The Consortium: Selling to Schools

Selling to Schools

The Consortium provides a wide range of products including stationery, office equipment and teaching materials to customers in the education, training and social care sectors. The company is leader in the schools supplies market.

Vicky Elliott, Commercial Manager with The Consortium, approached Chord with three requirements. She needed qualified sales leads from schools in Devon, South Wales, London and the South East, an improved understanding of The Consortium’s competition, and cleaner data in the firm’s marketing database.

"A campaign to deliver"

Vicky described how Chord approached the challenge: “Telemarketers often tend to take your instructions and execute them regardless of the value that will be delivered,” she said. “Chord applied themselves to understanding what we wanted to achieve and worked with us to create a campaign to deliver it.”

Working from a target list provided by The Consortium, Chord called 555 schools outside the firm’s customer base. For each school, Chord updated the details on the list, such as phone number, fax number and email address, and recorded additional information required by The Consortium, such as key contact information and numbers of pupils.

Chord also identified levels of interest in The Consortium’s services. For each school contacted, the benefits of using The Consortium were clearly explained, and current requirements were identified.

"Tenacious, courteous and professional"

“Chord’s tenacious, yet superbly courteous and professional approach rapidly paid dividends,” Vicky noted.

It swiftly became apparent through their weekly reports that as well as securing the leads we were looking for and cleaning the database to an excellent standard, they were obtaining high quality, detailed information on our market and competition. Information like that is worth its weight in gold.
Vicky ElliottCommercial Manager, The Consortium

“The major thrust of the campaign was to generate leads,” she observed. “Chord secured either warm or hot leads with over 46% of the target audience. That’s a terrific result.”