QualPro Achieves Breakthrough Sales Improvement for Monster.com
How Monster.com Scares Up a Sales Boost
Monster.com, the career search engine, used MVT to improve its telephone-acquisition sales force. They identified
changes that will boost sales performance 25% in the next year
By Keith Dawson.
11/10/2006, 2:21 PM ET
Monster.com is familiar to most job-seek-
ers. It’s a company that uses the web
to make matches between job-hunters
and employers who need to hire. What
most job-seekers don’t realize is that the
company makes its money selling listings
to those employers. Think of it as selling
classified advertising -- an employer pays
for a certain number of listings that can be
used within a set period of time.
And of course, it takes a call center-based
sales force to prospect through the uni-
verse of potential employers to sell those
listings.
Recently, the company used an innovative
technique to improve their sales perfor-
mance.
“We were at the time a two call center or-
ganization, but we’ve since added a third,”
says Monster’s John Hyland. He describes
Monster’s business as “very transactional”
-- there are as many as 300,000 active
customer relationships at any one time.
“Our mantra of sales is volume and activ-
ity,” he says. “The measurements that we
have typically used were very standard:
call contacts, time spent on the phone.”
What Monster’s call center operations
were charged with changing was “how
we could maximize productivity and gain
efficiencies -- there are certain things you
can achieve through volume, but what we
were looking for was an edge that would
make us a little more sophisticated and
intelligent about where we spent the time.”
At the same time, sales were growing for
the company fairly quickly. So to tackle the
question they had about how to improve
their operations, they looked at an innova-
tive statistical technique called Multi-Vari-
able Testing, or MVT. It’s a fairly technical
mathematical method for assessing an
entire battery of changes all at once, us-
ing statistical sampling. Developed by a
company called QualPro, it helps you ana-
lyze the consequences of making many
changes at once to a situation.
In MVT, you identify the factors that you’d
consider altering. These can be simple
changes: the wording of a greeting; the
particular mix of products in an upsell of-
fer; the addition of specific training to reps,
and so on. MVT analysis then creates a
matrix of “recipes” that let you test all the
considered changes in combination with
the other changes. You run the “recipes”
on a series of limited target agent groups,
and voila, you can see definitively which
changes help, which hurt, and which have
no effect.
Monster had had some experience using
MVT to analyze its ecommerce operations,
which Hyland says is a more traditional
environment for it.
In the largely outbound environment
that Monster operates, there are many
variables that could be manipulated to
improve performance. They include the
volume of calls, the various metrics used
to measure success, the average order
size, and what activities reps spend their
time on. “You have three or four stages of
the sales process where you really want to
have the sales force spend their time,” Hy-
land says. “The less prospecting, the less
quoting, the less administrative paperwork,
the better off they are.”
“We had some ideas of things that we
thought were drags on getting the reps
to spend time on the high value areas,”
he says. For example, they assumed
that there were aspects of the prospect-
ing and qualification process that were
bottlenecks. Another area where they saw
a chance to make up some ground was in
the quoting and closing process.
So they came up with that “menu” of pos-
sible changes to procedures and practices.
One area they considered had to do with
yearlong job postings. Reps were selling
a year-long commitment, yet customers
often believed that they had to use that
inventory immediately. Would sales go
up if reps stressed to customers that they
had up to a year to use the postings they
purchased?
As it turned out, the MVT process found
that their thinking was precisely opposite
to the desired results. “As we got the team
focused on underscoring that the postings
were good for a whole year, it got custom-
ers thinking in a different manner that
delayed the transaction. They thought of
it as more of a long term process,” Hyland
says. “It made things worse.”
Monster ballparked a list of about 80
possible changes, largely generated by
the reps themselves. The list was whittled
down to a menu of 56 variables that were
to be measured and tested.
The MVT process “has to do with being
able to measure the impact of things in a
short term period, and how they play off
against each other,” Hyland says.
All told, the things that worked, and were
implementable, gave the organization a
measurable sales boost. And the timing
was critical: Monster wanted to establish
a set of baseline best practices before a
series of expansions with a third major
sales center and the launch of several
international product offerings.
“There wasn’t a person involved who
wasn’t surprised by something we found,”
Hyland says. “Everybody goes in with pre-
conceived notions -- we all went through
something that we thought would make
a big difference that didn’t. It reveals the
unbiased nature of statistics.”