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BellSouth
BellSouth Background
BellSouth Corporation is a Fortune 100
communication services provider headquartered in Atlanta, GA, serving
nearly 46 million customers in the United States and 15 other
countries. BellSouth's e-Platform leverages the company's network-based
architecture to provide a variety of e-business services, including web
hosting, managed storage, managed security, content distribution,
disaster recovery, and Application Service Provider (ASP) services.
BellSouth's Challenge
Despite industry-leading facilities and
decades of experience managing state-of-the-art datacenters, sales of
BellSouth's web hosting, security, and storage services were sluggish
after the launch of its e-Platform in 2000.
A barrier to sales that plagued the 300 BellSouth sales reps supporting
the e-Platform was that decisions to purchase these mission-critical
applications are made at the executive level within companies–a
position into which they had little experience selling. BellSouth sales
reps struggled to create a compelling, quantified business case that
clearly demonstrated the impact their e-Platform solution had on a
customer's bottom line. As a result, the rare executive audiences reps
were able to attain failed to be effective. Many reps reverted to
selling into established BellSouth relationships, such as mid-level
operations managers and technical experts. This inability to
effectively appeal to the executive level resulted in long sales cycles
and unsatisfactory close ratios.
The Talant Solution
After evaluating a number of ROI solutions,
BellSouth ultimately chose the following components of Talant's Value
Measurement Suite:
- Needs Analyzer: enables
BellSouth sales reps to identify each prospect's capability gaps with
respect to Uptime/Availability, Data Recovery, and Physical/ Network
Security and quantify the impact of those gaps in terms of additional
cost incurred and revenue lost.
- Business Case Generator:
provides BellSouth sales reps with the financial and operational
metrics necessary to cost-justify their solution; quantifies the
business benefits of BellSouth's e-Platform solution as compared to
alternative solutions.
- Proposal Builder:
automatically generates a proposal-ready presentation that positions
the output of the Needs Analyzer and Business Case Generator in a
compelling manner for the customer.
Talant Impact
The analytics driven by Talant's Value
Measurement Suite arm BellSouth sales reps with the ammunition to
confidently reach out to senior executives and introduce them to the
business benefits of BellSouth's e-Platform. Sales reps reported
immediate success engaging at higher levels within customer
organizations with statements like:
- "Are you aware that employee downtime
caused by system outages is costing your business $1,200,000 each
year?"
- "Our solution for XYZ Company had a
positive ROI, driven by net 3-year returns of $13.2M on a 3-year total
cost of ownership (TCO) of $2.7M. This solution broke-even in 5
months."
BellSouth reported powerful benefits after
introducing Talant's Value Measurement Suite to the field:
- Significantly higher success rate in
attaining meetings with senior executives
- More efficient sales process by
leveraging early executive buy-in to facilitate access to other key
stakeholders and decision-makers
- Decreased sales cycles
- Higher close ratios for e-Platform
products
- High-impact proposals that take less time
to develop
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