Case Study: Cydcor’s Outsourced Sales Solution

One of the oldest methods for achieving sales growth is still one of the most effective parts of the marketing mix today: face-to-face sales. Many businesses, however, lack the staff and resources to deploy targeted face-to-face sales campaigns across geographies.

Seeking to generate more revenue, these organizations often turn to sales and marketing outsourcing companies like Cydcor (www.cydcor.com) to help them reach, engage, and acquire new customers.

Founded in 1994, the Westlake Village, CA-based Cydcor has certainly made a name for itself over the last decade-and-a-half. For proof, look no further than the 2009 installment of “The Black Book of Outsourcing,” a globally recognized annual survey conducted by Datamonitor.

Some 26,000 C-level officers and senior executives ranked Cydcor No. 1 in several key areas, including sales team outsourcing and sales support service, client satisfaction, and numerous performance categories (including vendor overall preference, training, trust, and reliability).

Clearly, Cydcor is doing something right. The company’s sales network marshals approximately 200 offices in North America and nearly 3,000 representatives.

In expanding its market coverage, Cydcor has generated impressive results for leading brands in the telecommunications, cable, Internet, office products, financial services, and energy industries In 2008, the company produced an estimated $2 billion of value for its clients and more than 92,000 new customers per month.

Three key factors account for this success: a company mission that meets a growing need, a collaborative culture that cultivates and rewards excellence, and a proven business model that drives results.

At the company’s core is what Chief Executive Officer Gary Polson describes as a singular “focus to be the best outsourced sales solution for [Cydcor’s] clients.” Cydcor’s mission anticipates and fulfills an escalating market need, as organizations seek more scalable solutions to achieve top-line growth and bottom-line value in the post-recession environment.

Fueling this mission are seven behaviors the firm instills in its people: integrity, service, team member development, collaboration, respect, open communication, and execution. As the foundation for Cydcor’s culture, this code of conduct guides every action and interaction throughout the company.

These behaviors have not only contributed to the business success of Cydcor’s offices, but have also made the company a preferred employer with an engaged and productive workforce. A prominent California survey has recognized Cydcor as one of the “Best Places to Work” for two consecutive years, touting its supportive work environment and culture, open communication, quality and commitment of management, and benefits.

From monthly rewards for modeling company behaviors to ongoing training that hones skills and leadership, the result is a performance-based environment centered on clients and the sales professionals who serve them. “Delivering excellence at every level is not just lip service. It’s simply who we are and what we do,” says Jim Majeski, Cydcor’s president.

The company’s unique culture drives not only individual behaviors, but also a third element critical to its success—its business model. Through its network of independently owned sales offices in the U.S. and Canada, the firm offers access to several thousand experienced representatives who represent the top tier of their industry and work exclusively for Cydcor.

In keeping with this client-centric culture, Cydcor’s sales teams typically focus on one campaign at a time. They provide targeted expertise in business-to-business sales, business-to-consumer sales, and retail sales supporting manufacturing and service-provider clients.

Advancing this effort is rigorous training tailored for the client’s product or service. The result is deep knowledge about a specific client and industry, from product knowledge, to customer and competitor insights, to objection-handling and advanced customer acquisition techniques. In short, each representative becomes a persuasive subject matter expert and passionate brand advocate to the people the client wants to reach most.

Effective teamwork between Cydcor’s offices and management ensures the business model operates smoothly. As the primary liaison, Cydcor manages the overall client relationship. It also designs the back-end systems and processes for the sales offices, their representatives, and clients. “The results are exceptional professionalism in the field, the acquisition of good customers for our clients, and the ability to hit our sales targets,” Polson asserts.

The experiences of two Cydcor clients ably demonstrate the effectiveness of this business model. In the first, a company in the highly competitive cable industry joined forces with Cydcor in an effort to grow sales; the client’s intent was to expand its sales force while minimizing overhead. In this pay-for-performance model, Cydcor acquired more than 1,000 new customers for the client in a week.

In the second example, an established telecommunications client came to Cydcor needing to acquire more consumer and small business customers in new territories—and quickly. Cydcor had its sales offices hire, train, and deploy nearly 800 sales representatives during the campaign’s peak. In that year, Cydcor sold more than 800,000 products on behalf of this client.

Crucially, Cydcor has hit upon a formula for delivering value its clients can count on—helping them to generate revenues and grow their businesses, even in the face of a stagnant economy.