South London Business: Boosting Apprenticeship Starts

South London Business (SLB) is a business development company that has been set up to: support and promote business, enhance regeneration, reduce unemployment and up-skill the workforce. To help launch an Apprenticeship Training Agency (ATA) and boosting Apprenticeship starts, SLB commissioned Chord to deliver a 30-day telemarketing campaign to test the receptiveness of employers in North London and to secure highly qualified appointments for the management team with senior decision-makers directly responsible for recruitment and training.

ATAs recruit, employ and train young people, while they are working with a host company. An ATA directly employs a young person and therefore takes on all the risks and administration normally involved in taking on a new member of staff.

Chord developed a clear strategy for the successful delivery of the campaign. Careful profiling and sourcing of prospect data, followed by pre-cleansing, enabled experienced business-to-business telemarketers to maximise the campaign results.

This was achieved by engaging with more of the right senior decision makers and securing opportunities for:

• Apprenticeships – in customer service, business & administration, IT, warehouse and storage, , logistics operations and international trade & logistics
• Email permissions – permission to communicate via email and collection of email addresses
• Opt-ins for the SLB Group newsletter – to enable ongoing communication

Most significantly, early analysis of the appointment outcomes have shown that so far over 40% of appointments have been converted into ‘Learner Starts’.

This figure is expected to rise further as more start dates are agreed.

In order to achieve this, Chord made 2,500 call attempts and spoke with 400 decision makers, securing 36 appointments at a conversion rate of 9%.

In addition, 550 emails were sent to interested prospects with email addresses being captured with permission, for future marketing purposes, along with 118 employers opting-in to receive the SLB Group newsletter.

Chord is in discussion with SLB Group about further opportunities.