Squeeze finds the sales you already paid for

A company can have too many leads. That sounds like a complaint invented by someone with a very comfortable job. But consider the scene in Squeeze’s founding account: a business generating 10,000 inquiries a week, a sales force of 500, and a customer database accumulating names that nobody had properly worked. The marketing machine was running. The conversations were backing up.

Carson Poppenger saw a separate job hiding inside the sales job: reaching people, establishing whether they were suitable, and delivering a conversation to someone equipped to finish it. Squeeze, founded in 2009, made that division of labor its business. The name is unusually literal. There might be more value in the marketing data already sitting there.

The expensive space between two teams

Squeeze calls its work Sales Experience, or SX. The phrase covers a practical operation. Its representatives follow up on inquiries, qualify potential customers and connect them with the client’s salespeople. A mortgage officer gets a borrower to speak with. A healthcare provider gets an appointment. A home-services team gets another chance to explain a considered purchase.

The company also offers customer retention, inbound service, business pipeline development and abandoned-cart follow-up. These services have a common starting point: a person has shown interest, or already has a relationship with the brand, but needs another interaction. Squeeze sells the staffing and process to make that interaction happen.

That places it between an advertising agency and the sales desk, with the operating responsibilities of a contact center. Its alternative is often an internal team doing the same work. The distinction Squeeze emphasizes is a combination of US-based representatives, client-specific training, integration and billing tied to production.

The first thing to fix was distance

The early operation was less tidy. In a retrospective podcast, Poppenger described using a Cape Town call center and struggling to diagnose performance from far away. He subsequently opened a center in American Fork, Utah. A small office had cost $300 a month; salvaged cubicles helped furnish the next step. Those details suggest a founder learning how much proximity mattered to managing the work.

By 2020, the company had moved its headquarters to Orem. Later offices opened in Logan and Rexburg. The geographic expansion also gave it access to university communities, a recruiting advantage discussed in its ambassador podcast. Managing the people doing the calling remained central to the proposition.

A calendar is an operating system

HealPros makes the work concrete. The mobile healthcare business needed to reach members and arrange in-home services. According to Squeeze’s case study, its previous outsourcing partner had weak coordination, poor reporting and disappointing contact and conversion performance. That left field capacity difficult to plan. A failed conversation could become an underused technician.

During the disruption of 2020, HealPros reconsidered its setup and brought in Squeeze. The work included integrating with its Five9 dialing platform, giving the client access to activity reports in real time, and changing the sequence of outreach. The case study’s results panel reports appointment generation increasing by 60% in the first year. This is a vendor-published result, specific to that engagement.

The revealing detail is the reporting. More calls alone would not tell a healthcare operator whether people in the field could do their jobs. The contact team and the service team needed a shared picture of what was happening. Here, the handoff ran all the way from a telephone conversation to an appointment book.

Pay for the handoff. Measure the sale.

Squeeze describes a performance model: clients pay for produced opportunities such as qualified transfers and appointments, without long-term contracts. That makes the unit being purchased unusually important. An answered call, a qualified prospect and a paying customer are different events.

The buyer’s calculation follows from that distinction. Take the cost of an accepted opportunity and divide it by the proportion that becomes a customer. That gives a cost per acquired customer for the Squeeze portion of the process. Advertising expense and the client’s closing costs still belong in the overall calculation. A cheaper transfer can become expensive if it rarely closes.

“If you have different processes for the same thing, you really have no process at all.”Carson Poppenger / The Juice, December 2024

The call gets a second listener

The company’s software work follows the same operational interests. Sqorecard handles agent performance, reporting and commissions. PeelVoice analyzes conversations for coaching, sales effectiveness and quality assurance. Its public product page also describes comparing lead sources and surfacing compliance risks. The human conversation produces material that managers can examine and use in training.

That is a useful extension of the contact-center business: supervisors can inspect how conversations unfold alongside whether appointments happen. Squeeze’s training practices include role-play and teach-backs. Software gives those coaching conversations another input; the job still involves deciding what an agent should do differently.

Try the split before the scale

There is a practical idea to borrow from Squeeze’s ambassador discussion: test comparable groups of leads against the existing process. Follow each group through contact, qualification, transfer and eventual purchase. Agree beforehand what qualifies as an acceptable opportunity. Keep the closing team’s capacity in view.

The fit matters. Squeeze describes an ideal prospect with substantial daily inquiry volume, a large inside-sales team and a significant marketing budget. A business selling inexpensive, effortless purchases has less room to pay for individual conversations. A team unable to accept transfers will create another queue. For a buyer considering more advertising, the useful first question is wonderfully mundane: what happened to the people who already asked?