Since today’s network architectures and equipment are typically not adequate for the challenges of this new world, DSPs have a big opportunity to help their enterprise customers take that transformative digitization journey to TND — to be more strategic DSPs.

An enterprise sales ecosystem to increase profitability

Because of the scale and diversity of TND, it is imperative that pre-sales processes evolve continuously and be fine-tuned, automated, and managed. Collaboration with Product Management is key so that Sales can keep up with the transforming nature of the proposed offerings. Influencing the sales team early in the process is important to ensure best practices are adhered to and profitability is maximized. It is thus crucial for the product management team to take full control of the DSP offering, update it regularly, and push those updates to the sales team. A multi-disciplinary, collaborative platform that spans from portfolio modeling to proposal generation is vital for this transformation and digitization to be successful.

Success is realized when architectures and designs move quickly and profitably from concept to requirements to proposal to order to successful implementation. Accurate solutions that can be implemented without errors result in customer satisfaction and significantly impact profitability.

To meet the needs of TND, a sales enablement and profit acceleration platform must include engines and data models. Engines such as configuration and design should interact seamlessly with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, profit optimization, workflow and collaboration, assessment and discovery, and proposal generation. Data models need to support the complexity of DSP reference architectures, from X-as-a-Service, managed and hosted, and on-premise edge equipment to different business models such as outright purchase, maintenance, subscription, and more. The data models are then utilized by the engines to drive the right solution and the best business model, and to align with DSP objectives such as increasing service attach rates and subscriptions.

Whether an opportunity is generated green- or brown-field, an integrated ecosystem that provides end-to-end sales workflow management, collaboration, business analytics, automation, and shared data (a single source of the truth) across the entire sales lifecycle is required to close the deal and deliver the solution.

TND is putting more focus on guided-selling templates to make architectural recommendations. Questionnaires can guide the sales person from enterprise business outcome all the way down to the best (and most profitable) architecture or design for that client. This reduces errors and dependence on more highly-specialized experts.