TTEC helps companies build engaged, happy, and profitable customer experiences powered by a combination of humanity and technology. Through its Customer Experience as a Service platform, TTEC uses a phased approach to transformation that helps companies set priorities, get quick wins, and build a shared vision for the future.
By partnering with People.ai, TTEC is now delivering a more rewarding experience for its own sales team. The company addressed concerns surrounding its current inspection process for deal qualification, adding the structure needed to determine deal quality while helping reps focus more on what they do best – engaging their accounts and serving customers.
Challenge Statement
With nearly 40 years under its belt in the customer experience industry, TTEC has set out to deliver experiences that captivate customers and dramatically improve the bottom line. But behind the scenes, an inconsistent and ineffective deal qualification process threatened to negatively impact the company’s own revenue goals and sales rep retention.
Discipline in disqualifying deals was one area of improvement for the TTEC team. Part of this problem stemmed from an unstructured inspection process intended to identify when a deal is appropriately qualified, but manual inputs into Excel from salespeople made it difficult. Working outside of Salesforce, where TTEC’s opportunity records were located, also made it challenging to identify whether opportunities were qualified.
Roadblocks to TTEC’s Success
“As a company, poor deal qualification was one of our top pain points. This affected our ability to use data and determine if it was predictive of deal health and success,” said Jonathan Gray, senior vice president at TTEC.
Not knowing whether its sales pipeline was healthy was the equivalent of working in the dark for TTEC. A disciplined deal qualification process was needed to disqualify deals appropriately, helping to eliminate the deals that aren’t profitable and focus on the ones that are. Without this critical information, TTEC was often working with a pipeline that wasn’t reflective of its truly qualified leads.
Another mounting issue that faced TTEC was working offline from Salesforce in Microsoft Word and Excel. Navigating multiple tools outside of where opportunity records were located meant critical data could get lost in the back-and-forth transition, leaving data integrity compromised.
“Using an offline excel tool for deal qualification made it hard for Sales Leaders to understand deal health scores and compare them to win rates, which led to understandable frustration for our team,” Gray said.
These roadblocks were happening at a pivotal time where a really tight job market was driving seller turnover up 36% above target. It was more than just the market dynamics, though, reps were spending too much time on manual tasks like offline deal qualification, and not enough time actively engaging their accounts, advancing opportunities, and retiring quota.
TTEC knew alleviating sales reps’ frustration around manual data entry and time-consuming administrative tasks was crucial to ensuring its workforce remained intact and could continue growing. TTEC’s goal wasn’t only to make sales teams more successful but happier in their roles.
TTEC needed a simplified way to make qualifying leads easier and remove exhaustive tasks in order to retain reps and entice potential hires to join its organization. Making it easier for a seller to sell and exceed their targets increases employee satisfaction.