Outsourcing has become one of the go-to options for businesses. Choosing to outsource is equivalent to requesting a helping hand. Many small businesses outsource not because they want to save money or they can’t find suitable employees, but because they prefer investing the time and effort in matters that are vital to the business. Therefore, hiring a third-party service provider may be the best decision a company can make.
Outsourcing offers rapid access to a team of highly qualified professionals who connect with the customers utilizing the latest technology and techniques by partnering with a third-party supplier. On the other hand, customers receive better service, agents address issues more quickly, and companies don’t have to worry about high turnover or infrastructure costs.
In short, outsourcing provides a great platform for both the companies and customers. Over the years, the outsourcing market has expanded rapidly, and many companies started delivering outsourcing services. One prominent company in that list is Salelytics, which provides Inside Sales, Account Management, and Inbound Support Services.
In an interview with Insights Success, Matt Gargo, the Vice President of Salelytics, sheds light on the journey of his company, its services, and the different aspects of the outsourcing space.
Please brief our audience about Salelytics, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a trusted outsourcing partner.
We work with Fortune 1000 companies as well as venture-backed start-ups getting off the ground. Since we don’t offer cookie-cutter solutions and customize any one of our service offerings to the specific needs of our clients, we are highly successful in a broad range of industries. We are adept at leveraging cross-vertical synergies to drive the best sales and service outcomes.
Salelytics was founded over 30 years ago to support manufacturers of consumer-packaged goods (CPG). From there, we branched into healthcare to include medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Some of our largest client partnerships today exist in the business-to-business space for financial, logistics, industrial supplies, travel and hospitality, and distribution among others.
Overall, we have a highly satisfied customer base. The best evidence to support this is the average tenure of top clients and total client base. Top 10 clients have been with us an average of 10+ years and the overall customer base averages over five years of partnership.
Shed some light on Salelytics’ offerings and how they impact the industry and your clients?
We provide five key service offerings to clients, all of which can be customized:
Funnel Development: Outbound appointment setting or demand generation (date and time with qualified decision maker)Team Sell: Clients Field Sales and our Inside Sales resources collaborate to acquire, retain, and grow revenues.
Sole Territory Coverage: Our Inside Sales Associates independently acquire new customers for our clients.
Account Management: Our Inside Sales Associates take over a clients specific set or segment of customers to retain and grow through Upselling and Cross selling efforts.
Customer/Patient Care: Our dedicated care associate supporting Inbound and Outbound needs tied to educating and supporting client’s customer or patient groups. While most of our initiatives are a strategic complement to our partner’s overall go to market strategic, our ability to take on both large Fortune 100 partners while also being nimble enough to provide the advice and counsel to smaller start-ups allows us to deploy our solutions at almost any scale.
Our expertise in consulting with our partners and building out a custom solution ensures we design a sales or service engagement that is unique to the value goal, be it in revenue generation, service, or service into sales. As part of this, we lead our partners through a robust solution design process that looks at every component, ensuring we’re pairing the best talent, tech stack, and sales and service enablers to optimize value.
To call out one specific and proprietary solution, we’ve developed a patented ‘Super Associate’ application to provide real time call scoring for associates leveraging our Speech Analytics platform to listen to a selected group of key words and phrases as specific points within a call.
This application is then tied directly into our Gamification platform to provide scoring and tracking to keyword adherence at the associate level that correlates directly to the sales or service goals of the client. This direct tie in has dramatically shortened the speed to ramp for new associates by up to 50% in some cases.
Combining our real-time Super Associate with Lingua—Salelytics proprietary full transcription speech analytics platform—we have empowered our coaches to find opportunities faster than ever and have equipped them to speed the diagnostic function of coaching and developing associates.
What used to take hours in the ‘old days’ of listening to call after call can now be accomplished with a quick text search across hundreds or even thousands of call interactions and filtered by call outcome or any variety of call meta-data. Both tools are fully integrated in our proprietary performance monitoring and development tool ROADMAP, driving a seamless integration of call analysis and coaching.
Being an experienced leader, share your opinion on the impact of adopting modern technologies within the business outsourcing space and what more could be expected in the future?
Over the past 10 years, there has been a rapid evolution of call center technology aimed at enabling sales and service outcomes and driving better, more prepared associates. Tools such as speech analytics and gamification have become central to how we go to market and key components of delivering upon program KPIs.
These tools also help reduce the initial time to performance ramp and part of our tactics in keeping associates engaged and ultimately reducing churn. The use of chat and video-enabled chat has tied teams together at a distance and has made cross continental collaboration easy to a measure no one would have believed a decade ago.
In this area, the future promises the maturity of many of these nascent technologies and a further application transforming both the in-office and remote training experiences to where oral and written assessments are supplemented with tools that numerically measure sales and service readiness based on talk track deliver and voice analytics prior to an associate taking their first live call.
For associate in production, expect the further automation of performance analytics through AI-driven speech and sentiment analytics as well as the automation of the call quality and compliance functions.
Considering the current pandemic, what initial challenges did Salelytics face and how did you drive Salelytics to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?
As we were primarily a brick-and-mortar call center business, we’d never been tested to deploy technology and lead our teams remotely. For us, however, there was never a consideration around whether we would stay in the office or migrate our employee’s home – we were committed first and foremost to the safety of our employees.
Our largest initial challenges were around deploying and testing our tech stack remotely and at scale and servicing our remote employee’s hardware and software – especially when troubleshooting remotely. Our second challenge was in training and onboarding new employees who would never work in the brick and mortar. By building out proprietary tools to help with workstation pick up and leverage virtual interviewing and training platforms, we found we’d improved our ability to hire and train.
With the introduction of MS Teams and enabling video across our employee base, we found we were quickly able to duplicate the in-office camaraderie and support even as we sat in disparate locations. Separately, while we had never specifically intended our proprietary Sales Enabler technology to support a remote worker, we found that with minor changes, they were well suited the job of continuing to drive top notch performance and employee engagement.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the business outsourcing services market?
While it is easy to get distracted by all the technology and tools, the first step is to focus on setting up the basics of the sales or service operation, determining the right KPIs and building a culture and cadence of accountability where everyone has clear visibility into what success looks like at every aspect of the process and level.
The technology provides no short cuts into ensuring the basic blocking and tackling exists and can only support a program built on a firm foundation of experience and rigor and cannot fill in the cracks where corners have been cut or outcomes unclear. Second to that is garnering the right talent for the task and being able to target the intersection of skillset and wage for your initiative.
While it may seem contrary – in most cases wage-level alone is not the key driver in employee satisfaction and retention. Having a robust understanding of your talent and being able to build processes to vet talent into the right role will ensure KPIs are met but will also bring longer term employee satisfaction and reduced churn. As attrition training is one of the largest drivers in performance and margin erosion within BPO, it is critical that all of these pieces work together as compliments.
How do you envision scaling Salelytics’ operations and offerings in 2022 and beyond?
The future of scale is tied to a national model for talent. The old days regarded the location of brick and mortar as paramount. The pandemic has accelerated the desire to work from home and forced companies to confront this as a viable option to a degree ever before seen. Due to the shear success, we’ve now looked at how we can mine for talent at the intersection of wage and skillset regardless of geographic location.
Where we were tethered to the geography and its inhabitants, having the flexibility to pull the best talent for the price point has been transformational. While the brick and mortar will always be a part of our model, we now have fully virtualized clients spread across markets gives us scale, skills, and flexibility we never enjoyed prior to the pandemic and tied to a finite set of locations.
Due to this change in our approach, we’re in the middle of a labor crisis yet have onboarded more associates over the past two years than pre-pandemic. If it weren’t for our embrace of this new mode, we would not have been able to deliver upon our growth objectives over the last two years.
About the Leader
After leaving graduate school, Matt Gargo started out as an inbound sales associate for a consumer retention program. Through a variety of roles of increasing responsibility in training, talent, and sales operations, Matt established the firm’s Financial Services practice.
He drove the growth of the company’s largest client while standing up internal and external compliance and auditing, a modern, speech-enabled quality assurance methodology, and a consultative sales practice focused on leveraging the right technology to drive incremental sales and best-in-class customer satisfaction.
In this area, Matt helped spearhead the establishment of the firm’s data warehouse for business contact intelligence, a proprietary tool used to uncover addressable markets with lead scoring for likelihood to contact.
Matt has also been at the forefront of the transformation of the associate talent and training model from regionalized, brick-and-mortar centric to one that is national and virtual.
