Background 

Consulting Co., a fast growing consulting company had quickly expanded its service offering through a wide variety of rapid deploy, productized-services. The goal was simple; customers wanted results in specific areas, and productizing their service offering enabled faster decisions. 

Overtime, however, this large set of products created confusion for their account managers and sales teams.

There was simply too much choice - and the choices were often not very straightforward. Multiple products could help with the same objective, several products had partial or sometimes, significant overlap. Sales people were unsure which one to recommend, customers couldn’t clearly see why one was a better fit than the other, resulting in confusion and significantly longer sales cycle.

Problem Statement

They came to SmashCloud with a clear problem statement: our sales teams are struggling understanding, recommending and selling this wide variety of products, we need a software solution to this problem.

They were clear on the overall problem, and they were clear that they were looking for a software solution. But that is about all. What the final solution would look like, what it will exactly do or how it’ll do it - were not specified.

They’d gotten used to our flagship, CAPstone approach, where we lead the discovery process and come up with a solution to a clearly defined business problem, instead of expecting a list of feature requirements/specifications.

Approach

SmashCloud conducted a series of workshops that included getting insight from over 60 people across the sales organization. We discovered what they key challenges are, what the typical customer journey was according to them and what segmentation strategies are currently being used. We discovered a huge variance in results across resources and worked to identify why that variance existed - what helped certain reps succeed while others struggled.

We also looked at the past data to analyse which customer segments were best suited to each of the productized-service offerings. In our analysis we discovered key insights such as accounts that started off with specific products end up buying more as those products helped them get a deeper understanding of what areas to focus on. We also discovered how Consulting Co.’s customer profiles often affected their likelihood to get value out of each of the service offerings.

The Solution

Using all of our analysis, we in collaboration with Subject Matter Experts, mapped out the key questions/criteria that would determine which products would be a better fit for each lead - depending on 17 different data points, such as company size, how far along in the customer journey they were, demographics and budgets.

We then built a recommendation/scoring engine that sales people were able to use during sales conversations over the customer journey to determine/recommend which products would be best for the customer - whether that be during sales conversations with new customers or upsell/cross sell conversations with existing customers.

In upsell/cross-sell situations, the recommendation/scoring engine would also pick up pre-existing data on the customer to tailor recommendations based on the products they had already purchased/renewed.

The recommendation engine would not only provide the sales people with the products that would be the best fit, but also provide a reason why through the scoring mechanism - allowing sales people to clearly articulate why a specific product would be the best fit for them and why other products that had some overlap, but scored lower, were not.

The solution resulted in faster decisions and an over 30% increase in sales in the first 6 months (Year on Year). 

SmashCloud’s CAPstone approach is industry agnostic and helps customers get more out of the custom applications by aligning business value with technology.