DePaul University is Chicago’s business school of choice with more than 67,500 successful alumni from the DePaul Driehaus College of Business and the DePaul Kellstadt Graduate School of Business. The Center for Sales Leadership at DePaul, with Dr. Rich Rocco as executive director, aligns traditional classroom education with real-world learning experience and technology to produce business graduates who can sell. Students in the Sales Leadership program experience rigorous classroom learning designed to deliver the knowledge and practical skills they will need to succeed, including the use of technology in customer outreach in a sales environment.
Rocco, who lectures on sales strategy, sales effectiveness, sales processes, communication, coaching, and customer relationship management (CRM)/sales technology, was one of the first to create a class that focuses on Inside Sales—MKT 385, Sports Sales. This class, which runs for 11 weeks three times a year, trains up to 20 students per quarter on best practices in inside sales with practical, hands-on selling experience working with Chicago sports teams.
Before working with Koncert (formerly, ConnectLeader), Rocco used a traditional on-site call center to execute call campaigns in his Sport Sales class, but the ramp-up time of having them come in and get started was a hindrance. He also wanted to move away from that call center for one that used newer technologies.
“As we were building our inside sales curriculum for the 21st century,” says Rocco, “we wanted to partner with a world-class technology company that could offer our students easy-to-use, leading sales enablement and sales acceleration tools to enhance their sales success.”
During Rocco’s path to move away from the traditional call center team into a 21st-century approach of selling for his Sports Sales students, he evaluated several solutions, including Koncert, which reached out to him about Sales Dialer technology. The other solutions weren’t chosen as they didn’t offer the easy interface, support, and partnership that Koncert offered for the program.
The top feature that Rocco was looking for in a solution was usability. When he chose Koncert, he learned that they offer a great user experience that translates into an effective, and easy-to-use and learns solution. With just a 30-minute tutorial on Flow Dialer, his students can fully utilize the solution and begin making calls.
While Rocco has been impressed with Koncert overall as a technology partner, he’s been even further impressed by the level of support he’s received. Whether it was initial setup, CRM integration, or general training needs, Koncert was highly responsive throughout to ensure DePaul’s needs were fully addressed.
Besides usability and support, Rocco has found further reasons to use Koncert for his students in the Sports Sales class at DePaul University. He said, “I have seen a positive relationship between the use of Koncert, student engagement, and student project performance as well as class learning outcomes. Our students are more ‘job ready’ as they leave the class with enhanced selling skills, enabled through technology, that they can use in real-world selling situations to better succeed in their sales careers.”
“In reviewing some of our sales campaigns after we first started to utilize Koncert,” says Rocco, “the average sales performance increased by over 17% compared to prior approaches without Koncert.”
Some of the contributing metrics to the increase in sales performance include the ability to make over 41% more dials per hour, which leads to more live sales conversations and closed sales.
Koncert provides a multi-channel Sales Engagement Platform integrated with your CRM that delivers tools for all types of sales roles to increase their top-line revenue and productivity up to 800%. We provide sales, lead generation, and marketing teams powerful tools to identify their best prospects, obtain accurate contact data, sequence the follow-ups, and enable accelerated communication.
One size does not fit all! Successful lead generation programs require different sales engagement tools for different sales roles — Koncert provides all of them. Koncert’s sales engagement platform includes customizable sales cadence software, sales dialers, and predictive intelligence, so you can simplify your sales tools and save time. Now, sales managers can create optimized sales processes that take leads all the way through the sales pipeline. Avoid leads falling through cracks. Monitor every interaction with leads no matter the channel, deliver detailed reports on sales performance, and continually improve processes based on real insights.
Our patented cloud-based technology is built on the Koncert AI predictive intelligence engine, which identifies and prioritizes prospect lists ensuring you contact your best sales leads first.