Building an Outbound BDC Strategy That Drives Results

First step, Jacob, I, I feel like you're gonna have a great day nailing that.

It's been a, it's been a few years since I've missed hitting that, but that is always extremely disappointing when you miss hitting that, so. Well, thanks everyone for joining us for today's webinar. Scott, you know, this is going to be the second session. Session in the series and I know folks are still joining, so why don't we take a minute here and you want to walk through what prompted you to, to want to talk about, you know, last time was inbound. This time is outbound. You know what, what's, what's prompted you to, to start this series of shows?

Yeah, I think a lot of people, I mean, it's just been the feedback we've gotten from customers. They really just want to plan. A lot of them want to know best practices and you know, that's why we added the training program, the manager training program and such based on feedback. And, and I, when I look at things, I see people doing incredible things and I wanted to just pass along that information. My plans, by the way, we'll have a sales focused one coming up. We're also going to have what we're learning from scoring all these calls via Pulse on one of the future ones as well. Today is very service marketing focused and I, I hope people enjoy it.

Well, good. Well, in that. With that said, Scott, you want to pull up your screen and we can get started?

Yeah. All look good, Jake.

Yes.

All right. You know, we're going to talk about building a strategy without boundaries. A lot of this is just the basics. You know, you guys are the ones that make it happen in, in Valley. You know, we just make it easy for you to, to build it, but there, there's not going to be any big surprises. A lot of this will be familiar to a lot of, a lot of you folks, but I, I'm confident if you apply of what's in here, you can, you can grow your business. This will take about 20 to 25 minutes is all. We'll leave a few minutes for questions at the end. But, but I've, I've timed this deck out. If anyone wants a copy of the deck, either reach out to Jake or Liza or Wendy and they'll get you a deck. Get a copy of the deck going forward. So, so here we go. You know, to me, outbound is about offense and we've talked about this a lot. Inbound is defense. And, and unless you've got a dealership where you're where your retention is 100%. And, you know, we'll talk about that a couple times today. You just can't wait for people to show up. You've got to assume that, that you can. That, that you can impact your business and grow it. And that's really the focus of what we're talking about today. So, first of all, are you doing the basics? Are you spending five minutes a day with every agent? If you are scoring calls, whether you have pulse or you're doing on your own, you're listening to them, are you talking about the reasons why they didn't schedule an appointment? Are you really working on script adherence? So what's the difference between someone who converts 35% of the people they speak to on an outbound appointment and someone who converts 5%? Well, a lot of it is just confidence. So I, I slam my hands there for emphasis, Jake, and I turn the slide. So a lot of it is just confidence.

I.

You need to train the script until, you know, they don't need the script. So all new employees, I would spend a few minutes every day having them go over the, the script when they deliver it and interrupt them, ask them some questions, get it till they don't need the script. That should always be your goal. Secondly, by the way, a lot of these terms today, and a lot of my focus will be volley focused. We know we've had quite a few people register who aren't volley customers. Most of this applies to your BDC in general. So with or without volley. So I just. That's our viewpoint there. But when you work with your agents, are you training them on your outcomes, your dispositions? If you don't have consistent dispositions or call outcomes, then it's hard to really build the numbers around what works. So five minutes a day, drilling the script, talking about finding a call that you can improve what they're doing and, and then drilling dispositions. It's just the basics. It's really the basic of any call center. And a BDC is a call center for a dealership. So are you doing that? That is one way that you can, that you can improve your BDC pretty much right off the bat. Have a service mindset. So once again, every vehicle that has been sold in your dealership needs service. They just don't need it from you. So we see a lot of call reluctance. We see people who are worried about interrupting people. Customers need service, every one of them, and they want good service. We see, you know, there's over 20 million calls a month In Valley right now, we see relatively few calls get marked as price objections. It's such a small amount when we look at dispositions. Customers go places because they want help and they want good service. So when you call a customer, don't worry about interrupting them. You might have some people who maybe they're doing something that wasn't on their mind, but come at this with that. You're here to help them and take care of something they have to get done. It's a different mindset than someone saying, oh geez, I'm doing cold calls on people who are due for service. Everyone needs it, they just don't need it from you. So have a service mindset. The day will go better. You're still going to get stepped on a bit by people who weren't expecting it. But, but everyone needs service. They're dying for good service. If you're confident in your scripts and you have the, the mindset that everyone needs service and you're doing them a good, good favor, you will convert more benchmark outbound. So Volley, we do about a hundred demos a month right now, and the ones I listen to there are. Most of the BDCs have a benchmark for their agents. 60 calls a day, 80 calls a day. Very rarely do we run into two dealers that benchmark inbound and outbound separately. If there's. So this is another takeaway with or without volley, that you can improve your BDC greatly just by benchmarking outbound attempts separate from inbound calls they take every day. If you don't do that every day, you're busier than normal. You made zero outbound attempts. What do we consider a good ratio? We consider two outbound attempts for every one inbound call to be. To be a good ratio. Now that assumes that you are taking 60 to 70 inbound calls a day per agent. So the numbers are going to be a little different at the. At a single store where a busy inbound day will, will, will take 40 to 50 calls. And then you can make more outbound calls. But you need more coverage to a central BDC where the inbound volume can go up because you've got more people spread upon the peak parts. Just make sure that you make outbound attempts every single day. Okay, so in volley we track things like agent drop rate, customer drop rate, answer rate, etc. Sometimes the numbers might be too good. You think you're doing a good job, but really we're not as efficient that we have. And one thing I want you guys to all get out of today is that you can always do more than you're doing. You know, first you need to imagine it in your mind. Remember, every, every decision you make in life, you make twice. Once in your mind and then once when you do it. Make in your mind that you're going to speed up your agents and you can do it. So. Agent drop rate. What is a good rate? We consider the 6%, under 6% a good drop rate for a central BDC. Then if you call people back in Volley, your adjusted drop rate is around 3%, meaning that your store is performing at 97% on inbound. If you have a drop rate where it is 1 or 2%, you probably have your agents sitting around waiting for calls and they're not as productive as they could be. And you know, that isn't me saying that we want people to, to just willingly not get phones answered. But considering Volley automatically calls people back and you'll reach almost 60% of them. Um, sometimes too low of a drop rate can be too low. Answer rate. 35% is typical. So on service retention. So if it is, if your answer rates at 50%, you might not be getting through the cues. It's a good sign that you're not pacing enough. So however you track those, whether you're doing it in a spreadsheet or anything else that, that is, that's, that's what I look at. Make multiple attempts. So if you enroll a hundred people and you make four attempts, the math kind of ends like this. To get through those hundred people at a 35% answer rate, you'll speak with about 70. And this includes callbacks. It, you know, it's 50% the first time, 25 the second attempt, 20 the third, and 15 the fourth. We don't normally recommend going over four attempts for service retention. We do have some people that do. And you'll have to adjust your answer rate for that. But just keep in mind there is. You can reach about 70 people of 100. If you've got a 35% answer rate and you've gotten through the queues, takes about 280 attempts. That's another reason why pacing is important. Because the last five or six or five, 15 people, etc. There's, there's buyers in there. We see it all the time. So make multiple attempts. Everyone has a smartphone on this call. I, I don't even know if they sell phones that aren't smartphones anymore. Always include voicemails in your strategy. Ha. We see half in a lot of cases of, of Outbound appointments come from people who call back, an agent who left a nice message. All messages get transcribed nowadays. Speak clearly and smile. Just remember you may have said this, this voicemail greeting 65 times. It's the first time that customer's hearing that and it can, it can double your outbound business if you do that. Get a lot of callbacks from this Jake, on other calls you've asked about, should we use the instant voicemail feature where we place one on there? It's a matter of efficiency. I like where you can always use in the human touch and I would sprinkle that in if your pacing isn't where it is to save you the 30 seconds in between calls. When you're leaving a voicemail, don't call and say hi, this is Jake from Volley Motors, you're due for service. Say hi, this is Jake from Volley Motors and, and I'm calling to help you take care of your 2022 Camry. It's ready to be serviced. Have affirmative helpful voicemails work on your scripts. We can help you with that. Always leave a voicemail. Okay, this is, this is something that might be controversial, but I would always start with the people who are due. Like I said earlier, there isn't a single dealer who has a, has a retention rate of 100%. So to me, setting aside telematics, where some of those need to be called immediately, we're talking about first service and active service first with most of the manufacturers, if they skip you once, they're going to be inactive already. And, and where you look at someone with a 100 people that you speak with 35% you know, on active customers you can convert over 30% of those two appointments. When you're talking about people who have went somewhere else that that return goes down by by three. So always start of course track conversions by care terror by category. But it is, it's always human nature to say oh, I got to get the people back in who left. You can mow through the list of people who, who are due for service very quickly and then you can still get to those people and it's just a matter of pacing. But I would always start with them. It is maybe controversial for a lot of the service managers on this call, but your retention rate is not 100%. I would start with these customers. We get a lot of people who ask about text messages and emails. Best practice, emails and text messages should work in conjunction with calls. Think of your own personal history. How many text message solicitations do you get how many do you actually convert on? We see about 7% of campaigns. We know 100% of them get get delivered that are, you know, the good data and such. Interestingly, interesting stats though. 32% of all the customers who received an sms came in. 56% did not schedule it through the BDC. Best practice, always include a scheduling link in every message. Again, remember we're here to serve our customers and make it easy. Vale is with our new reporting platform that will be coming out at some point. We're going to build a report that shows the activity that you generated where you didn't schedule an appointment to. That's something that a lot of you have requested. Always include an sms. SMS works in conjunction with the phone. The phone is still the best way to interrupt people, but I would always send an SMS if you can. How fast should they work? So you know one of the answers is faster than they're working now. A lot of people just don't realize how much faster you can go. Generally wherever you're at now, don't feel bad. Make a goal to go faster because you can. And I've got some numbers to share later in the presentation. We base these numbers based on being on the phones 50 minutes an hour. BDC agents have hard jobs. Everyone is their boss in the dealership so they need a break. It gets stressful to go from call to call to call. But you can go faster. I would love to see every BDC over 200 attempts plus inbound calls every day. At a minimum, you know, 60 to 70 inbound calls, double that for outbound. You can all get there. And what about preparation? What about research? The BDC isn't anything any different than anything else in your dealership. The people who do the most thoughtful activity generate the most business. So it is very important to know to be ready for a phone call. But really you just need to know one reason. Because the customer if it is your policy to to sell them every service available, you know you still need to get have a reason for them to stay on the call. If you do engage with them, you've got plenty of time to look up what else they might be due for. Get really good at a hook with one reason. Pacing is more important than taking five minutes between every call. If you figure 65% don't answer. And you know most stores already have the philosophy that that BDC agent schedule appointment service advisors sell, you have plenty of time if you reach the person to look at the other things they might be due with. Especially recalls etc. Research is important. Going faster is more important. Be comfortable with the scripts. Move fast. Pick one reason. How. What is a good appointment number per stores? So I'm going to throw out some numbers and, and you might think they're crazy and I can tell you right now that none of them matter without knowing what other calls the BDC is making. You know, we have some stores where the B or making and taking the BD. We have some stores where 80% of their calls inbound are not appointment calls. Well, that limits how much you can do for, you know, if you're taking a lot of time with non revenue calls. What is a good, good appointment number? We see a lot of our mature BDCs getting up to 40 attempts or 40 appointments today, inbound and outbound together. When you're tracking this, look year over year and you'll, and you'll see important, you'll see good, good learnings there. It's why you benchmark inbound, outbound, separately. It's why you track your conversion rate by appointable lead calls. And I would start tracking what it is and I would make a goal to, to up it. So, so here I've got some numbers just to close this out. I included one single store and then, and then I included some dealer groups. We have just so, just so I've got some bigger numbers here. But this is one of our earliest stores on you can see in the first. And this was actually. So this was October. Years two through five, this was actually December because their first month was in September in their first year. And I didn't think October was a fair representation. And so the appointment number is a little bit different. But you can see in year one they took 20,000 inbound calls, made 11,500 outbound attempts. Year three, they took a massive leap forward. Their agents improved in the second year, by the way, we started tracking productive hours. You can see this year they scheduled 5,000 outbound appointments in the month of October with 3,058 productive hours in the BDC. That does not include the people who they generated activity who came in anyway. These were directly attributed to appointments they made. The other interesting thing, almost exactly 50% of their outbound appointments were people calling back this great BDC manager who runs this store. They train and drill on converting, they train on voicemails. This is the compound effect though of, of getting faster. They did add four stores. If you're wondering why the, the, the, the jump up there. But this is the culminating effect of teaching your customers that they need to get in the habit of coming in, building a habit with them. This is what you get by doing it year after year after year. And remember, every outbound appointment you make, either they weren't going to come in or they weren't going to come in as fast as. And you guys get to take the call before they have a problem most of the time and schedule it when it's convenient for the dealership. Compare that with most inbound calls that are unsolicited. They're usually calling with a problem. They want to come in in the morning and they want a loaner car. These numbers compound if you focus on them. If you drill the basics, you can do incredible numbers. Here's a new dealer group. This is, I thought this was an incredible arc. This was July, August, September, October, their first full month. Their agent drop rate on inbound was 1203. And I just included that. This is an outbound seminar. But I wanted to show you how they could improve outbound by also improving the business for the people who are trying to do business with them. Very, very good management at the Steeler Group. But you can see in their first month they went from 1559 outbound appointments to over 2000 in their fourth full month, all while improving their inbound performance. Every month their agents are picking up the pace. They know their staffing levels. This is a good projection for. A projection for you to map out what you're doing. All of you new people on the call, we benchmark the first three months, up your attempt goals every month. Okay, so this is a single store. In October, they made 11,000 outbound attempts, spoke with 3467, took 4300 inbound calls. They scheduled almost 1100 outbound appointments. Their appointment rate on people they reached was 7.69%. On the people who called them back from a voicemail, it was 17% of the people they converted. And this isn't quite the one to one that I gave for this other example. And it's. And it's because of their high appointment rate here on conversion. But this is a good, good barometer for a single store. So they have three and a half, four agents depending on how you classify it. They hustle. So by the way, I'll do any of these calls whether you're a customer or non customer. If we, if you want to talk pacing with me. Finally, what are. This was from a very good BDC we have that's been on multiple years. They take about 70 inbound calls, an agent per day. This was the month of October. Year over year, you can see they keep getting better. In year three, they realized they needed to pick up the pace. Look at the difference between 150 and 230. They had one agent average 70 appointments a day and 300 handles. They have five agents average over 50 appointments a day. Now again you're thinking, how could I ever get to that? We're only averaging 18 a day. These numbers only matter in conjunction to the other non revenue calls that they have. Just for reference, their status checks are at 20% or less. They take no other inbound calls that aren't revenue calls. They really hump it. But they've improved every year here and you can too. You can do more than you think. So another BDC we had before volley, they went to 2,000 outbound attempts a week. They do about 14,500 a week with a 34% contact rate. So it's out there for you to do it. One thing I just really wanted to stress is that you first have to decide you can do more in your mind and every one of you can. You guys are the folks that make this happen. And remember, we've got to play offense because the customers don't think of us as much as we think of them and we're not going to wait around for the business to get in. So any questions of follow up, you can reach out to me scottally.com you can call me. I always answer my phone. I'll do any of these calls with you guys. Work on pacing. Spend five minutes a day training your agents on dispositions, script adherence. Pull one call. Whether you have pulse or you're just listening to them, you can do these numbers. They're the people that, that I shine these number showed you, showed you these numbers for. They're good managers, they're experienced managers, but they put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else and, and you can do it too. So well Jake, I actually took 26 minutes from once I got started, but there you go.

Well, good. Well thanks for going through that. A lot of great insights and data. You know one of the things that really stands out to me personally, we, you know we run into this on a lot of calls are the, is the, you know, don't wait around for the phone to ring. You know, I was doing a call with a customer the other day and they're just getting started so you know they're going to start doing a great job. But you know their, their wrap up time on a call. You know their average ready time, it's something like 3 minutes and 42 seconds or something. They're waiting for the phone to ring. And, you know, we know that the average outbound call is only a couple of minutes, so that that's two outbound calls they could squeeze in in between the inbound call. So I think all this data is really great and hopefully that you all found that to be interesting. And please let us know if you have any questions. And we already had one that I answered. Scott, someone asked how could we get the slide deck? And I said they can email you directly, of course. Feel free to reach out to me or Liza or someone as well. But we can definitely get you the slides with the data. So let's hang on here for a minute or two, see if anyone has any questions. I know a lot of this is pretty straightforward, and it's just, you know, digging into the data and seeing your own data and seeing where you can improve. But it's very interesting to think about where you can get to. Any other comments, Scott, as we're wrapping up and waiting for, you know, giving everyone a minute.

No, hope everyone's having a great November. We have Thanksgiving next week. We'll do this again. The next one will be in January, I think, so we'll. We won't mess with December because a lot of people take a lot of time off. But hope you're all doing well. Certainly we wish you the best and please reach out if there's ever anything we can do for you.

Well, now the questions are pouring in, so. So just going down the list for that. 14, 500 weekly calls. How many agents did they have?

They. They have, depending on. On the staffing levels, 17 to 20.

Okay. And what is the minimum outbound call requirements you see other teams make? Well, it's interesting and I'll answer, and then I'll let Scott answer. You know, it's interesting because we see some people who, you know, they set and I don't typically. We see some people do it, you know, an outbound, a strictly outbound call goal for the day. We see a lot of people who have their daily requirements or daily goals are inbound, outbound, together. And we see a lot of people who have 80 calls, you know, inbound, outbound for their agents. We know it can be much higher. We have a lot of other groups who, you know, their minimum requirements are 150 or 200 or. I even know a group whose minimum is 250. So, you know, it can be done if you're willing to push it. I mean Scott, what do you typically see?

You know so much of this depends on what type of calls they're making and taking. Also staffing levels. Certainly you can have too many people because you know vole allows you to go faster. But I would love everyone to bare minimum get up to one and a half outbound attempts for everyone inbound and then see whether you can, you can build there. So we do have you know, if you're, if you've got a nine person BDC and you're down to five people because of illnesses etc. You're just going to be hanging on for dear life. But if you're fully staffed, you can do more than you think you can do.

Does inbound account for callbacks on that?

Inbound accounts for callbacks on my stats it but the outbound conversions were separated out. You know we filtered by inbound calls from outbound campaigns when I gave those numbers.

Any tips on overcoming the call filtering on iPhones?

Well, I mean you can answer this one as good as me Jake. It's not default. We don't see it widespread. You know, hopefully it will never be the default setting for Apple. I, I do. You guys have a service number that you've been, you've been using for Volley? If you've been on for a while I would encourage people to save it. I would encourage you to use we now can send calendar invites. I would encourage you to send the calendar invite and put the information in there. But mostly I would encourage you to leave friendly voicemails. They're going to see it. What do you think Jake?

Yeah, I mean so I think the biggest thing here is that it is not a default setting. So while some people are you know of course change that and dig into all the ways that they can do these things. You know just I've seen a quick Google search will tell me this. I this is higher than I've typically seen. I thought it was 80, something like 82% but quick Google search I see a few articles 90 to 95% never change their default iPhone settings. So I always thought it was in the 80s. But regardless of the exact number, you know I think the trends show that you read that a large majority of people do not change the default setting. So as long as that stays that case that it is an optional thing, I don't think it should be that impactful. For our part we have not seen contact rates decrease across the platform in the last month or so though I know it's still you know, not everyone's on the new iOS 26 yet, but it is, you know, the other thing there is, like Scott says, you know, make, you know, make, you know, thoughtful messages and voicemails. I do know, you know, to my understanding with the call screening on if they don't get to the screening or don't answer it, you know, a lot of the times it'll still ring. So, you know, I think TBD on it. I'm not overly concerned at the moment, but I think time will tell and we'll be sure to let you all know what we see regarding that as it become, if it becomes more used. And that's a great question. We'll keep an eye on it. Does Volley have any reports tracking the amount of status calls that a store or department may receive in a day?

Yeah, and your CS rep can help you with that, whether we get it in an export or, or in, in the disposition report, et cetera. And we've got good plans for that going forward.

Okay, I have seven brands and five agents. What do you recommend for success? I'm guessing the question is, you know, benchmarking and pacing.

Yeah. Okay, I'm going to speak generically here because I, I don't know what your mix of calls the BDC is, is receiving. I'm going to assume that outbound, you're making mostly revenue calls, which we always want you to ring the tail In a single store. Keep in mind you can't do as many, you can't receive as many inbound calls per agent because, you know, they all tend to come at the same time. So you're on an in, on a, on a single store. We're seeing that, you know, 30, 40, 50 inbound calls per agent will allow, you know, you've got a staff a little bit heavier, but it'll allow for more outbound calls. When you look at a central bdc, or in this instance, we see a, a number here. And your CS rep can help, definitely. Liza's been through this a million times, but you see a point at like 7,8000 ros a month where you can do this with one agent for every thousand ros. And, and keep in mind your numbers will be different based on what other types of calls they're doing. But. And then as you get to 15, 16,000 ROS, etc, then you can even, you can even, you know, the inbound numbers even out. I'd have to know the numbers, but that's generally how I look at it, and that's how I benchmark it so count how many inbound calls there the each agent's taking and work backwards from there.

Yeah, it's a lot of. It also depends on, you know, on the brands too. You know, some of the, you know, luxury brands, the calls typically take a little longer. You know, that obviously the more time spent on the phone, you know, determines how many more calls they can get to. Right. But in general I think that if you take your inbound volume and you, you know, try to map out how quickly they're going, look at the wrap up time, look at, look at how long they're spending in between calls and you should be able to figure out, you know, where you can be.

Yeah, I mean so when we recently looked at this, the average inbound call that was an appointment took 4 minutes and 4 seconds. If you look at a 35% blended answer rate, if you're taking 60 to 70 inbound calls, you can minimum do double that. And outbound if you're taking less than that because which a lot of single stores are like I said, by how they're spread out, you can probably up that. When it's not in your peak times.

Though, I, you know, based on the message seven brands, I assume it's not a single store. So you know, a lot of it just really depends on, on the, your specific situation and the numbers that you have Inbound volume, you know, five agents could be plenty for the volume, five agents could not be enough for the volume. So some of this is, is hard to say off the cuff but you know, really digging into your agent efficiency stats will really help you know what you can do. So Scott, that was the last question that we had come in. Any other closing thoughts here?

Now if I don't speak to you guys before, have a great Thanksgiving and we'll see on the next one of these.

Thank you all so much for joining, really appreciate it and feel free to reach out to any of us if you have any questions and we hope you all have a fantastic day.

See ya.