Incept’s CEO, Sam Falletta, was recently featured on The Market That Moves America podcast where he talked about Incept’s path from rapid expansion to focused growth. With nearly two out of five middle market businesses lacking a clearly defined strategy to guide business decisions, this podcast is worth a listen for any business interested in learning from one company’s journey towards strategic growth.

The Market That Moves America Podcast

Don’t have time to listen right now but want some of the major takeaways? We’ve summarized the interview below:

The Background: Who is Incept?

“At our core, we strengthen the relationship between our clients and their customers at every interaction.  We’re a contact center that uses voice, email, and increasingly more chat and social media to connect our clients and their customers proactively and reactively to help improve customer retention and growth,” Sam stated.

Ask: Where are we going and why?

Sam discusses that to grow the company to where it is today, consistently asking, “where are we going and why” has been key to helping stay focused. With a company rapidly growing, only strategizing in Q4 for the next year isn’t going to cut it. At every major milestone or decision, your executive team needs to reassess how all decisions will impact the company.

Adjusting our market to focus on value

When a few legislations impacted the way contact centers reached out to people and companies began outsourcing to off-shore telemarketing companies, there was about a 30% decrease in the contact center industry nationwide. So, Incept knew they needed to adjust their target market in order to continue growing. As a contact center that had a hand-full of clients focused on blood donor recruitment, they saw a gap in that market and took advantage of it for further growth.

In order to set the company apart from competitors, Incept placed providing the customer with the highest value as its top priority. They began seeking customers that wanted to provide a high-quality service for their customers so the Incept team could be proud of their work, as well as their clients’.

Strategic Planning for Telemarketing Companies

In the past, we have used binders that quickly become irrelevant, so we now use an agile development software approach and update it frequently (formally about once every quarter). The two key inputs include:

1. Our three key metrics (customers, market share of the market we are in, and employee engagement)

2. Our three key themes that explain how we execute our plan

This then results into a 3x3 grid to help align the leadership team and analyze our progress.

When planning for the future and looking at our 5-year plan, we have a target in terms of size, profitability, and employees but we are fluid in the market and product mix. We strategize and plan for an end goal but are open to different approaches because we saw how quickly the market changed on use in the past.

If you want to listen to the entire interview, you can find that here!