3 Strategies to Maximize Sales Results

Our latest webinar, 3 Strategies to Maximize Sales Results, explored three factors that can make or break a call center: lead management, performance tracking, and company culture. 

Hosted by Convoso’s Paul Cowman and featuring industry leaders David Stodolak, CRO at Connection Holdings, and Brooks West, founder of Pingtree, the webinar covers key strategies to help you match agents to leads, track metrics closely, and build a strong, results-oriented culture. 

Read on for key takeaways, insightful speaker quotes, and practical steps you can implement immediately to elevate your sales results.

You can also watch the full webinar replay to dive deeper into these insights and start taking action today.

1. Lead management

Effective lead management is the backbone of any successful call center operation. Acquiring quality leads isn’t enough. “Scaling telesales demands effective lead prioritization, smart routing, and lightning fast speed to lead,” Cowman said. 

Here’s how you can integrate these essential lead management strategies into your call center operations.

Prioritize leads and route them to the right agents

The value of each lead varies, and prioritizing them ensures your agents focus their efforts on the highest-converting opportunities. Effective prioritization helps maximize conversion rates by concentrating resources on leads most likely to close, while still managing lower-priority leads efficiently.

Pingtree helps businesses take prioritization to the next level by capturing detailed data throughout the lead journey—including where the lead originated, which ad or path it followed, and even which buttons the prospect clicked. This granular tracking allows you to categorize leads by quality or campaign needs and assign them to agents with the right skills to convert them.

Once prioritized, Pingtree integrates leads seamlessly into Convoso’s dialer platform to turn these insights into actionable routing strategies. High-intent leads go to experienced agents, increasing conversion potential, while lower-intent or experimental leads are routed to newer agents to build experience without overloading top performers.

By aligning lead quality with agent skill, your call center operates more efficiently and ensures you get the most value from your lead spend.

Be the first to contact leads

Response time is critical for outbound call centers. Your speed to lead should be seconds, not minutes. “[If] they’re the first one to contact that customer, they’re going to get the appointment. By the time the third person calls…[they’re going to hear], ‘I already booked my appointment,’” Stodolak said. 

This strategy applies not only to shared leads but also to exclusive leads. Customers are most engaged right after they submit their information, making those first few seconds crucial for establishing contact. 

Faster response times consistently drive better conversion rates, reinforcing the importance of speed-to-lead as a core component of modern lead management.

2. Performance tracking

To grow your business, you have to know your numbers. Because if you don’t understand what works and what doesn’t, you can’t improve. “I think this is where a lot of call centers get it wrong,” Stodolak said. “They’re throwing stuff against the wall hoping something sticks. You need to break it down…You need to know your KPIs.”

But which KPIs should you track? 

Cowman shared a slide showing 20 common call center metrics. While they’re all important, “that’s way too many metrics for anyone to manage and monitor on a daily basis,” he said. Instead, you have to prioritize the metrics that best support your call center’s operations and goals. 

Stodolak and West shared the metrics that are most important to them. “If I had to pick two…I would do contact rate and sales per agent. At minimum, it would tell me how [good] my data is and how well my agents are doing,” West said.

Stodolak takes a different approach, prioritizing billables per hour, contact rate, and conversion rate: “Billables per hour let me and let my team know how profitable we are…. Then that ties into the contact rate, because if we're not getting in touch with people, we're not going to have any billables per hour because no one's picking up the phone…And conversion rate is obviously huge, because it all ties into that. At the end of the day, if you're not converting, you're not making money.”

West encourages his customers to find their “North Star” metric. “Try to find one of these [KPIs] to make the biggest enhancements on, and everything else will slowly start to mature,” he said.

3. Sales culture and agent optimization

A strong sales culture is essential for driving performance and keeping agents motivated. Stodolak reinforced this point, reflecting on his personal journey in the industry:

"I came into the industry as a salesperson. I was on the phones. I've seen the importance of leadership and a good culture in a call center and how that could make or break it." 

Here are his top tips to build a solid call center culture.

Balance workloads to prevent burnout

Managing workloads effectively is essential to maintaining performance and preventing burnout in high-pressure call center environments. Stodolak emphasized the importance of taking a holistic approach to balancing workloads by accounting for peak and off-peak hours, lead type, and the natural rhythms of the day. 

Managers need to carefully plan agent schedules to maintain productivity during high-contact times while providing breaks and non-call tasks when performance is likely to dip. During peak hours, managers should keep agents on the phones as much as possible, handling high-priority leads to maximize efficiency. 

Outside of these periods, however, contact rates tend to drop, and agents are more prone to fatigue. During these off-peak hours, adjust workflows to help agents recharge without wasting valuable leads.

“After lunch, agents are naturally sluggish,” Stodolak said. “They won’t be able to sell as efficiently.” To address this, his team schedules non-call tasks for the early afternoon, such as mandatory quality assurance (QA) sessions, call reviews, or training. 

From 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM, for example, agents may listen to their own calls from the previous day to refine their techniques. This approach allows agents to take a mental break while improving their skills, ensuring they return energized for peak evening hours.

Stodolak also highlighted that burnout is more common when agents handle low-intent leads—the kind that generate high rejection rates. “When you talk to 50 people and get one conversion, or maybe one every 100, you’re hearing a lot of ‘no,’” he explained. 

To prevent burnout in these cases, it’s important to balance lead types carefully. Managers can assign agents a mix of high- and low-intent leads or stagger their workload throughout the day to avoid prolonged exposure to tough, low-intent calls.

Incentivize to fuel motivation

Recognizing and rewarding achievements keeps morale high and drives sustained performance. Targeted incentives build momentum, especially during peak hours or when contact rates spike. Stodolak emphasized the importance of understanding your call center’s rhythms to know when to boost motivation. 

"We knew that from 8:30 AM to 11:00 AM and from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM, contact rates were usually 20-30% higher,” he said. During these prime times, agents need to be ready to close deals, making it essential for managers to motivate them effectively.

He shared that he closely monitored performance in real time and encouraged supervisors to introduce incentives on the spot when the team was performing well. “If the day was hot, if I was seeing that we were off to a good start, I told the supervisor: give some incentives, give out some gift cards, do whatever. If we hit a certain target, everyone’s getting lunch, everyone’s getting dinner—something.”

Offering timely, performance-based incentives—whether in the form of individual rewards or team-wide recognition—helps keep agents motivated and engaged. A positive and competitive work environment reinforces your agents' desire to perform at their best and fosters a culture where every win feels valued.