Leveraging Variation to Drive Revenue

Most people associate reducing variation with improving quality, efficiency, or the customer experience. But driving revenue? Not really.

Well, think again. A very real example…

Years ago, I led a 700+ person inside sales call center operations focused on converting paid inbound calls. The revenue opportunity for these inbound calls varied wildly by source, and our long-standing playbook was to route the highest revenue opportunity calls to the best agents. Makes sense, right?

But when we challenged ourselves and dug deeper into the data, we were stunned. For many of the higher opportunity calls (which were more “order taking” type sales), the lower and higher skilled agents performed about the same. Low variation. Whereas for the tougher lower revenue opportunity calls, the lower and higher skilled agents performed very differently. High variation.

So, we flipped the model. We started routing calls based on agent performance differences, regardless of the call type opportunity, and got a massive step-function jump in revenue overnight. And we aligned comp so our top talent still won, even with taking on more of the tougher calls.

The lesson? Understanding variation has massive applications across the spectrum, including revenue growth.

Image by Mohamed Hassan on Pixabay