About Moneycorp
Moneycorp is the UK’s leading independent foreign currency exchange brokers, handling over £7.5 billion in currency annually. Over the last 30 years, it has evolved its operations from a pure Bureau de Change service for consumers to additionally providing foreign exchange, global remittance and financial risk management solutions to businesses and financial institutions. Their operations are split into three divisions, each of which play in different markets – commercial, wholesale and retail – and trade under discrete brands. In 2006, the Royal Bank of Scotland acquired a 49.5 per cent stake in Moneycorp, who have a triple-A credit rating and an impeccable reputation in the industry.
Strategy
Consumers were accounting for 70 per cent of Moneycorp’s revenues, generated by an average of 2,000 transactions per month. However, as consumers typically have a sporadic requirement for foreign exchange, Moneycorp was looking to expand its corporate client base with the aim of building more regular and substantial revenues.
Moneycorp’s lead generation was carried out by a junior sales team, with opportunities passed to a senior sales team to close. Not only was this far from cost-effective, it was actively constraining their business. By outsourcing lead generation, Moneycorp would be able to increase the volume of prospects contacted and re-engage their junior team in the core activity of closing business rather than creating it, permitting them to increase their commercial responsibility and accelerate their professional growth and development.
Moneycorp appointed Market Makers to establish the use of telemarketing to achieve its business ambitions, provide a measurable return on investment and ensure that their brand was consistently represented and professionally portrayed.
Campaign Audience and Objectives
There was no existing database for this campaign and historically, Moneycorp’s internal sales team had manually sourced their own data. As a core competence, Market Makers’ tried-and-tested approach to building a data pool involved drawing up a set of fundamental criteria to reliably indicate whether the prospect would have a need for Moneycorp’s services. This aimed to reduce wastage and, by exploiting Market Makers’ access to specialist data houses, deliver a better return on campaign investment.
The starting definition was any company trading over £50,000 in foreign exchange every month. As the campaign was not specific to industry or geography, research established that companies in the import/export sector fitted the profile of having an ongoing requirement for foreign exchange and being of sufficient size to be of interest to Moneycorp. The data was further refined into those with a turnover in excess of £1m per annum and the decision maker was identified as the financial controller or director or managing director. Finally, all phone numbers were verified as being accurate and up-to-date.
The data was then segmented by type of contact, type of company, turnover bands and area, in order to measure the effectiveness of each element. This enabled Market Makers to prioritise the data for dialling, and build a profiled database for the client which would provide visibility into the areas in which they were most effective. By developing a clearer picture of Moneycorp’s target audience, the learnings from the initial campaign could be applied to future activities.
Based on Moneycorp’s objectives and previous experience of telemarketing, an initial target was set of one appointment for every three hours’ dialling for the benchmark campaign.
Campaign Execution
As a respected brand, it was imperative that Moneycorp was represented in a coherent, professional but ultimately passionate way. The telemarketers were eager to learn not only about the offering but also the company, as they would be speaking to prospects as an extension of Moneycorp itself. In-depth training was provided and this shared investment of time among Moneycorp and Market Makers helped to nurture a close working partnership between the telemarketers and the senior sales team and ensure a consistent representation of the Moneycorp message.
The aim of each call was to identify a need with the prospect and open the door for the Moneycorp sales team. Calls were recorded and analysed for key insights. Where an appointment had been set, the call recording was sent to the client prior to the appointment to ensure consistency of approach. By analysing calls that did not produce an appointment for common objections from prospects, further lessons were learned that helped to evolve the messaging throughout the campaign.
As dialling progressed, the database was profiled and leads were scored on a matrix against size of company, value of foreign exchange business and frequency of demand. Targets were prioritised and call-backs set for those who did not have a current requirement but otherwise met the matrix criteria, building a valuable pipeline of future business.
Peformance
To date, Market Makers have booked over 400 appointments on behalf of Moneycorp. Appointments per hour are tracking at 0.43, delivering almost one appointment every two hours, favourable to the original target of one appointment every three hours. Over the last four years, there has been a cancellation rate of just 1.4 per cent, demonstrating the quality of appointments set.
Client Testimonial
“We initially engaged Market Makers to test whether the performance of our incumbent telemarketing agency could be exceeded. Market Makers outpeformed them substantially and we have since moved all our outsourced activities to Market Makers as a measure of the confidence we have in their approach.”
Marc Morley- Freer, Commercial Director Private Client Department at TTT Moneycorp Ltd
