Servomex - lead queue review
Who is Servomex?
Servomex is a world leader in gas analysis. Their technology is used in many areas of industry, particularly hydrocarbon processing, power generation, and the production of industrial gases and semi-conductors. Its global team also provide technical service support and education to clients worldwide.
The challenges?
One of our clients operates a global sales team who work in SalesForce. All the RFQ’s and call-back requests that are generated from their website, plus enquiries generated from the rest of their marketing activity, are assigned to the team via a lead queue. As is often the case, the behavioural shift needed to get full adoption of a new CRM system takes time and effort. In this instance, the regional sales staff, who are on the road visiting customers much of the time, were not always diligent in ensuring that all customer contact was noted in SalesForce, resulting in an incomplete picture. Also, some staff were very focused on lucrative opportunities with extremely large customers, to the detriment of leads coming in from smaller organisations.
Over a period of time, the overall lead queue built up to nearly 1000 primary leads in the global queue which had not been updated to indicate contact or follow up. We were asked to reach out to these contacts, to engage with them and to ensure that valuable opportunities were not being missed.
Our solutions
We created a bespoke CRM application for this project and populated it with a full download from SalesForce. Working in our system enabled us to add some additional functionality not present in SalesForce and some project-specific questions. And, in addition to this fact-finding work, the team were asked to assign a subjective score after the call to reflect their impression of the customer sentiment, based on the customers’ responses during the call.
Many of the large customers on the list had multiple projects in hand and therefore had more than one lead in the queue. So we first did a matching process to link them together so that we would make one call to each contact. This resulted in 760 unique contacts and we contacted all 760, in their native language, with a customer-service style call to get feedback on the support they had received following their recent enquiry.
Some of the leads had requested a quotation so those calls were prioritised. We obviously didn’t imply that the client suspected that some of them had received no response; we just asked if a response was received promptly, whether it addressed all of their questions and whether the price was competitive. This obviously uncovered instances where the quotation had not arrived at all.
As well as taking note of whether the quotation had been received or not, we asked if the project was still live or if they had already made their purchase. If the opportunity was still live, we passed the lead back as a new urgent lead. If they had already purchased, we established whether they had purchased from our client or from a competitor. All of this information was passed back to be uploaded to SalesForce at the end of the campaign.
The results
Over a three-month period, we reached out to the entire database and generated 145 new leads and 33 specialist literature requests. We uncovered instances where ballpark figures had been provided on the phone, but no paper-trail existed to support this. For some customers, the quotation was not received at all. There were a handful of instances where the quotation was late or incomplete and some instances where the customer purchased from a competitor. As well as the direct impact on potential sales, the structure of our data capture enabled us to provide each Regional Manager with a summary of the results from their area. This indicated which members of the sales team were responding promptly but not keeping notes in SalesForce and highlighted the few who were not actually following up on leads at all.