Would you like a Talant Value Measurement expert to contact you?

Click here to submit a request and a Talant expert will contact you shortly.

Lavastorm

Lavastorm Background

Lavastorm is a Revenue Assurance software company that enables communications service providers to identify, validate and recover revenue leakage caused by discrepancies in their complex billing, customer care and operations support systems.

Lavastorm's Challenge

Telecommunication service providers such as Verizon and AT&T recognize that leaked revenue is a big problem, potentially causing them to lose more than 5% of revenues each year. In spite of this, Revenue Assurance remains a complex, nascent, and largely undefined problem within the telecommunications space. Lavastorm has developed a powerful automated software solution to this problem, but they struggled to convince prospects that their solution was superior to traditional alternatives. Some factors working against Lavastorm included a broad base of executive influencers and decision-makers, a complicated sales process, and limited budget for new initiatives. Even though Lavastorm boasts over 60 years of expertise in Revenue Assurance, and deep industry contacts, Lavastorm suffered through sales cycles that lasted 9-12 months.

The Talant Solution

Talant implemented several elements of its Value Measurement Suite to help Lavastorm identify, quantify and communicate the value of its automated revenue assurance solution:

• Needs Analyzer: enables Lavastorm to evaluate a prospect's operations, pinpointing current levels of revenue leakage by analyzing:
  • System integration and complexity
  • Strength of organizational processes
  • Nature of ongoing customer activity (installs, disconnects, etc.)
  • Nature of ongoing business activity (product rollouts, market expansions, etc.)
• Business Case Generator: provides Lavastorm prospects with a detailed comparison of alternative revenue assurance solutions, demonstrating how each solution stacks up with respect to total cost and total benefit; enables Lavastorm to evaluate different implementation options for its revenue assurance solution to determine the configuration that provides the most compelling results for each individual prospect.

Talant Impact

Talant's Value Measurement Suite provides Lavastorm with an analytical framework that facilitates communications about the complex issues surrounding revenue assurance. Using Talant's tools, Lavastorm can now assess a prospect's revenue leakage problem from the prospect's perspective and provide a customer-specific framework through which to solve the problem. In addition, Lavastorm can also build the business case for automating the revenue assurance solution by calculating and comparing the total costs, total benefits, and time-to-benefit of each alternative solution. This approach positions the Lavastorm team as thought-leaders and business partners to their clients in the revenue assurance space.

Lavastorm anticipates the following benefits after Talant's Value Measurement Suite is introduced to the field:

• More efficient sales process by using Talant's applications to engage key stakeholders and decision-makers early, uncovering issues and obstacles and managing them with real data
• Decreased sales cycles by:
  • Pinpointing the current levels of revenue leakage, thereby building a sense of urgency with prospects
  • Generating the appropriate financial metrics to enable prospects to evaluate competing solutions and make a responsible financial decision
• Faster time-to-benefit for prospects, by experimenting with different Lavastorm configurations and identifying the mix of solution controls and settings that deliver the biggest impact on the prospect's bottom line
• Improved ability to negotiate based on value delivered, avoiding time-consuming, costly and risky price negotiations.