How I Revived A Vital Sales Campaign, Increasing Performance By 281%
With Josh Ballantyne, Insurance Manager at Kiwibank
Show Notes
Josh Ballantyne is the Insurance Manager at Kiwibank. He’s spent 13 years in the financial industry - working with some of New Zealand’s largest insurers and companies - and has created huge performance transformations in multiple sales campaigns he’s been responsible for.
He’s got great tips on how you can achieve the same.
Top 3 Tips:
Put yourself in a positive mindset - you can lift performance (11:26).
Identify what behaviours distinguish your high performers from your average performers. Train all agents to use them on every call (12:12).
Praise agents every time you observe them using these high performance behaviours (12:55).
You'll Learn:
The key advantage you have in your contact centres - over any other channel - when it comes to lifting performance (04:37).
How many behaviours distinguish your high performers from everyone else. The number will surprise you (07:05).
The surprising transformations in Josh’s agents, which happened at the same time they lifted performance (09:05).
How much more praise than correction Team Leaders need to give agents, so agents reach their potential (13:11).
Connect with Josh on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshballantyne/
Get your free copy of Game On here: https://bravatrak.com/game-on-book (you’ll also get the latest podcast episodes sent straight to your inbox).
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome. This is the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak, the High-Performance Coaching System for Contact Centres. It helps you to create and sustain a world-class coaching culture, so you can beat your targets without burning people out.
Today I'm joined by Josh Ballantyne, who is the Insurance Manager for Kiwibank, and I'm rapt to have Josh along on this podcast, as he's an outstanding Contact Centre Sales Manager. Amongst his many other accomplishments, Josh was responsible as a Contact Centre Sales Manager in a previous organization for lifting sales revenue on several campaigns by more than 270%.
Today, he's got some great tips on how to revive your sales campaigns. So Josh, welcome along.
Josh Ballantyne (00:53)
Thanks Blair. Pleasure to be here.
Blair Stevenson (00:56)
It's great to have you here. Just as a starting point, tell us a bit about your background and your experience.
Josh Ballantyne (01:01)
Yeah. Cool. First of all, I just want to say thanks for having me on the show today. It's a great podcast and it's going to be a really awesome tool that can be used by a lot of New Zealand businesses, particularly in the contact centre space.
A little bit about me, I've got 13 years in the financial industry, focused on the insurance side of things, and predominantly in sales. So more on the front-line side of things.
And I've worked with some of New Zealand's largest insurers. And in that time, with some of New Zealand's largest companies. Just working with them in business partnerships and whatnot.
And, really, my expertise is understanding that insurance is largely misunderstood. And so I've got a real passion for, one, speaking with customers myself, and helping explain how insurance can be genuinely beneficial.
But then on the other side of things, being in sales leadership. Being the coach and on the sales side of things. More focusing, not on operational "let's just get the team going" as they normally do, but actually really getting in and creating a high-performance framework and culture around that. And to drive high performance within the team, so you've got a happy team and happy customers.
Blair Stevenson (02:21)
Cool, cool, great background. Thank you. So thinking about kind of reviving sales campaigns, just in terms of what we've been discussing recently, what was the kind of the problem or the opportunities you faced, and what were the implications arising from that?
Josh Ballantyne (02:36)
Yeah, yeah. So a really, really good example of this is - I just want to touch on the fact that I believe that insurance is largely misunderstood in the general public.
So if you're a business and you’re getting cut-through with [customers], you generally want to hold onto that cut-through. Because if you're getting that cut-through, they generally understand what it is that you're offering, and how it can help. So if you get that, you want to hold onto it, and that's really, really important.
So what we had at my previous organization, we had a really successful campaign that we ran for many, many years. And it was getting that cut-through that we wanted. We were getting customers who understood what we were offering, understood how it could help them, and they were coming to us with queries around it.
(03:18)
Now what was actually happening is over time, the influx of queries was decreasing. And further to that, the actual sales conversion when they got in touch with us, the conversion through that was decreasing as well. So it really started to make us call into question the viability of that channel of getting information out to our customers. And then we'd have to do a bit of a rethink around strategy, which could have various implications around the place.
So that was the problem that we were facing at that particular time. We had a really, really successful information campaign out there. It was just waning over time. And we had tried many, many different ways to make it a bit better, make it a bit more profitable for the company, a little bit more better information for the customer, so they could be better protected. But after all of those attempts, we were sort of stumbling.
Blair Stevenson (04:12)
And the reality is, change is constant. So these things happened. So how did you go about addressing this issue?
Josh Ballantyne (04:19)
Yeah. Good question Blair. Well I think the first thing we did was we consulted our Brava material. We went back to the material, and then we understood potentially some of the gaps that we were not fully utilizing, essentially.
So really what we did is ... call centers are awesome. I absolutely love call centers. But the really, really cool thing about a call center is that you can actually go back and listen to your calls. If you're in a branch network, you're in a face-to-face retail situation, you can't go back and analyze a customer situation that has happened a month in the past, a year in the past. You can't actually understand the differences in customer behavior and your staff behavior over time.
So a really, really key and important thing that we did was, basically, I booked a meeting room and I sat down for days and days and days, and I analyzed calls over time. Over a long period of time.
What we did then is I looked at all of the people of all the calls that I listened to - which was a spread of all the people in the current team, and some people who had left over time. And we then plotted their performance on a normal distribution graph. So we could see we had a group of top performers over here. We had a larger group of people who were just sort of in the middle, they were doing okay, but not exceptional. And then we had a smaller group of the people who weren't getting that cut-through to customers like [the high performers].
So then what we did is, after doing the analysis of all those calls and that normal distribution - we then listened to specifically the things that the top performers did, absolutely every single time, or most of the time. Then with that … they were obviously the words that they were using, they were using phrases. And we then boil those phrases down into "what were they trying to achieve with that phrase?"
(06:16)
It was a big list, of course. And then we did the same for the middle group. And then we identified that the middle group weren't always - or very few times - doing what [the high performers] were doing every time. So we captured that information, wrote it down.
Then we said "right, we just want to get the middle people doing what the top people were doing absolutely every time." That would then mean that we're moving the middle team to the [performance of the] higher team.
And we know that the high performers generally have, one, higher performance from a business point of view. But number two, they actually, they come away with more customers protected, happier customers, better NPS (Net Promoter Score) scores, things like that. So what we did is we rolled out all of what we called the "critical behaviors of high performance".
(07:05)
And then we ... I think there were about five of them from memory. Five from memory. So we rolled them out. So not a huge amount. You'd be surprised. The actual critical ones that you truly truly need is not many.
So we briefed the team - it was a big project of course - we briefed the team, we rolled it out. And then we said, "right, team. Let's put these in order. At the start of the call to the end of the call, this is where you do them." So they knew where to do it in the call. We then talked about how you'd do it in the call. Because everyone does it slightly differently.
And we said "awesome. Now we're only going to focus on one of them. And that one will be the first one.” Because you want to start at the start of the call and end at the end. Right? So the team agreed that they would use the first one. And then that would be our focus for a period of time until we were all using it perfectly, then we moved to the next one.
(07:55)
Now the key thing here, as the leader though, is to follow up. You follow up, you listen to it, you listen for it. And when they do it, you praise it. That there is the absolute critical thing. Now you're going to get people who sometimes forget to do it. It's going to happen. Sometimes you might need to do a little bit of correction. But you want to be praising when they do it. Hear it every time and you praise it.
Then, of course, what actually happened is when they're focusing on one high performance behaviour, they go, "Oh, cool, I'm getting lots of praise here. I'm going to do the rest of them as well." So then you start praising them on all of them, and then they're doing them all.
All of a sudden, we turned that campaign around. And yeah, I think month-on-month, I think you mentioned numbers, about a 280% to 270% - or something like that - month-on-month improvement that was maintained for a long period of time.
Blair Stevenson (08:42)
That's outstanding. It is outstanding. And it just simply shows you the power of understanding the behavioral difference between your high performers and your more average performers. You're saying sort of between a 270% to 280% increase in terms of performance. What other outcomes did you get out of that project?
Josh Ballantyne (09:05)
Yeah. So this is actually really quite surprising. So there are a number of quite obvious ones. So I think the first one is we secured the viability of the campaign. So that meant we didn't need to go and change strategy.
And we helped more people - people being New Zealanders - understand the importance of the product that we were offering at that particular time. And the key benefit from that for them, and for us, is that we were protecting more Kiwis. Because, typically, we are largely under-insured as a nation. It's for various reasons. But one of the main things is we did cover more Kiwis, which is a big goal of any insurer - to truly, truly help.
But another thing is actually staff satisfaction in their role actually increased. I think that's largely due to the fact that they saw personal progress and the direction. They saw the performance shift, they were getting personally better outcomes. No one likes to hear a "no" when your when you're talking to someone. They were getting more yeses. So they felt good.
And of course, their manager, which was myself and the other Team Leaders, we were giving them more praise. We were praising them about the critical behaviors that we'd identified. They were then following up. So they were feeling good. Our customers were feeling good. It was actually a really, really good time.
Blair Stevenson (10:19)
Outstanding results across the board. I mean, most people would go, "wow. How is that even possible to get that?" And yet, you know, to get much greater performance in terms of sales, to avoid having to change your strategy, to get much higher employee engagement, at the same time is an incredible result.
So sort of reflecting back on all of that, what would you say would be your top three tips for Contact Centre Leaders, or Contact Centre Sales Managers, who find themselves in a similar position?
Josh Ballantyne (10:58)
You can find yourself in a similar position, where your campaign is going in a direction where it's your job to make sure it doesn't do that. It's your job to make sure it increases. And if it is increasing, if you get a 5% increase in a month, usually that's like "awesome, great stuff".
So you're right. To see pretty big numbers like that was was quite a cool breakthrough. If I was to reflect on it, there's definitely a top three.
Tip #1 (11:26)
The first thing to do is if you do find yourself in a situation where something is going backwards, you've been trying to do lots and lots of things, and you're probably feeling, you're probably feeling a bit down, you're the Sales Manager and it's your job to make other people feel good and essentially hit the numbers. And in turn, that probably makes you feel good.
So if you're not, you're probably not feeling great. So the first thing to do is actually assess that mindset and put yourself into a growth and positive mindset. Because if it's worked before, there's a chance it'll actually work again. So get yourself out of the dumps. Think about what you can do. So, be positive.
Tip #2 (12:12)
The next thing is to approach it exactly the way that we just discussed, which is work out who the actual top performers are. Because in some businesses it's easy to do. In some businesses it's really difficult to do. Spend the time and figure out where do people fit? Where do they fit on the key metrics that you want to actually measure? So you go, "cool. Here’s my top, here's my middle, here's my lower people".
And then go and figure out what the differences between those people are. Identify the actual behavior itself, rather than generalizations. So rather than saying, "be a happy cheerful person", say "smile and say 'welcome' with a loud tone". Something like that. So be very, very specific in what it is you want your staff to do. And then you roll it out.
Tip #3 (12:55)
Now, the key thing, like I said, is follow-up, but praise. So you praise, absolutely praise your staff and your team for doing the things that you asked them to do. Paying them each day gets them to work. Praising them gets them to do what you want them to do. So you do that at least five times more than your correction. And you're getting in a good direction.
Blair Stevenson (13:19)
Great. I like that. What you pay them gets to them to work. What you praise them for is what they're motivated to do. Fantastic, great summary.
Well, that's all we've got time for today. Thank you so much to Josh for coming on the show today. You've given us some wonderful insights into how to revive a sales campaign.
Now, for listeners, you'll find a link to the show notes and the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Josh on LinkedIn, you'll also find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the description too (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshballantyne/).
Now, if you've tuned in today looking for a way to create and sustain a world-class coaching culture, so you can beat your targets without burning people out, just like Josh did, have I got an offer for you!
You're welcome to a free copy of my book, Game On: How to Increase Sales, Productivity, and Customer Experience by Turning Your Managers Into High-Performance Coaches.
The link to that offer is also in the episode description below (https://bravatrak.com/game-on-book).
Well, that's it from us today. Have a productive week.