A major challenge to the overall effectiveness of any sales force is maintaining a good mix of prospecting, while closing sales with target clients. We believe that in the United States and Europe, lead generation is the most underutilized competitive weapon available for sales teams today.

The following are some revealing best practice metrics taken from our experience over the last ten years:

• Effective lead generation can enable a sales force to more than double its performance, i.e., doubling the effective size of the sales team;

• The fully loaded cost of an OverDrive® Contact Center Professional™ (CCP) is usually 1/4th the cost of a field salesperson or less;

• The CCP can deliver as many as twice the number of qualified opportunities necessary to meet the field sales person’s quota, depending on the industry.

• Good inside sales people can often enroll as many as 10 times the number of prospect stakeholders that a field sales person can in the same period of time.

I’ll expand on this more next month, but let me tell you a little about what we are doing in Asia.

Because lead generation has been so very effective for our clients, we’ve made substantial investments in human capital and technology in this area for years. Most recently, we greatly expanded these capabilities through some significant investments in Manila and Cebu, Philippines. Our American-born US and Philippine-based management teams oversee the most gifted, disciplined and effective inside sales professionals we have had anywhere in the world.

Armed with the firm’s intellectual property and technology, these professionals consistently produce between two and five times as many appointments and qualified leads as any other group we’ve measured at an all-in cost that is very low.

Our Philippine teams identify, qualify, and engage real buyers and influencers in productive sales dialogues that are often carried through to the closed sale. In other cases, they set up face-to-face appointments with the best potential clients where qualified opportunities exist. OverDrive Contact Center Professionals™ have an average of 5 years experience calling on decision makers and influencers.

This is one of the great outcomes of our year-long Asia Project - to expand and improve our capabilities in the Contact Center Operation. Frankly, I’m very excited with the competitive advantage we can deliver our clients.

This expanded capability gives us more capacity to serve clients at extremely competitive rates in even the most complex outbound and customer service environments. It also allows us to serve the native English, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish and other language groups anywhere in the world.

Look forward to more exciting news in the coming weeks!

Bob Howard, CEO
Sales OverDrive, LLC


About Sales OverDrive, LLC

Sales OverDrive is a leader in the end-to-end sales acceleration and outsourcing markets worldwide. The company helps organizations rapidly achieve significant increases in sales, margins and market share by providing customized consulting and hands-on delivery of targeted sales acceleration services and comprehensive outsourcing programs. Bob Howard and his OverDrive team offer many years of sales leadership experience and insight combined with unique, proprietary processes to deliver unmatched results. For more information visit www.SalesOverDrive.com.