Six Pack Shortcuts Lifts Profits With NewVoiceMedia

When partners Michael Chang and Daniel Rose founded Six Pack Shortcuts in 2009, they had no grand aspirations. According to Chase Larson, the company’s sales operations manager, the friends were using a camera-phone to film workout videos in a modest one-bedroom apartment, then uploading them to their YouTube channel. But videos gain views and a following, and they realized they could achieve something bigger.

The company’s first moves were to up its videos’ production quality and launch its flagship video product. As the operation continued to grow, and Six Pack Shortcuts released additional fat-burning and muscle-building offerings, it had to invest in more serious equipment to handle the demand.

Six Pack Shortcuts’ mission is to help people get into shape quickly, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the Austin-based outfit was prepared for a rapid makeover. The company soon moved into a 6,000-square-foot office, which housed three customer service agents and seven sales reps; at the same time, it started to use 8x8’s contact center coupled with Lime Light CRM to handle sales and service calls.

By 2013, the company realized it needed to get even more serious. “We weren’t displeased with Lime Light, but it wasn’t functioning for all the features we needed,” Larson says. “We couldn’t scale up using two different CRM systems and two different phone systems, so we transitioned fully into Salesforce.com.”

With Salesforce, the company could focus on the fastest-growing segment of its business—its sales team. An inefficient phone system remained a problem, though. “Our [then] CTO spent a lot of time researching the various vendors, and we found that NewVoiceMedia did exactly what we were looking for,” Larson says.

NewVoiceMedia’s ContactWorld aims to keep teams connected through dashboards that track individuals’ activities, while recording and storing call information. The solution includes click-to-dial and local presence features.

A big factor in the decision to go with NewVoiceMedia, Larson says, was its dedication to customer support. The company was taken with the vendor’s attention to detail and preparation “as far as coming on site and helping us get set up, because that was something we had absolutely no experience with,” Larson says. The technology was fully implemented by the first quarter of 2014, after two weeks of on-site work.

According to Larson, once the group of stubborn sales reps got in the habit of mouse-click dialing instead of manual dialing, things happened quickly. “What we noticed, right off the bat, was that we were able to make calls a lot faster,” Larson says. Within 72 hours, he adds, “we saw our call volumes literally almost double.” Eventually, the company’s outbound call capacity would jump from an average of 80 calls a day to 350.

The solution got Six Pack’s customer records—and its reps—in better shape. “Overall, sales agents are inherently lazy,” Larson says. “They will say that they forgot to do things, so having a platform that logged our calls was really important for us.” The company was able to cut down on duplicated calls—and the annoyance factor.

Prior to ContactWorld, Six Pack Shortcuts made $13,000 a day in sales at most. “Now there are days when we have $53,000 in sales,” Larson says. “Our per-day average has absolutely skyrocketed from where we were before the technology, and one of the main reasons is we can scale across multiple agents very quickly and see what they’re doing.” Larson estimates sales have grown by 500 percent.

“If you go on a per-agent level, our average sale per agent was only about $67,” Larson says. “Now some of our agents average almost $500 per sale.”

The tools allow for quicker training as the team continues to grow, Larson says. The call recording capabilities have enabled the company to cut up to four months from its ramp-up time. Six Pack Shortcuts has extended its sales team from 10 members to 40, and Larson says that the company continues to add agents what seems like “every other day.” 

The Payoff

Since launching NewVoiceMedia's ContactWorld solution, Six Pack Shortcuts has seen:

• a 227 percent increase in deals closed per day;
• a 500 percent increase in sales;
• a 400 percent growth in the size of the sales team; and
• a jump in outbound calls from 80 a day to 350 a day.