Is your telco business leaving money on the table?

Telecoms sales in the digital era

The pressure is on to achieve growth and increase margins, and sales teams are being tasked with improving customer acquisition and retention rates while reducing operating costs. That is a challenge for anyone, but especially in the telecoms sector, where highly-customized, multi-year deals are expected. 

If you are a technology company in the communications space selling to mid-size corporations or large enterprises, the sales cycle can be anything from six to nine months or even longer. This is a space in which products are diverse and deals are complex. Value-added services, like security or professional support, are a vital feature – whether provided by you or your partners. 

Your customers and prospects want more. They are prepared to change to get the high-quality digital services they are looking for. And even if the deal is incredibly complicated, they want easily digestible quotes and speedy decision making. With loyalty a rare commodity, no one can take them for granted.

And then you have the decision-makers: they can be a single purchasing manager who oversees all decisions in a single location, or a centrally concentrated buying team looking after geographically diverse locations. 

The competitive landscape is also changing. Large tech companies and hyperscalers are eyeing up your traditional markets. You have different sales channels to operate, different deals to construct and different timelines to manage – and you need to do all that while the digital revolution continues to transform the technology you sell, and the demands your customers make. 

No one wants to leave money on the table. But the reality of sales in this market makes it hard to avoid, especially when internal processes and infrastructure are not set up to address that reality. The challenge here is to interpret the clues about how much is being lost and where.

In this report, we’ll look at some of the key indicators that show where value is leaking out of the sales process. If there’s money on the table, we want you to find it – and help you get it back.

Is omni-channel a buzz word in your organization or a way of orienting your sales process? 

This is a conversation taking place within and among tech businesses throughout the communications space. When you’re looking for long-term relationships in a rapidly evolving marketplace, how do you put the customer at the heart of your business activity? 

Ideally, your customers are never aware of your organizational structures or internal workflows. They just see you as one entity that delivers the right solution and services at the right time. They expect the same quality of service at every touch point, from initial sales contact onwards. After all, they are increasingly enjoying this kind of service from other types of providers in the broader IT space. 

And just as sales is fundamental to everything that the business does, it’s fundamental to achieving true omni-channel operations. 

You need your call center, your direct sales reps, your channel sales reps, your customer self-service channels – and all the other others – to work seamlessly from the same information. And you need them to be able to hand the relationship off to account managers and their teams for fluid, continuous service over time. 

Ask yourself: 

• Are you sure that all your teams work off a single source of up-to-date customer information? 
• Do you have a full history of individual customer engagements so that no records fall into the gap between systems? 
• Does everyone in your team and beyond understand the individual deal created for each customer? 
• Can they continue to optimize the value of that deal at every stage of the relationship? 
• Are all potential upselling and deal-optimisation opportunities being taken? 
• Are you comfortable with the level of customer churn – and do you know what it is?

If the answer is ‘yes’ to all of these questions, congratulations! You have created a fully customer-centric sales organization – or you are at least well on your way to achieving it.

This is an excerpt from a recent in-depth guide "Money on the Table". To read the full guide, follow the link below: