In 2015, Ricci, a School Experience Manager for eDynamic Learning, was being stood up on sales calls 63% of the time. Not surprisingly, her sales numbers were hurting – you can’t sell if you can’t get prospects on the phone.

eDynamic was using a cold calling company to book leads for them. Unfortunately, the cold calling agency wasn’t doing anything other than scheduling calls. They weren’t qualifying any of the prospects ahead of time.

To make matters more difficult, eDynamic sells into schools and school districts and relies on outbound sales as its primary revenue driver. Needless to say, something needed to change.

Enter Predictable Revenue.

When eDynamic switched to Predictable Revenue, attendance rates for sales calls doubled, the number of opportunities created from outbound soared by 440%, and revenue from outbound jumped by 40%. Not too bad.

Throughout this post, we’ll detail why eDynamic transitioned from a cold calling agency to Predictable Revenue and take a deep dive into their results before and after the switch.

The Challenge

When eDynamic started, its early growth came primarily from word of mouth and customer referrals. As the company grew, however, they needed to increase sales in order to hit their growth targets and turned to a cold calling agency to help them out. And the early results were impressive: eDynamic quickly scaled up to 40 meetings per month.

Unfortunately, the excitement didn’t last.

“The call center was making very introductory calls…basically, they’d confirm if the prospects were the principal or superintendent and book some time on our calendars. People didn’t know why they were speaking to us and we had a lot of no-shows and unqualified meetings as a result,” says Ricci.

“The cold callers were rewarded just for putting a meeting on our calendar. Prospects were being annoyed because they just kept calling with the same message. It’s possible to make a good call but there’s so much more work and investment required to do it really well. The cold callers weren’t making these investments, we could hear it on the call recordings. The conversations they were having weren’t being used to qualify the prospects, there was no sense of urgency, and there was no reason for them to get on the call. We spent more time rescheduling these meetings that nobody was going to show up for than actually talking to customers.”

Ricci and her team found that 63% – 63%! – of prospects weren’t showing up to meetings, which lead to even more work trying to reschedule the calls that the team knew would never end up happening. Sadly, things weren’t much better when prospects did show up; often they weren’t interested in their products or weren’t even involved in the decision to purchase software.

“It wasn’t resulting in pipeline growth, we weren’t getting the quality of prospect that we wanted, and it became a huge time waster,” adds Ricci.

After an entire year, Ricci’s team was frustrated by the lack results and needed to find something that would help her hit their growth targets. She decided to pull the plug on the cold calling agency and started looking for a partner that could help them achieve their goals.