In order to work better together, we have to understand each other. This can apply to any area of life, and to any part of the World, but it’s fundamental to a relationship where an organisation is outsourcing an element of their business and placing it in the hands of an external agency, which is something we at Next Call have become very experienced at over the many years we have been working with all our clients.
Collaboration not only across the organisation, but across teams and peers, and technologies, will enhance the working relationship and allow for a better flow of knowledge.
This helps the external team integrate more fully and to absorb key facts and information that are necessary to make the campaign a success. This works across technologies as well. Collaborating and overlapping with internal systems produces a much clearer picture for the client with real-time information available to them whenever they need to monitor and analyse the progress of a campaign.
One of our recent clients, a company called Humanyze, entrusted us with a sales lead generation project to increase their opportunities of getting face to face with prospects.
Humanyze are experts in analysing data and trends to support and influence decision making, using something called Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) which they use to derive and understand business benefits across areas such as:
Process Optimisation and Productivity Improvement
Employee Wellbeing
Workplace Design and Efficiency
Measurement of Employee Engagement and Collaboration
ONA enables faster and more accurate decision making when it comes to organisation change, leading to measurable improvements in efficiency, productivity, employee retention and other key business objectives.
We found this way of working and business proposition fascinating which meant that the team were even more keen to learn more!
By working with their existing systems and leveraging globally shared technologies like Linkedin we have been able to identify more easily the target audience and open up channels of communication that support the traditional telephone approach.
This has proved especially useful when targeting not only in the UK, but across Europe and the US as well. Although time zones can sometimes get in the way, centralised information and taking a common approach breaks down those barriers.
Molly Falconer, Senior Director of Marketing at Humanyze, had this to say about us…
Working with Next Call has kept us organised; it has been a much better process for us than having someone in-house, saving us a lot of time and stress as the Next Call team understood the process from the start. The level of intelligence and experience is right there and there's no time-consuming training involved.
Taking the time to fully understand not only a client’s technology and their proposition, but also the marketing that is currently in place, including collateral, websites, videos and case studies etc, all builds confidence within the team, enabling them to have discussions at a level that reassure the prospect that they are speaking to someone who not only understands the solution they are talking about, but who also knows enough to understand how it will impact on their business in a positive way, and to be able to listen and then walk them through how that would work.
Analysing the response to the messaging is also an extremely useful exercise for the client, providing them with essential information about how their current marketing and collateral is being received and how it can be changed or improved to get the message across more clearly.
Although the term ‘outsource’ is used when referring to the type of projects we and other sales and marketing agencies undertake for clients, we approach it instead very much as a collaboration, as teamwork, rather than being on the outside of something, we are focused on being on the inside and becoming integrated.
We have found that this produces better results not only in terms of numbers but, more importantly, in terms of long-term sustainable results. Collaboration is not just a business strategy, it’s about weaving knowledge and information into a long-term approach that results in success for everyone involved.