Effective Sell of Advanced Network Services & Solutions A Catalyst Project for Management World 2010 Phase I

Transcription

1 S OLUTION WHITEPAP E R Effective Sell of Advanced Network Services & Solutions A Catalyst Project for Management World 2010 Phase I

2 Overview Effective Sell of Advanced Network Services & Solutions Sales Management & Solution Management to Optimize Your Sales Processes By almost any measure, the IP and Carrier networking industry have come a long way. Their networks reach almost everywhere, bandwidth is abundant, standards are mature and the companies building the equipment and the networks themselves have amassed an astonishing amount of talent and expertise in relatively few years. The Challenge Still, some networks are built through force-of-will with old methods, a lot of wasted effort and at higher costs. Oddly enough, in this ultra-high tech realm, service providers report that a lot of processes are manual, relatively uncoordinated, duplicative and error prone. This may be the biggest paradox of all: for an industry that exists to move data efficiently, its own marketing, sales, design and operational data is not always well stored and used. This is especially true in the design and selling process for network services. Not only are many of the process steps not automated, but also the vital data that relates to the process is often produced using labor-intensive methods and stored in multiple locations. Worse, rudimentary sharing and version control principles common in corporate IT is often not applied systematically. To cap it off, the hand-off from sales to fulfillment often involves the kind of information re-keying that long ago became obsolete in the IT world. The Solution The objective of this catalyst was to create a framework, consistent with TM Forum s Application Framework (TAM), which streamlines service providers sales process for enterprise solutions. An expected outcome was to be the creation of an accurate and orderable quote, resulting in a smooth Order to Cash process. Netformx and salesforce.com believe that this is possible by enabling collaboration and integration between sales, sales management, sales engineering, solution engineering, sales operations, fulfillment and 2

3 support. The intent of this catalyst was to apply the collaboration concept to the Lead to Order processes for enterprise sales of complex communications services. Netformx and salesforce.com have brought together best of breed solutions for sales force automation (the salesforce.com Sales Cloud) and an end-to-end automated platform for discovery, design, quoting and proposal generation for IP-based network solutions (Netformx DesignXpert ) with an innovative enterprise collaboration solution (saleforce.com Chatter). The Catalyst Project Details Salesforce.com performed as the sales management solution for lead management and opportunity management. This solution enables sales teams to collaborate and close deals faster by providing a single place for updating deal information, tracking opportunity milestones, and recording all opportunity-related interactions. The ability for the Sales Management solution to be customized to fit internal sales methodologies and processes, makes it easier for managers to monitor their sales pipelines. When a customer requests a Quote, the account manager can assign a sales engineer for the task of solution design. The assignment triggers a notification to the sales engineer who can now review the quote details as well as the overall opportunity. The details of the customer s contacts are also available for the sales engineer. SE assignment as part of new Quote creation in salesforce.com 3

4 The sales engineer now has the necessary information to begin working on the solution design. Using dedicated guided selling wizards, the sales engineer can quickly design transport services accurately for simple and complex solutions. The sales engineer can start fresh with a new design or baseline the solution on the customer s network as discovered by the solution management system. Finally, the labor expected for the implementation effort and other services can be added according to the service provider s best practices. The sales and solution management integration allows the sales engineer to associate the design project with the Quote and to upload design documents to the SFA system directly from their design platform. The account manager can now apply solution pricing while network engineering reviews and approves the designed solution. Once approved, the solution is included in a complete proposal along with the quoting document. It should be noted that all the stakeholders involved in the proposal lifecycle processes can now collaborate efficiently and effectively even with multiple iterations to the design. Design upload from DesignXpert to salesforce.com 4

5 In addition, the solution s Bill of Materials can be uploaded to ordering and uploaded Provisioning reports can be used during the solution implementation. A centralized solutions repository can help sales engineers to reuse previously created designs for new and existing customers. salesforce.com as design repository 5

6 Overall Benefits Significantly reduced manual work and number of required tools Improved sales productivity and reduced time to revenue Improved sales accuracy with less fallout in the order to cash processes Improved collaboration, best practices implementation and knowledge sharing Improved integration between CRM, ordering and provisioning Provisioning can update the solution with as built adjustments to keep the design ready for future growth Summary You can t compete for today s customers with yesterday s technology. It takes the combination of integrated sales management and solutions management to quickly and accurately provide designs that can be easily deployed and activated by the provisioning team. Service providers adopting this methodology can better position their sales and solutions management team to continue to stay relevant as an enterprise customer s business grows also becoming a trusted advisor. This catalyst project was successful due to the accomplished integration between Salesforce CRM and Netformx DesignXpert. The integrated solution proves that sales, sales engineering and fulfillment teams can significantly improve their working processes through automated sales and design activities. In addition, the 6

7 solution facilitates exchange of information important for sales and the delivery of advance network services. For a video explaining more about the project, visit the TM Forum Catalyst Project Pages: Netformx, Inc. 275 Saratoga Avenue, Suite 200 Santa Clara, CA sales@netformx.com 7