OuterBay Technologies, Inc.
OuterBay’s Need: Lead Development and Management Process
While Mark Burton, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing at OuterBay Technologies, expects his field sales force to take responsibility for finding sales leads themselves, Burton knew from his previous sales executive experiences that he would also need to create a sales lead qualification machine to keep the Field focused on the best sales opportunities. Mark did not need to be sold on the effectiveness of telebusiness; he just needed the right team of trusted, experienced telebusiness managers to work with his Director of Marketing, Maureen Kelly, to quickly build the infrastructure for a critical piece of his sales success.
According to Burton, “Phone Works was a perfect fit for my detailed sales process orientation. They crafted and implemented a working sales development process faster and more effectively than an internal staff member, had I even had someone with the skills and bandwidth to accomplish what they did within a month.”
Phone Works Builds the Program: Processes, Tools, Systems, Management
OuterBay is in the enviable position of being a very hot company with a top-notch Director of Marketing, Maureen Kelly, who knows exactly whom to target and how to communicate OuterBay’s benefits. That means that prospects are coming to them. Leads are generated through programs driven by Kelly, including events and web campaigns. Phone Works’ essential job was to create a program to follow up, qualify and manage the incoming leads so that the field sales force could distinguish between opportunities they should follow up and attempt to close that month from the longer term opportunities.
Says Kelly, “As I had never managed a telebusiness group before, I received essential training from Phone Works during the course of the project. It was like getting ten years of experience in 90 days! Phone Works’ expertise and focus on revenue meant we got our program up and running and producing qualified sales leads within one short month. I have never experienced this level of commitment to a project’s success from any vendor before.”
Phone Works started by creating a Blueprint for the lead management function after interviewing executive, sales and marketing staff to fully understand company strategies, positioning and messages, current and potential markets, and resources. Contained within the Blueprint were the Phone Works signature methodologies and call model metrics, developed after twelve years of experience working with technology clients at different stages and in different markets. The lead development message, process and metrics were designed to be tested and validated “with real prospects in the real world.” During the course of the project, Phone Works was able to quickly recruit a Lead Development Manager for OuterBay who rolled up her sleeves to test the call metrics personally by getting on the phone and calling prospects, using the sales tools and call guides developed by the Phone Works consulting team, as well as the salesforce.com implementation that was specified and customized by Phone Works.
Phone Works Delivers Fast Results
Burton, who expects to drive at least 30% of sales revenue from demand generation commented, “Phone Works’ early lead results were beyond promising, especially considering they were building and testing the program at the same time.” Based on projected close rates and average sales prices, OuterBay should expect to see handsome revenue returns from the Phone Works-generated leads within six months as well as a handsome return on investment. That pleases not only Burton, but also the OuterBay management team, their Board of Directors and company investors.
| Results Summary - Month One | ||
| Activity | Number | Percent |
| Attempts | 379 | |
| Contacts | 79 | 21 |
| A Leads | 9 | 11 |
| B Leads | 10 | 12.6 |
| Projected closes | 2 | 10 |
| Pipeline Built | $1,600,000 | |
| 6 month ROI* | $85,000 | |
* The six-month ROI number assumes a 10 percent close rate and includes Phone Works’ cost for planning and implementation of the telebusiness function.
Maureen Kelly summarized, “In addition to the stellar results, which speak for themselves, the chief benefit of working with Phone Works was the fact that they had built groups before from the ground up for start-up companies our size and knew how to hit the ground running. Phone Works knows how to work at a start-up pace, and could focus our budget and time on getting results without getting too bogged down in process and detail.”
About OuterBay
OuterBay's LiveArchive products improve application performance and
reduce the downtime needed for upgrades by managing application data
growth. LiveArchive works by identifying inactive application data and
moving it onto more cost effective storage where it remains online and
accessible to users from their existing application user interface.
The result is a smaller, high performance production database. See www.outerbay.com
for more information.
