Challenges

Kaltura, already a successful, publicly listed technology company was struggling with a challenge common to companies with large Sales Development teams – they had constant fluctuation in performance driven by promotions as well as attrition, as appointment setters moved to alternative companies and roles. This challenge made generating consistent Sales Qualified Leads difficult for the Marketing team, which owned the responsibility of the Sales Development department.

Kaltura is not alone. Whistle clients have reported that for every internal Appointment Setter hire that they manage over the course of a year, there is a minimum loss of 2 weeks of productivity to absenteeism, or unplanned events, over and above any downtime provisions. In addition, the industry average time spent from sourcing to placing and onboarding a qualified appointment setter currently hovers at 14 weeks, with the average internal hire staying with a company for 6-9 months, leading one client to exclaim “it takes 3 months to find them, 3 months to onboard them and 3 months to lose them!”.

Solution

Despite having a robust leadership and management team in place, as well as high functioning systems, playbooks and processes, these challenges persisted at Kaltura, probing them to search for a solution. As such, Kaltura approached Whistle about its Appointment Setting services, where vetted and Whistle Certified Appointment Setters are interviewed by the client within 48 hours and placed immediately upon request.  

Whistle Appointment Setters have at least 2-5 years of sales experience prior to entering Whistle’s Academy program, where they undergo both face-to- face and online training in areas such as cold calling, objection handling, Hubspot CRM best practices, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, prospecting and content creation, email writing, and effective time management / task prioritization.

In addition to providing highly qualified candidates, the Appointment Setting program offers two guarantees: the first being that should a candidate not meet expectations or for any reason be unable to continue, Whistle arranges new interviews with replacements within 5 days. The second guarantee is that the Client may offer to exit the agreement with 30 days’ notice for up to 2 full time candidates at any point.

Results

After beginning with 4 placements, Kaltura expanded to 8 full time Appointment Setters within the first year via Whistle’s Appointment Setting program, with each request for a new vetted hire fulfilled in under 48 hours.The Whistle team has generated over $5,000,000 in Opportunity value for Kaltura at an ROI of 16:1 on their continued investment.

Whistle’s appointment setters at Kaltura have a 100% uptime and currently cover time zones extending from Europe, the UK and to the east and west coasts of the US, Monday to Friday.

Whistle’s team has supported Kaltura in phone, email, and LinkedIn outreach, as well as in international conferences, having flown to New York in the past year to represent the company. The team works seamlessly with Kaltura’s Sales Development and Marketing leadership team, liaising with Sales and RevOps functions in the company and is treated as if it is part of the employee base.

For companies looking at appointment setters as a viable means to handle  inbound, outbound, and face-to-face sales and business development, Whistle’s Appointment Setting program makes sourcing vetted talent as simple as sending an email request and eliminates all of the traditional headaches that are associated with sourcing, placing, managing, developing and retaining Sales Development teams.