How Camesa Scaled Revenue with Telesales and Direct Sales
Richard Batista details regional market expansion, dormant account reactivation, and direct sales structuring.
Richard Batista outlines Camesa's commercial strategy combining direct-to-consumer reseller sales with dormant account reactivation. The initiative overhauled inside sales and expanded the brand's reach beyond major metropolitan hubs.
Richard Batista, Head of Performance & GTM at Camesa, sat down with Bruno Gimenes on Marketing - The Podcast to discuss the commercial and operational decisions that transformed the textile manufacturer's distribution channels. The initiative combined opening direct sales to individual resellers during the pandemic, reactivating dormant retail accounts, and professionalizing the internal telesales team.
In the video above, Batista shares behind-the-scenes insights into this transition, detailing how a deep understanding of consumer behavior guided media investments and channel design.
Direct sales and serving markets outside major hubs
The shift in the distribution model started with identifying coverage gaps in field sales representatives' routes. Noticing that remote regions and smaller shopkeepers rarely received routine sales visits, Batista proposed opening direct manufacturer sales to individual buyers with national ID (CPF) numbers via digital channels, targeting people seeking extra income.
Paid media campaigns focused heavily on the country's interior, reaching resellers who previously had to travel long distances to wholesale hubs. According to Batista, messaging remained direct and pragmatic: "I still joke today that ugly ads are what really sell. So, while everyone else was doing fancy ads with beautiful photos, we ran straightforward ads featuring the Camesa logo and 'buy from home, resell Camesa.'" The registered database quickly grew to 20,000 individual sellers, 90% of whom were women.
Account reactivation and expanding the dormant channel
Beyond onboarding independent resellers, the team analyzed their historical B2B database of lapsed clients. By cross-referencing CRM data and churn reasons with the logistical limitations of traditional field reps, the team discovered that thousands of retailers had simply stopped purchasing due to a lack of active sales outreach.
Leadership greenlit the remote reactivation plan, recovering accounts of all sizes. Batista points out that 5,000 dormant accounts were reactivated, generating nearly 300 million Brazilian reais in incremental revenue and accelerating the brand's penetration into regional retail chains and department stores.
Structuring telesales and upskilling the team
To manage the surging demand generated by ad campaigns and reactivation efforts, the internal telesales team grew from 4 to 25 women, operating alongside the company's 150 field representatives. Management redesigned the team's sales approach, transitioning operators into specialized B2B sales consultants.
Batista highlights the importance of internal alignment between marketing and front-line sales: "From now on, you are a sales consultant for the country's largest home textile brand. In other words, we shifted mindsets, reopened doors, and bridged e-commerce talent into B2B. We revealed a whole new world, which I believe is core to marketing's role: developing people and collaborating closely with other departments."
Empathy, consumer behavior, and global expansion
When addressing metrics like ROAS and acquisition costs, Batista argues that quantitative data must reflect the operational reality of those who consume and sell. The expansion initiative addressed regional dynamics across the domestic market and navigated specific cultural nuances in new Latin American territories, such as their operation in Argentina, generating 80 leads per week.
For Batista, marketing must go well beyond aesthetic positioning: "A lead comes in and converts, but someone still has to close the sale. Why shouldn't marketing support the sales frontline too? That means training, motivating, and showing another side." The strategy successfully aligned product, team, and logistics to support production scale at their 500-person factory.