Great product set, crowded market, high cost of sale, scale and dramatic growth just around the corner, sales pipeline poorly understood with many opportunities getting stalled halfway along the pipe for reasons not understood. These were the presenting conditions of one of our clients providing a content management solution. They had already had success in a number of verticals but had not been able to capitalise on this success.
We performed a diagnostic on their sales approach, captured the critical data surrounding the sales process and built some sales models that represented the typical approach to winning new business. From this we discovered and illuminated a massive drain on resources at a critical stage in the sales cycle that diverted key resources from later stages in the sales cycle. This resulted in lack of attention to key deals during the final stages of bid campaigns.
We created a series of recommendations including
- reducing the complexity of bid responses, and demonstrations so that they could be created and delivered quickly with little or no specialised or expert resources;
- tightening of the value proposition and creating some specific vertical market messaging and case studies that improved conversion at key stages in the sales cycle and improved market awareness; and
- alignment of the product roadmap to the marketing message along with introduction of improved configuration capabilities that enabled rapid configuration for proof of concept and pilot stages of the sales cycle at dramatically reduced cost.
Results are increased wins, higher market profile, reduce cost of sales, better sales with less bespoke extensions and more use of configuration features. |
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