1,521 dealers spoken to in five days, for ₹8,510

The job

Sparsh Pearl is the bathware brand of Pearl Precision Products, sold through dealers and distributors. When it runs a dealer scheme, the hard part is telling every dealer. A field executive gets through eight to ten calls an hour, so the 1,521 dealers in this campaign would take about 21 working days, before salary, travel or supervision.

Reach mattered. In the first cycle, 549 of the 753 dealers who gave a clear answer said they had not heard of the scheme before the call.

What the agent did

The agent called each dealer in Hindi. It named the company and the reason for calling in its first line, explained the scheme, answered questions about it, and asked for the order. Every call was recorded and transcribed, and each dealer was sorted by what they actually said, never by what the agent raised.

What changed after the first cycle

Every call in the first cycle was reviewed. Four changes went into the next one:

• A short reply such as “ji” or “haan” now counts as a dealer listening. Polite, brief answers had been closing calls early.
• A direct question gets answered first, and then the agent picks up where it stopped.
• The proof that the scheme pays out moved into the opening lines, where the doubt forms.
• The agent says who it is, who it is calling for and why in its first sentence.

What came back

From the second cycle, 27 to 31 August:

• 30 hours of recorded conversation, 593 of those conversations substantial.
• 14 dealers rejected the scheme, and 12 asked not to be contacted again.
• A workable list of 828 dealers, with no new numbers to dial. 437 of them are priority leads, at ₹19.47 each.
• 11 dealers moved on to ordering during the call, asking how many boxes or who to order from.
• A sixth attempt led to a substantial conversation on 30% of calls, against 27% on the first, so later tries were worth making.
• Calls between 10 am and noon led to a substantial conversation about 30% of the time, against about 20% early in the morning and just after lunch.

What these numbers are not

They are conversations and leads, not sales. Dealers order through their distributors, and Sparsh Pearl's team works the list from there.

Other partners, other conversations

Dealers are one part of a channel. In an earlier test with counter staff, the people behind a dealer's counter, an agent took them through their own scheme in two parts, checked they had understood the first before going on, and helped with problems scanning their points. It was a test on a small list, so it has no figures here. It showed the same agent has to hold a different conversation for each kind of partner.