The sales contact centre cookbook

Successful Selling:
The Sales Contact Centre Cookbook
About the Author
Mark Kehoe is a former RightNow / Oracle Service Cloud Principal Consultant who
joined the company way back in 2006. He has since gone on to create his own
consultancy company based in Australia. He has been a regular contributor to the
Oracle Service Cloud conferences both in Europe and Australia.
About this Document
The audience for this document is an Oracle Service Cloud client who’s
implemented service and might have used the marketing module. This document
offers no warranty for the implementation of the sales module but will give you a
ideas, suggestions and a check-list of the configurations to accomplish.
The document is a cookbook for implementing a sales contact centre within Oracle
Service Cloud and is the compendium to the “Successful Selling using Oracle Service
Cloud”.
Oracle Service Cloud – Sales Introduction
The sales module or sales component of Oracle Service Cloud (OSC) offers a simple
method to allow a contact to be offered goods and services then have the
interaction managed and tracked until it’s finished.
It needs no integration and little configuration for it to work.
This cookbook will focus on B2C, be that client, consumer or customer (or more
typically for me – student). The sales module can manage businesses but this won’t
be included. Customer Portal can also include opportunities on the end-user pages
but this won’t be covered either. If there’s an appetite I’ll create an appendage to
explain B2B and CP.
Oracle Service Cloud – Sales Concepts
The important thing to remember is that opportunities are not like incidents; incidents
(or enquiries as I like to call them) are an open and shut case, opportunities take
time. The analogy I like to give is that enquiry management is for short-duration
interactions over hours or days. Opportunities are long-duration interactions over
days, weeks or months.

2 The Sales Contact Centre Cookbook
Created by Mark Kehoe mark.kehoe@outlook.com 0487 335311
An opportunity has a child-relationship to a quote. A quote is a container for the
sales products that the opportunity relates to (and you can also use the quote to
send your customers a letter using Microsoft Word).
Sales products connect to service products found in both incident management
and the knowledgebase as well as the assets object. In this regard the sales module
is at the centre of Oracle Service Cloud.
Implementation basics: lead generation
A lead is someone who has either self-identified themselves or your institution /
organisation has identified them as a possible consumer. This means that they have
a contact record and an open opportunity.
A contact / opportunity relationship can be created in two ways; a marketing
campaign can generate an opportunity (more of which later) or a service advisor
can recognise the enquiry is a potential lead and use the opportunity button on the
enquiry workspace to create a simple lead (again I cover this later in the
document).
Implementation basics: using marketing
Marketing is one of the two methods to generate leads (as well as using inbound
enquiries). By sending out a marketing mailing using OSC you have a ready-made
integration to send them a personal message (using enquiries), tracking their use of
the knowledgebase or seeing how they interact with your mailings or surveys with
tracked links.
I’m the first to admit that OSC doesn’t have the beautiful design canvas that Eloqua
has and designing a web page or a mailing isn’t as easy (anyone remember the
Dreamweaver connector?) but to be honest what matters it what your customers
see. By creating an integrated marketing / service / sales interaction you truly have
the 360-degree view of what you customers.

Kehoe Consulting
The sales contact centre cookbook
3
Here is a common campaign. I’m sending out a broadcast mailing, getting people
to register, adding them to a lead-list and redirecting them to a thank-you page.
Notice that the entry point is creating outreach activity; this is important because it
will give you an audit trail.
If I wanted I could create an opportunity when I know they want to attend my event
or subscribe to my product update at the stage of ‘lead’. We’ll look at strategies
and stages later.
Clearly it doesn’t have the functionality of Eloqua or the other marketing tools on the
market but to the person receiving the invite or reminder they won’t care.
Implementation basics: integrating other marketing tools
Marketing is the start of the conversation. If we fail to capture this conversation then
it makes the conversion process later that much harder. But what it you’re already
using Survey Monkey, Campaign Monitor or EventBrite? We need to have a simple
method of knowing what you said within Oracle Service Cloud and there are three
options:
1. Start marketing with the other tool and hand back to OSC
2. Start the marketing with OSC and hand-off to the other marketing tool
3. Import the marketing results into OSC

If you use another tool try and use option 1, but I’m going to show you all three.
Please note that I’ve used the word integration but I’m assuming this will be a
manual process. If you have connected these systems together the next part may
not be of as much interest.
Implementation basics: handing back to marketing
Prior to starting your marketing campaign with one of the other marketing tools
make sure you have a copy of the contacts into OSC so we know who we’re
expecting to reply.
We’re going to use the contact uploader to import the contacts we’ve sent an
email to from our other marketing tool and in doing so trigger a thank-you email. This
means we have a transaction against the contact that we can follow-up on.
First create a campaign with an entry point that creates outreach activity and
passes the parameter of contact ID into the thank-you email. First, the campaign:
Next upload the contacts you’ve sent out the mailing to using the other tool. This is in
two parts. Firstly, select the file from the other mailing and remember to include the
campaign from above:
Other marketing
tool
Contact
uploader
Launch
campaign
Create
audit trail

Kehoe Consulting
5
Next pick the fields that the other mailing field has used (because it may have
updated the contact details) and as a useful suggestion add a note to the contact
record explaining what’s just happened. This is going to be really useful for the sales
contact centre when they are chasing up leads:

Implementation basics: Handing off with marketing
As with handing back to Oracle Service Cloud, initiating the conversation with
marketing and handing off to a third-party marketing tool. We have a couple of
options to initiate our marketing process:
1. Export the contacts to our third-party tool
2. Initiate the interaction with a mailing containing a link to our third-party tool
For the first option you’ll need a report that contains the contacts and this will need
to be saved. Again there’s two ways; one, export the data and keep it somewhere
safe or better still publish the report on the system. If you’ve not published a report
before this is how you do it:
Now we have a static list of contacts this can be exported to the third-party
marketing tool. However, it would be nice if we knew that the contact has been
used in an external campaign. For this we use the same export for our third-party
marketing to import the contact record and narrate what we have done. I’d
recommend both:
Scheduled
report
Export
contacts
Reimport
contacts
Create
audit trail

Kehoe Consulting
7
Now we have captured the start of the process the external marketing tool and
continue to do the heavy lifting for us.
Implementation basics: importing marketing results
Without the entry point or exit point from a campaign creating a corresponding
marketing transaction isn’t possible; but we can use our contact notes to record
what we did.
Clearly this option gives the least amount of reporting and value back to the
business.
Implementation basics: Post-marketing interactions
After we’ve done all our marketing there’s a hope that some of those people we’ve
got in touch with are going to reply; either directly via email or the phone or
indirectly via a web-form and that may not create a nice incident.
Other
marketing tool
Contact
uploader
Contact
notes

If you’re using the third-party solutions they’ll send you a formatted email containing
what the person replied with and their details embedded in the email. You’ll need to
scoop the useful bits out, search for a contact record on Service Cloud and then
either switch the incident to them or create a new contact record. It’s a pain but it
has to be done – or alternative do all of your marketing using Oracle Service Cloud
as it can directly update the contact and create an enquiry.
The above example shows the structure text coming from a third-party email
solution; in this case it’s Campaign Monitor. The agent is going to search for the
student name and see if they are already on the system.
Opportunity management: Create a lead from enquiries
Did you know there are two opportunity workspaces? An opportunity is created in
two ways, one from marketing and the other from converting an enquiry into a lead.
Let’s look at the enquiry (incident) ribbon:
From here we can create a new opportunity. This workspace is put on the profile as
a service opportunity workspace. Think of this as a short-hand version of the full
opportunity workspace.

Kehoe Consulting
9
Now I have assigned this workspace to the profile, whenever my service agent sees
an enquiry that they think could be a lead they click on the button in the ribbon and
the enquiry is converted to an opportunity:
The opportunity has some basic fields that the service agent needs to complete. The
opportunity name is automatically populated as is the summary. The strategy and
stage (more of which later) is set by the workspace and there’s the opportunity for
the service agent to write some hand-over notes to the sales person.
Opportunity management: Offer Advisor
Oracle Service Cloud comes with a wealth of tools to support the service advisor
answer questions that your customers might have. The knowledgebase, guided
assistance or agent scripting all lend a hand in ensuring that the customer gets the
best answer possible.
In addition to this support the system has another rarely used feature; Offer Advisor.
This feature checks if a customer has raised a question about a product and
suggests a special offer in the same way as smart assistance works. I’m not going to
document it here has I’ve never implemented it – just know it’s out there J

Sales Strategies and Stages
I’ve often seen part-completed and test items in this area of the system. Often a
systems administrator will take a peek, try something to see where else it appears
and abandon the idea to the ‘interesting but not useful’ pile.
A STRATEGY IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO
You can have many strategies but each should be unique. It needs to give
expression to what you are doing. I work in higher education and commonly
Universities unbunble their degree courses for summer school. I might have a
strategy called “Summer School 2017”. You might sell wine; “Pinot Noir 2017” or
tickets “World Cup tickets 2017” or services “Car club membership drive – Q3”. They
need to encompass a point in time within your organisation and have a definitive
beginning and end.
Next, we have stages. These can represent an activity, or a choke-point that stops
something from happening or an outcome. Remember that stages need to be both
the positive and negative outcomes from the sales strategy.
STAGES ARE HOW YOU DO IT
As I work in higher education I’ll show you two strategies, one from a short-course
strategy and another from an undergraduate application.
Summer School – Short Courses - 2017 2017 Domestic Undergraduate
Application
Lead Lead
Prospect Prospect registered
Offer Sent Incomplete application
Offer Received Application received
English Proficiency Received Application unsuccessful
Converted Application accepted
Lost Application withdrawn
Assessment
Faculty Assessment
Conditional Offer
Unconditional Offer
Offer Accepted
Offer Declined
Offer Deferred
Preparing to Study
Enrolled
As you can see both are quite different reflecting the different activities that take
place during the sales cycle. The left-hand one takes less effort and less energy to
make it happen; people either want to attend a short-course or they don’t. The right

Kehoe Consulting
11
hand one shows a lot more activity required to convert the application into an
enrolled student.
The important parts to point out are the failure points ‘lost’, ‘declined’, ‘rejected’. It’s
as important to know where we were unsuccessful as we were successful for
analytics; more of which later.
Opportunity management: Using tasks within stages
Once the strategy is decided and the stages in place you need to add two more
things. Firstly, for an opportunity to move from one stage to another something
needs to have happened. The stage can automatically generate a list of tasks that
can move the stage on when they are completed using workspace rules or
manually. There are two important points to using tasks:
• Keep them as simple as possible
• Get them to work for you, not against you
If you’re finding that you have a load of incomplete tasks at the end of a strategy
cycle then you’ve made them too complicated. If the opportunities aren’t getting
to the end of the stage then tasks aren’t driving the sales advisor behaviours.
Opportunity management: Getting more from tasks
By creating types of tasks we can develop a deeper understanding of what it takes
to move from one stage to another. Did it take a couple of phone calls? Did you
need to see someone? Task types become your friend and with nice report you can
get some great engagement from users. Here’s a couple of examples:

Coupled with a simple task workspace the process of working an opportunity
becomes more enjoyable and easier to understand:
With responsive reports, compelling and attractive workspaces users will value the
information the system is giving them and enjoy seeing how their actions are
affecting results.
Sales management: Creating an internal market
When your institution or organisation becomes more accomplished with a sales
contact centre you’ll find that leads and opportunities can become tempting to
other departments.

Kehoe Consulting
13
The contact has expressed an interest so why not see if they’d like another service or
product? Sadly, to be on the receiving end feels like spam. However, if marketing or
enquiry management are generating leads for sales then you’ll be able to create
segments to remove contacts that have an active opportunity.
OWN THE OPPORTUNITY NOT THE CONTACT
If you haven’t then you’re going to be in a bit of a pickle as a keen lead gets
swamped with well-meaning emails all hoping that their product or service leads to
another opportunity.
There is a way around this; by creating an internal marketplace it become easier to
identify who owns what opportunity and by extension what contact.
I work in Higher Education so this might be a typical internal marketplace for me:
I’m using territories to do this but making them internal rather than external. Now I
can assign my territory to my sales advisor using their staff account:
Now my sales advisor can pick the opportunities they want to work:

The contact record is not indirectly ‘owned’ by the sales team but that doesn’t
mean they can’t still be marketed to. While it’s possible that a contact can be
assigned a salesperson the allocation and deallocation can be onerous.
The nice thing about assigning a team to an opportunity as well as a person means
that when the opportunity is ‘lost’ then contact can reappear in the marketing
segment. Here’s what I mean:
Here’s my segment; it contains only active opportunities. Now I can use this segment
in my marketing on the exclude side of things:

Kehoe Consulting
15
This means that when I’m trawling for new prospects using marketing my active
opportunities aren’t included – so we don’t spam them!
Sales management: Sales products and quotes
Sales products or the product catalogue to give use its proper name work like
service products but with extra functionality. They can be joined to service products
and by extension the knowledgebase and service delivery if you wish and further
extended into assets.
This means that both incidents and answers can have a related sales product and
tied to the offer advisor (as previously mentioned and often overlooked) this means
that the system can really empower service agent to identify potential leads and
prospects.
The quote tool enables you to produce Microsoft Word documents to give to your
customers (back when people put letters into envelopes and a fax machine was
considered an office essential).
Sales products are one of the best bits of workspace functionality that RightNow
ever did. It’s a genuine multi-select field that allows both create and delete.
Products and Categories kind of do it but not as well as here.
Firstly, let’s take a look at the sales products (product catalogue). As I mentioned I
work in Higher Education so mostly my products are service-based, selling courses
and the like to prospective students but anything can be put into the sales products:
Every sales product needs to have a price schedule for it to work. A price schedule
identifies who owns the pricebook or who the price is for. An example might be
‘gold users’, ‘summer sale’, ‘normal price’, ‘discounted price’ etc.

There is an option to have a sales period too which gives a start and end period to
your sales cycle. I’ve not used this as mainly I implement solutions for a ‘sales advisor’
rather than a hard-charging ‘sales executive’ so sales quotas and revenue
attainment aren’t something I’ve needed to do.
With our pricebook created we can now look at the two workspaces we need to
manage the selection of products against our opportunity. The first workspace is
quotes. I tend not to dwell on the functionality here as it acts as a stepping stone to
the good stuff which is the sales products (more of which later). The quote
workspace needs the container for the products but that’s pretty much it:
The workspace is greatly simplified from the standard one as we’re really trying to
get to the next workspace which is the sales products. As the title of the workspace
implies this is the summary. Next, let’s look at the sales products themselves:

Kehoe Consulting
17
As you can see the sales product here (I’m selling a diploma course but you can sell
anything) has a quantity of 2 with a discount of 10% and the system has
automatically calculated the total for me. I don’t need to discount or allow the
changing of the price, name or description if I don’t want too.
We now have an opportunity with a quote that contains a product or products but
what does this mean? When we typically measure anything in Service Cloud it’s a
numbers game; number of hits, number of incidents, average handle time and so
on. Now we can measure the value of something. With value, we have turned our
cost centre into a profit centre and we’re able to put dollars against our effort.
Here’s some reports I’ve generated for the sales contact centre:
The above image shows a classic numbers game by volume. Now by adding the
dollar value the figures become quite different:

Comparing both images shows some great insights. Where the first image appears
to show a bottleneck early in the sales cycle the dollar value doesn’t corroborate
the story with consistent values throughout the lifecycle (and a nice conversion
value at the end!).
Conclusion
The process for creating a sales contact centre has several moving parts all of which
need consideration and planning. I’ve tried to encompass as much of the
complexity as possible to ensure your delivery is successful.
The sales contact centre is at the heart of the Oracle Service Cloud product but it’s
not something Oracle seems to want to promote and I’m sure they have their
reasons.
Implemented well and it can turn your cost-centre into a profit centre, add genuine
value to your marketing efforts, connect the knowledgebase to sales through
products and give purpose to your team, ensuring greater success for your
organisation.

The sales contact centre cookbook

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to The sales contact centre cookbook

Similar to The sales contact centre cookbook (20)

More from Mark Kehoe

More from Mark Kehoe (11)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

The sales contact centre cookbook