PERQ's Sales Conversions Perk 500 Percent with Salesvue
PERQ, an incentive-based marketing company, had recently rolled out Salesvue's sales acceleration and business intelligence solution and was reporting that it had boosted the calls it was able to make by 125 percent and increased conversations per rep by an average of 330 percent. More than that, sales conversions were up by 500 percent. Peter Fuller, chief marketing officer for Salesvue, asked his counterpart at PERQ if these statistics were real.
"I said, 'That number has to be wrong,'" Fuller recalls. "But when we went back and looked at the map, it was true."
PERQ is a measured marketing technology and promotions firm that helps clients attract customers through incentive-based promotions. PERQ primarily serves car dealerships and newspapers, but is looking to expand its reach.
Before adopting Salesvue's technology in January 2014, PERQ had been using a straight Salesforce solution to track customer engagements. Even though the solution had been in place since 2006, PERQ was finding it hard to get consistent uptake among its agents. Logging calls was especially time-consuming, requiring 12 separate clicks. Reading back that data and making meaningful sense of it was even more difficult because the results were buried in the Salesforce notes.
Stephanie Thompson, marketing success director for PERQ, explains that her agents were spending far too much time trying to figure out where they were in the sales cycle with each client. It was slowing down the process and eroding faith in the work they were doing.
"Twelve clicks is just ridiculous. And not knowing if what you're doing is going to make a difference is demoralizing," Fuller says.
Thompson was actively looking for something better. Salesvue's technology, which sits on top of a Salesforce platform, reduces the number of clicks required to log a call from 12 to just two. It also makes trends and best practices more obvious to leadership, by collating the data in meaningful ways. Many companies, for instance, don't make enough attempts to contact their clients.
"There's an industry standard that you have to have eight activities before you communicate with someone," Fuller explains. "That's an average.... Most inside salespeople give up after three attempts."
PERQ had been making, on average, six calls to prospects before giving up. While Salesvue's analytics revealed that most conversations were taking place on the first or second call, pushing the cadence past an eleventh call could realize a 30 percent conversion rate. That's a number that would not be intuitively obvious.
The solution also helped PERQ make staffing decisions based on data-driven management. Fuller says that his clients don't often realize how much something like a sales kickoff (SKO) meeting, where all of the agents have been pulled from the field, costs in actual dollars. "They [couldn't] see the cost beyond...the food and hotel," he says. What they couldn't see was that they might lose activities, and that translated into measurable average numbers of conversations and sales.
"Most of our folks have come to the conclusion that they'll split the team. Half the team goes to the SKO and the other half goes another time so that they maintain activity throughout."
These kinds of efficiencies allowed PERQ to realize an increase in sales conversions of 500 percent. PERQ's results, however, are not typical. According to Fuller, the average Salesvue client realizes about a 40 percent increase in sales activity, which is not half-bad either.
The Payoff
Using Salesvue, PERQ was able to achieve the following results:
- a 125 percent increase in the number of calls agents can make;
- a 330 percent average jump in conversations per rep;
- a 500 percent increase in sales conversions overall; and
- the discovery that the 11th call to a client could yield a 30 percent conversion rate.