Your Growth Hackers: How to look beyond the ‘usual suspects’

As a owner of a company, you would look around for the employees who perform best and allocate them the most crucial tasks. That’s great! You have spotted them after their remarkable work and attitude. However, I came across as interesting article which claimed that ‘Good managers need to look beyond the Ususal Suspects’. Instead of relying on the same set of reliable employees for every major task, a company would do well to spot talent beyond the usual suspects. This will add a fresh perspective of looking at similar people and issues. Moreover, it will help maintain the efficiency of the employees by avoiding over burdening those who deliver better.  The article is right! But how would you approach implementing such a culture?

We recently bumped into a customer, a VP of an SMB, who told us, in their sales team of 10, he has only 2 people who get most of their business. So when they decided on getting a call managment system, they simply added those two people to attend customer calls. They argued that if the callers connect to the best managers, their probability to convert will double. The argument might be true. But my question was, why were the other 8 managers not effective enough? To that the VP said, they don’t ‘get’ the customers as effectively.

As an experiment that we agreed upon, we routed 60% of the incoming calls to the two star agents. But the other 40% were allocated to 2 other managers chosen randomly from the rest. After about a month, the results were a bit surprising. The rate of customer conversion for all the 4 managers ended up vey close to each other! On further probing, the VP realized that the maximum sales came from the 2 employees because they dedicated modt of their time to handling customer conversations. While the rest were allotted some extra chores around everyday operations and support, besides the core sales.

The significance of having a platform which manages complete customer interaction could not become more evident. This awareness hopefully made a good starting point for the company in identifying the flawed assumptions on which employees were judged.

So when you are off to find your own people who form the best first point for customer interaction, consider this:

1. Start with 3-4 random sales people irrespective of what you think they can deliver.
2. While tracking their call performance, fish out the call recordings which led to sales conversions.
3. Create/auto-generate a weekly report of every sales person and provide constructive feedacks for improvement.
4. Re-iterate every month.

With cloud technology, it is possible to assign sales people to the same number. You can get complete real-time tracking and recording.  Nasscom’s white paper claims that emergence of cloud computing is providing alternatives to accessing new functionality, mobility, social media and analytics driving agility and responsiveness. Call management systems like MyOperator are a stepping stone to a better managed organization.