James Rick Stinson has been in the call center business for more than 10 years, and through his years of operation he’s observed that many of his successful clients wanted to be very hands-on in managing their outbound campaigns. He quickly realized that this kind of management is critical, especially in the early development of an outbound campaign.
But rather than trying to lead small startup campaigns that entrepreneurs wanted to control themselves, Stinson thought it best to actually give them total control. Thus, Outbounders was started under the parent company of GlobalSky to help small and medium sized companies recruit their own sales staff and manage their marketing campaigns at the best possible cost.
“I thought that if there was some way to help these motivated clients to launch and manage their own campaigns and pass the savings on to them there would be a huge marketplace for this. I was right,” says Stinson.
Outbound campaigns can consist of anything: lead generation, appointment settings, surveys, lead verification, customer follow up, customer retention, and event marketing. Outbounders.com provides a databse of over 5,000 applicants with detailed information about them like audio recording samples of their work.
The platform even has time and screen shot tracking so you can stay on top of what teams are doing even when they’re far away or working from home.
“Theres a huge motivation for us to shift people from working at offices to working at home, in fact our goal is to create 1 million legitimate home based sales positions around the world through the Outbounders platform,” says Stinson.
Most of the Outbounders team works from home too, including operations and team managers. They do have a small team of staff working from office, and they collaborate with Skype and base camp, but that hasn’t been the big challenge for them.
The big challenge came when Stinson decided to start Outbounders on a $50,000 budget, something most people wouldn’t dream of doing with less than $1 million. He hired developers from the Philippines and India and worked remotely with no physical office overhead for 3 years while building v 1.0 of the platform.
The hard work and time paid off, because Stinson assures us he is the only entrepreneur doing what he’s doing in this market. No other company, he says, offers a niche solution to browse the best sales talent, create campaigns, upload training materials, and make payments from one consolidated platform.
“Homesourcing is obviously going to be one of the biggest workforce trends over the next few decades, as most companies need to reduce overhead and eliminate physical offices,” explains Stinson. “Plus people pay for idle resources like car, house and internet when they are away at the office.”
According to him, as the world gets more connected it will also get more competitive, which means companies will need to get more cost efficient as a way to maintain a competitive, global advantage. The good news is that home infrastructure, like faster internet and reliable power, is getting better with the time also.
“I see Outbounders playing a huge role in how companies hire, manage and train their ‘revenue generating specialists’ which will always play a key role in a company’s growth,” says Stinson.