In a perfect world, every calling campaign we conduct on behalf of our clients would deliver exceptional results from the start, but that’s obviously not reality.
Even when all the right pieces are in place—a great list, a compelling script, and skilled and experienced Business Development Representatives (BDRs) to deliver the message—scheduling appointments can be challenging.
But that’s no reason to lose hope. Often, even a slight change in strategy can make a dramatic difference in the success of a lead generation program.
BandyWorks, an industry-leading retail analytics managed services provider dedicated to helping family-owned convenience store chains grow their business, has experienced this firsthand during an ongoing campaign with VSA that began last fall. After a slow start, the program regularly yields multiple opportunities a week for BandyWorks. One recent week saw us deliver 10 opportunities for their company.
BandyWorks’ relationship with VSA actually dates back to 2017. The company has partnered with us on several different campaigns.
“What we like is that the VSA team takes something that’s pretty darn geeky, and boils it down into something that’s understandable and figures out if prospects are interested or not,” says Tom Bandy, the company’s founder. “When someone has a problem that we solve, they want to talk to us, and when they talk to us, we have a very high sign-up rate. VSA has allowed us to talk to many more of the companies that need our solution.”
The benefits of BandyWorks’ data-driven solutions really come down to three factors:
- They help store managers and their employees save time
- They help stores sell more
- They help stores keep more of the money they earn by reducing theft and other forms of shrink, as well as unnecessary expenses
As Mr. Bandy puts it: “We hear store managers say all the time, ‘Yes, we’ve got problems, of course, we’ve got problems.’ We help them eliminate problems, we help them deal with the right problems, and we help them reward the employees they want to keep by helping to identify the best ones.”
It’s an appealing message if you can get the right people to hear it. But at the outset of our calling campaign, that wasn’t always easy to do or promote. Getting busy C-store operators on the phone was difficult, and even when we did them get on the phone, they often didn’t have time to talk. As a result, we were not setting appointments at the rate either we or BandyWorks had hoped for.
But because VSA collaborates closely with all our clients via weekly meetings and detailed reports, we were able to quickly identify the issues, and together we worked to develop alternate approaches which in the end increased conversions for BandyWorks and helped them open up the channel.
“It’s a matter of flexibility and the willingness to try different things,” says Lisa Doyle, the Program Manager on the campaign. “And then once you find something that works, to kind of take off with it.”
In BandyWorks’ case, we tried multiple new strategies to achieve our goal. These included:
Changing the message and approach
If there’s one thing C-store operators don’t have a lot of, it’s time. Asking to schedule a meeting early in the conversation—even just for 15 minutes—often resulted in a quick brush-off.
To help avoid this, we altered the phone script and technique to focus more on acknowledging common pain points for a better outcome. Also, instead of leading with asking for a meeting, we shifted to asking prospects to register for a webinar series that dealt specifically with the most common C-store concerns. Maybe the prospects weren’t willing to commit to a 15-minute meeting, but many had no problem agreeing to take a few seconds to click on a registration link.
But we didn’t eschew the meeting request altogether. After letting prospects know about the webinar, we still asked to schedule a meeting with them and often found they were much more likely to agree at that point since there had already been meaningful dialogue.
Changing the target list
While we continued to cold call new prospects, we also began calling existing BandyWorks customers for follow-up. Rather than wait for a problem call to come to them, BandyWorks wanted us to reach out and ensure their clients had full use of their services. We checked to see if they had any issues with existing services and informed them about newly available programs that increased engagement.
This tactic has resulted in a number of appointments for BandyWorks. Store owners appreciated the outreach and the opportunity to talk to representatives from the company.
The two-pronged approach—reaching out to connect with both prospects in their target audiences and existing customers looking to add services—has been key to helping BandyWorks grow its sales funnel.
“VSA has helped us fill in a lot of customer service gaps,” says Mason Cowan, Director of Managed Services. “We’re not doing the prospecting we need to on our own, so that’s been a big help with both customers and new prospects. On the customer side, we want to communicate directly with our customers on a regular basis. We want to make it easy to increase our client’s sales and help them to save a little time each day. On the prospecting side, it’s the same story; having VSA hit that initial outreach has been super helpful.”
As with all our clients, VSA relied on careful analysis of our internal calling data to help increase productivity on BandyWorks’ campaign. Our emphasis on data has been music to Tom Bandy’s ears.
“The reason I like VSA so much is I appreciate organization,” he says. “I’m a data guy, pretty detailed. Working with Lisa and VSA, they’re part of our team. We love their commitment, creativity, and accountability to their goals. They give us information the way we give it to our clients—very organized and easy to read.”
BandyWorks plans to continue its professional partnership with VSA for the foreseeable future. If you’re interested in learning about how we can also work with you, give us a call. We’d love to talk about ways to help your company grow and generate potential customers.