the increase in conversion signals to you that the ICP has finally been created. As an example: when writing the first letters with a proposal for organizing small call centre, I rewrote them dozens of times until I learned to hit the bull’s eye.

But don't rush to celebrate your victory. The compiled profile corresponds only to this specific product of your company and is only current.

Be prepared to review your ICP every few months and make adjustments to ensure you don't lose conversions.

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Point 4. Test the theory in practice

If you are going to enter the market without having an established client base, as we did, having decided to cross the borders of your country and conquer the European outsourcing industry, or perhaps you are just thinking about how to promote a new product, creating an Ideal Client Profile will be more difficult.

Answer yourself a series of questions:

- What “pain” does your product relieve?
- Which potential clients feel it?
- How can you remove it?

After studying the answers of 2-3 dozen respondents, you will get an idea of which direction to move.


What if there are no clients yet?

Today I’m going to tell you how we created for one of our clients, a large hardware manufacturer in Europe, a SKUs processing algorithm, which allowed us to sort orders by the order tracking system. Owners of industrial enterprises and those involved in the issues of work processes automation, in principle, will find it interesting.


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Everyday life of a BPO company: how does automation help improve the quality of customer service without being distracted by Excel?

Today I’m going to tell you how we created for one of our clients, a large hardware manufacturer in Europe, a SKUs processing algorithm, which allowed us to sort orders by the order tracking system. Owners of industrial enterprises and those involved in the issues of work processes automation, in principle, will find it interesting.

A SKUs processing algorithm

![MacBook Pro 16_ - 48.png](/uploads/Mac_Book_Pro_16_48_3e17793bf0.png)

Client: Well-known manufacturer of fasteners in Italy, shipping its products to more than 30 countries. Wholesale supplies, tens of thousands of contractors, high average bill.

The problem is the complexity of order processing, the large amount of time for processing, and insufficient understanding of how to correctly enter CRM data. An example is a case where managers failed to provide fully prepared hot leads to sale: the audit discovered more than 700 applications that did not get to the right department but were lost along the way. Lesser global failures were also found when managers accepted an order for a product that was out of stock, or could not find available products; and the isolation of telephone and electronic communications of each individual company office in different cities and countries hindered their coordinated work.

Task: to completely modify the algorithm of work processes, making them less time-consuming and effort-consuming for employees and be more efficient.


Input data

We understood that to solve the problem it was necessary to make adjustments to the very structure of the company’s activities, as well as to develop and successfully implement a CRM system that would automate the main production processes and take outsourced customer success solutions to the new level.

We identified the main KPIs that we should strive for and outlined several main steps:

- Ensure that the client receives a commercial offer within 2 hours from the time of placing the order.
- Implement a new CRM with digitized request processing.
- Automate the activities of operators loading orders into 1C.
- Combine CRM with the existing 1C database and matching service.

One of the weaknesses of the old system was the inability for employees to manually collate orders received daily from a huge number of counterparties in different formats effectively. Due to the lack of a successful automated operator interface, the highest level of outsource customer service could be forgotten. The process looked something like this:

![MacBook Pro 16_ - 3.png](/uploads/Mac_Book_Pro_16_3_9e80f9d430.png)

Everything happened clumsily, the sequence of actions was constantly disrupted, and the order files, which the operators manually collected, correlated with the internal nomenclature and prepared by entering into 1C, were regularly confused and lost. Adding even more chaos was the fact that the client could call the same item differently, adding to the misunderstanding among managers:

![MacBook Pro 16_ - 4.png](/uploads/Mac_Book_Pro_16_4_ffa15e06da.png)

Situation analysis and work plan

Our analysts identified two more features in the company's work that hindered its development. Firstly, CRM, widely used for consulting companies, here served only as a client base, and the system was not used to conduct transactions. Secondly, counterparties transmitted order data to operators in a wide variety of formats, including voice messages and photos. It was necessary to reorganize sales as a service, convenient for customers and profitable for the company.

We decided to start by completely breaking the logic of the old ordering system, reformatting it as follows:

![MacBook Pro 16_ - 5.png](/uploads/Mac_Book_Pro_16_5_62270f344e.png)

After the changes we made, order processing began to occur through the item matching service, while simultaneously checking the product balances in the warehouse and transferring data to CRM for transaction analysis. Now these processes have acquired a more orderly form:

![MacBook Pro 16_ - 6.png](/uploads/Mac_Book_Pro_16_6_9494e9c630.png)

You don’t need to have a deep knowledge of marketing, much less be a bpo specialist, to see the advantages of the new scheme over the old one, where everything often happened on a random basis.



Clearing confusion

To successfully implement CRM, it was first necessary to develop a system that would meet all the needs of the customer’s company. At first, we planned to use Corteza CRM to build its processes, but in the end, we decided that the Terrasoft platform was much more suitable in this case, since all the scripts and widgets necessary were available for use to carry out complex business processes.


Choosing a CRM platform

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Let's take an example of the really large, best call centers, where up to five thousand operators work. Customer calls in such centers are segmented into several types, each of which has its own conversation scenario. A cheap CRM will not be able to cope with such a load and will simply confuse managers, while a clear algorithm provides the necessary flexibility in scenarios and branching of processes will show itself in the best way.

Now all customer orders, including those who contact the company for the first time, enter a single system, where managers receive them and lead them through to placing the order, and the process is automatically transferred through all the necessary stages and transferred to the necessary employees for execution. As a result, the transaction is under control at any time, and it becomes easier for operators and managers to perform their duties.

If you have a small company, you can turn to a simpler platform to implement CRM, but if your business does not fit into the small framework, or you are planning to expand, I recommend betting on something more serious, capable of handling large-scale workloads. For example, Terrasoft, which is used by employees in my agency and, as I know, by many US companies that outsource.

Why is it important?

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Once the CRM was ready, it was time to move on to the next task. “Manual” order matching took too much time for operators – sometimes up to several days, so it was clear that this process also needed to be automated. Here, we resorted to Elasticsearch, a search engine that converts source text into unique identifiers and tokens, and then compares them with the existing database and ultimately outputs the finished product positions.

Using tokenization as a basis, we created the Elastic system, which performs the work of operators in matching orders and their outsourced sales ready, after which it uploads the finished result to 1C, and the human task is only to control the actions of Elastic and its further training.

Updated matching system

One of the training points is the compilation of black and white lists:

- If the chain Client – Item from document – Nomenclature from 1C has been matched, it is whitelisted and reused;
- If it turns out to be incorrect, it will be blacklisted and not be used further.

Over time, the list will expand, ensuring increasingly accurate operation of the system in automatic mode. You get a kind of sales virtual assistant, although, of course, this is not exactly what this term is usually understood as.

After matching the list of positions of the received file, its data is displayed in the form of a table:

![MacBook Pro 16_ - 7.png](/uploads/Mac_Book_Pro_16_7_ee224e7934.png)

All that is required of the operator is to make sure that all records are matched correctly in order to train the system.

Two types of lists

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Naturally, it was not without difficulties. And the first of them during the assembly of Elastic was the enterprise’s product catalog that had not been updated for a long time. When you realize that it contains 4 times more items than are actually in the company’s warehouse, this is a problem that needs to be solved as soon as possible, otherwise all work will stop. Therefore, I had to quickly do an update.
Next, we introduced a unified packaging and volume system for orders to eliminate possible discrepancies. Everything became simple and clear.

From there, the system converted files that clients each prepared in their own format into one common one, recognizing and isolating fundamental parameters from it.

The last rather unexpected problem was the resistance from operators, who began to fear that they would be fired. A small spoiler: after the final implementation of the system, the management plans to transfer some of them to support, and some to the ranks of account managers, so those concerns are for naught.


Underwater rocks

Development and implementation of CRM with all innovations took our team about 3 months. At the moment, we have a working MVP, the system is being successfully tested in one of the company’s divisions, after which it will be extended to all others.

The digitization of each stage of the order is being completed, from the customer’s request to the delivery of the goods, which has already made it possible to relieve managers and give them the opportunity to pay more attention and effort to issues of best customer service. Indicators of their activity are now also sent to CRM, clearly demonstrating cross-sections of the work of each employee.

Work continues to train and improve Elastic.

![MacBook Pro 16_ - 8.png](/uploads/Mac_Book_Pro_16_8_64b88b97ff.png)

Work is still ongoing to improve the quality of delivery customer service; the ideal level of process and cost optimization indicators has not been achieved. All this requires additional effort, but it will certainly pay off. According to forecasts, by the time of full implementation, the system will save the enterprise up to 450 thousand per month.

I am sure that it is possible to automate any business process – from mailing to accounting outsource if you have a good idea of the benefits it will bring. Think about it: do you need to improve processes that are already running? Is it worth building a fundamentally new business model from scratch? Will optimization pay off? Answer these questions for yourself and, if you understand that yes, act.



What did we end up with?

Today, I'm going to share with you some insights into my company's structure and the business model chosen for it while also listing some key tools we used when launching lead generation processes. This scheme worked well even before the agency entered the markets of Western Europe and the USA, and later, with minor adjustments taking into account the peculiarities of doing business in a particular country, it turned out to be effective everywhere.


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How does our BPO Company generate sales leads?

Today, I'm going to share with you some insights into my company's structure and the business model chosen for it while also listing some key tools we used when launching lead generation processes. This scheme worked well even before the agency entered the markets of Western Europe and the USA, and later, with minor adjustments taking into account the peculiarities of doing business in a particular country, it turned out to be effective everywhere.

Some key tools

Just as the Earth, in the view of the ancients, stands on three pillars – the success of my agency, engaged in business process outsourcing, is based on the coordinated work of three departments that ensure productive interaction with clients: External, Internal and Research.

![MacBook Pro 16_ - 63.png](/uploads/Mac_Book_Pro_16_63_51304f9a65.png)

Three principles of our team

Their responsibilities include:

- Email copywriters creates sales text templates for mailings that can generate orders;
- Account managers ensure that clients who are already interested in cooperation with the agency remain loyal to us and strive to further develop partnerships;
- IT specialists prevent our mailings from going to spam;
- Managers whose responsibilities include providing personalized customer service, instilling trust in the brand in the subconscious of customers, and also ensure that clients who are already cooperating with the agency remain loyal to us and strive   for further development of partnerships.

The indispensable center of the entire system are SDRs. They are in charge of the entire pool of clients, monitoring the results of the department’s actions, consultations and much more. It is these specialists who actively set up sales channels and provide further support, and in addition, they partially take on the functions of CSM, solving a variety of problems that inevitably arise in the process of interacting with clients, or providing answers to questions they have.


External

The duties of this department are to conduct cold calls and letters, attract new clients to the agency and organize hot sales appointments for higher-level managers. In general, this is an excellent school for working with leads, where newcomers often gain experience in the department and aspire to be SDRs in the future. However, talking about the Internal is such a broad topic that it can only be properly covered in a separate article.


Internal

The employees of this department have important tasks, including:

- Marketing analysis of industries of interest to the agency;
- Drawing up ICP – Ideal Client Profiles both for “internal” needs and for entrepreneurs who contact us;
- Searching for leads;
- Conducting subsequent assessment of the leads and dividing them into segments;
- Creating a base for b2b lead generation.

The activities of the first two departments are based on the information received from the Research's tasks mentioned above. Therefore, it is fair to say: if SDRs serve as the defining link in the External, then Research employees are the core of the entire team.
