Sales Transformation Through Customer Understanding and Innovation

This leading global networking and IT services provider recognizes that the rapidly changing market has increased demands and complexity for its salespeople. Pressured by greater customer expectations, sales teams are challenged to do more and know more. How can this company effectively prepare its sales force to increase customer strategic relevance, improve business results and drive this sales transformation?

To advance customer business results and sales force agility, this global technology company partnered with BTS, a leading strategy implementation firm. Through a collaborative effort, a highly customized experiential workshop was developed, focusing on customer understanding, innovation and selling value.

Through this process, teams leave the workshop experience with new opportunities identified, 100 percent alignment to customer needs, and concrete plans to make them happen.

The Program at a Glance

The elite planning and execution workshop targets more than 100 global service provider account teams and challenges participants, including account managers, account executives and sales engineers, to step inside their customer’s shoes and analyze:

• What is the customer trying to do today and what can the company do to accelerate results?
• What does the customer want to do, but has not yet started?
• What is the customer not considering, but should?

These topics act as a guide for participants, who spend time reflecting on the client’s market and competitive position prior to the workshop.

Participants spend two days at the interactive workshop learning, collaborating and discussing their most important asset – their customer. They consider customer challenges and opportunities, market forces, and what it takes to build a strategic partnership. From there, participants ideate towards customer value creation and the evolution of business models. To maximize applicability, assure customer value generation and deliver workshop ROI, sales teams then get specific. Participants identify the current state versus the future state, the creation of value, “change champions,” what it will take to win and what may cause them to lose. In concluding the workshop, teams create robust action plans and rough presentations, deliver their presentation and practice building internal and external alignment.

Through this process, teams leave the workshop experience with new opportunities to drive customer results and concrete plans to make them happen. All steps are taken to leverage strengths and mitigate inhibitors to success.

Winning with “Big Bets”

The workshop is an astounding success and results continue to be recorded. Most notably, account teams:

• Know how to assess the customer’s business environment and identify groundbreaking opportunities
• Acquire a process to ensure effective selling and build the skills necessary to assess risk, plan for success, sell value and collaborate as a team
• Leave with new opportunities, totaling $1B+ in pipeline expansion
• Achieve results and real ROI (with multiple opportunities going into contract and strategic partnerships achieved)

Going forward, the sales teams’ wholehearted comprehension of their clients business and their strengthened sales capabilities will aid the company’s and their customers’ continued growth.