BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT •BUSINESS PROCESS ENGINEERING • CONSULTING

Value: Our client was empowered to focus on their core competencies while we delivered a superior customer experience across all sales channels, and throughout the customer lifecycle. STI became the face of the business, providing subject matter expertise, customer service and technical support. The economic pricing model includes multiple on-shore, near-shore and off-shore locations, encompassing off-shore locations, encompassing voice, click-to-chat and order entry channel functions. It’s cost-effective, and over the decade of our relationship has enabled global expansion. STI’s sales team interfaces with our client’s small, in-house sales group to report on sales performance, keep abreast of any new sales initiatives the company creates, and relay customer feedback to continuously imprcontinuously improve the customer experience.

Furthermore, STI’s year-over-year success, including exceptional order fall-out resolution, sales program fine-tuning driven by analytics & performance reporting and website modifications, has led to a long term strategic partnership.

Solution: The rapidly growing business in this use case engaged STI to serve as their upfront sales team, choosing to outsource the entire sales ecosystem instead of building their own department. The first step was for STI to learn the core business and sales model, which primarily involves large, relatively complex orders, often on a scale of thousands of telecommunications products for distribution to telecommunications products for distribution to employees. STI trained hundreds of call center representatives on the products. Based on our experience with similar B2B clients, we also suggested and implemented end-to-end back-office processes that streamlined order management and the CRM system.

STI delivered inbound and outbound call center support, chat interaction, web ordering assistance and post-order fallout resolution, plus ongoing enhancements to the web site to enable sales and improve user interaction. Furthermore, we established a transactional pricing agreement that enabled our client to have a dedicated sales force at a predictable, manageable cost, and without increasing headcount or manageable cost, and without increasing headcount or adding office space. STI was able increase resources to as many at 500 representatives when needed and reduce that force, and cut costs, when appropriate.

Challenge: Growing fast is great, but growing smart is better. Every successful business plan has sales programs built-in, and entrepreneurs and a company’s initial hires often “put on their sales hats” to get their products or services into the hands of the company’s first customers. However, at some point it becomes apparent that the smart move would be to form a dedicated sales staff, so that the founders can focus on core competencies – new software solutions, expanding customer services, developing next-gen product offerings, etc. – while the upfront sales team finds new business and builds on existing relationships.

A long-standing Sequential A long-standing Sequential Technology International (STI) client found themselves exactly in that position. Their business-to-business sales trend forecast was extremely positive, and they had reached a point at which the best way to capitalize on the opportunity was to scale-up the sales efforts. With that acknowledged, the next question was how to make a strategically advantageous, one that would enable them to cost-effectively establish a world-class sales force.