Accelerating Pipeline Growth for an Ambitious Enterprise Sales Team
The Verizon EMEA Enterprise Sales team comprises highly skilled and experienced consultants with a proven track record. The Team was eager to explore innovative approaches to generate more sales opportunities, and SNH stepped in to deliver exceptional results.
The Challenge
The Verizon EMEA Enterprise team comprises highly skilled and experienced consultants with a proven track record.
They needed to accelerate their pipeline growth and despite an outstanding brand reputation, strong customer base and active marketing support those senior consultants were short of high quality leads and having to resort to making cold calls to generate new opportunities. This was yielding poor results, diminishing morale and represented a poor and unsustainable use of skilled resources.
The Solution
Like most sales teams the Verizon team has a strong network of customers and contacts that represented a ‘Goldmine’ of opportunity. Yet they had no structured approach to systematically and effectively ‘mine the gold’. Step one for SNH was to understand the key barriers to effectively unlocking the untapped opportunity in their network. Having identified these barriers at an individual, team and organisational level; a tailored solution was developed to equip the sales team with the techniques, tools, capability and confidence to make this a natural, enjoyable and profitable way of working.
SNH worked with the Verizon sales team to harness their existing relationships with customers and personal networks, enabling them to generate a consistent flow of high-quality introductions and referrals. Through strategic guidance, SNH demonstrated how to identify and create opportunities where it was timely and appropriate to ask for introductions. Additionally, SNH provided the team with effective tools and templates that made it simple and comfortable for their contacts to provide high-quality personal introductions
The Outcome
The sales team generated over £10m of additional pipeline in under 6 months, with closed business delivering an ROI in excess of 20x the cost of the project, underlining its remarkable success. The SNH solution helped experienced salespeople thrive by leveraging their existing loyal customer base and contacts, enabling them to focus on what they loved most - engaging in meaningful sales conversations with their contacts. This approach eliminated the need for resorting to less rewarding and enjoyable methods such as cold calling, further improving the morale and performance of the team.
Overall, this resulted in a more cohesive sales and marketing effort. Sales teams also gained a better understanding of the value of marketing-led activities such as white papers, seminars, and hospitality in synergy with their own efforts in building relationships and developing pipeline.
“Since introducing the SNH’s revenue growth solution we have generated over £10m of new pipeline specifically from activities related to the programme. We have seen a turnaround in the team’s attitude to generating new leads through referrals. In fact it has impacted how they view everything from marketing campaigns to hospitality to handling queries, since they are now constantly looking for opportunities to generate goodwill and opportunity in their relationships.”
CTO, Verizon Enterprise, EMEA
“The team have 'got their mojo back’ - bringing out their natural talent and providing a framework for a structured approach to social selling. You can see the salespeople who have been through the programme versus those who haven't. It's created a mind-set change and promotes a practical, effective and sustainable approach to developing healthy, profitable relationships.”
Sales Director, Verizon Enterprise, EMEA
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