Cold calling has always gotten a bad rap, as even the name strikes you as something that you wouldn’t want to be within arms reach of. But why does cold calling have to be such a frigid process? Often it’s because salespeople aren’t equipped with the information they need to warm up that call, but sometimes it’s because they aren’t even aware of the tools at their disposal.
So when Shawn Ahmed at CanadianStage took advantage of AudienceView Unlimited’s CRM, it allowed him to segment customers and log their activities. The result? His team doubled their outbound sales in three years.
“When I took over, the sales team was using paper leads,” says Ahmed the Sales Manager at CanadianStage who has been with the company for four years. “We weren’t doing any real tracking in AudienceView or storing data in the system. My biggest thing was getting everything to a point where there was no more paper needed for anything.”
Getting his team away from the paper leads system was one thing, but creating a BI that would allow his team to sell smarter, and sell more, was another undertaking completely. Shawn set up a system where he was able to pull a report for each representative that targeted anyone who spent a certain amount of money on a single ticket purchase between a specific set of dates. He’d then filter out anyone who had already been assigned a representative, as well as anyone his team had contacted in the last 3-4 months so as not to bombard them with requests.
Then, Shawn got to work. “Once I built out the list, I added a correspondence code to it. That became the unique tag on every customer file that we want to dial. Then I go into utilities, and I open up the customer marketing, and search for the correspondence code that I assigned to the customers. This way I’m able to search anyone who has a specific correspondence code, assigned to a specific name, as well as a few other filters to make sure I‘m getting the right information in the searches, like the ticket price. Then the sales reps just go through the list. If a customer is too busy, or can’t answer, or wants to be called later, these are fields we can track year-over-year. So this way we make sure that we’re nurturing all of the people who have bought a ticket or have asked us not to call them.”
By tagging each customer correctly and assigning them to the best rep, Shawn and his team at CanadianStage are able to offer the right deal at the right time. “We’re able to target people very specifically and say ‘you’re coming to see the show and you’ve spent this much money. We’ll bring your ticket down to this price and give you credit towards a subscription, and you’ll also get all of the following benefits.’ A lot of the time it’s such a good deal that people take it.
“That was one of my big ideas, says Shawn proudly. “Why don’t we call them before they come to the show and try to upsell them? If they say no that’s fine, we call them after and find out what they thought about the show. If they say yes, that’s a new subscriber.“
“We’re also able to track our customer’s preferences in AudienceView,” says Shawn. If we know that someone is a big fan of dramas, we can target them directly with a special offer. And if we don’t have enough dramas that season to justify a package for them, we can look to see if it’s worth making a mini package at a discounted rate that lets them still see all their favorite types of shows while getting them to subscribe.”
Through switching his sales processes over to AudienceView, Shawn Ahmed and his team at CanadianStage saw instant results.
