The Next Profitability Challenge: Enterprise Cloud
Q: What impact does presales automation have on Sprint’s time-to-market?
A: When we work with our customers to create a proposal we need to understand their current networks and services as well as their plans. Then we iterate with “what if” variations, add or subtract regions and evaluate one-step as well as staged project plans. Our customers need to receive proposals quickly and review the detailed options visually so they can make informed decisions. Those reviews typically result in new ideas and additional options that need to be translated quickly into revised designs.
Q: How do your sales engineers keep up to date with equipment updates?
A: The suppliers in our ecosystem make changes to their devices daily. In the old days we would track and communicate that information to the sales team manually. Now Netformx manages all the supplier’s policies and rules so that designs meet the manufacturer’s specifications. The system prevents the sales engineer from creating a design that won’t work and removes our dependency on their memory for the details.
Q: What has the impact been on staffing?
A: Putting detailed vendor-technology information and valid configurations into a central repository has resulted in a change in required sales engineers’ skills. Instead of being dependent on individuals with deep knowledge of particular technologies or customer network details, we can now use engineers with more generalized skills and count on Netformx’s automated solution to provide the technical details they need to create an accurate proposal.
Q: Have you gained any other efficiencies?
A: Since we store network designs in a database, when customers make changes to their networks or their managed services, anybody in the process — whether sales engineering, Tier 2 support, customer care, or implementation — can pull up the existing design, know it is current, make the required change, and rest assured the change will follow the workflow and be implemented properly. We can do it practically in real time. Our customers really appreciate that.
Q: What’s been the net impact of Sprint’s presales automation transformation?
A: We have improved our ability to sell complex enterprise solutions and created a faster automated sales process that feeds designs downstream with virtually no implementation errors. This speeds customer proposal creation, service availability and cash flow, increasing both profitability and customer satisfaction.
The bottom line
Presales automation enables more enterprise service proposals to be prepared and more business to be won. As demonstrated by Sprint and others, significant business results can be achieved, such as:
- 60-90 percent faster network designs and proposal generation
- 70 percent productivity increase
- 99 percent error-free designs
Like Netformx, Sprint, using an integrated solution, has become a leader in automating the presales process. It can respond to customer needs faster, and its sales engineers can be more productive. Automation has increased sales and sped up time-to-market, enabling Sprint to differentiate itself with real-time designs and flow-through provisioning.
