Case Study: Cinergy Communications

COMPANY OVERVIEW
Name: CINERGY Communications
Industry: Telecommunications (CLEC)
Client Since: June 2004

Training Areas Covered:
A. Sales Competency & Performance Metric Awareness
B. ‘Top-down’ Appointment Strategy
C. Setting ‘Targeted’ business appointments
D. Identifying and achieving weekly activity goals

Training Objective:

• Improve participants Conversation-to-appointment ratio
• Improve number of new appointments
• Set appointments with ‘Targeted’ decision makers to increase Results

I. The Challenge

 CINERGY Communications was lacking an adequate number of sales appointments in their 7 sales locations throughout the Midwest and Southeast. They were looking for a training system to allow them to replicate Best practices in line with prospecting and supply sales reps with a defined track for sales success.

Added to this challenge, their Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets contained many like-type competitors, all vying for the same prospects. Telecommunications is a mature market from the business prospect vantage point.

Marketing dollars were not available for a full blown PR campaign, and results were needed sooner rather than later.

JDH Group Assessment: (Cons) Extremely competitive market with many businesses competing for same customers. No current methodology or process for targeted prospecting in place. Business people with ‘Fiscal authority’ normally do not sit down with telecommunications reps.

(Pros) Client service suite had a measurable benefit for small and medium size businesses, with both hard and soft dollars. Sales leadership was open to a systematic approach tied to results and was willing to lead a process to achieve it.

 II. The Strategy

 JDH Group’s X2 ROI Survey diagnostic process showed that the CINERGY sales team needed to improve their new appointment sets per month by 40% in order to meet their sales objective. Realistically, they could only accomplish this by increasing their prospect conversation conversion ratio to the 50% to spend less time to get the required number of new appointments each week.

They currently were ineffective as a group with an 11% Conversation-to-appointment ratio, spending too much time to get too little results.

Secondarily, the team needed to differentiate themselves from their many competitors by targeting the ‘C-level’ prospect to decrease their sales cycle in days and increase their closing ratio. Prospecting contacts were limited to these titles of responsibility and prepared for the 2-day X2 Boot Camp.

The X2 Sales System™ training process was initiated with the training objective set at improving the CINERGY team’s prospecting competency minimally to a 50% conversion ratio, or an improvement of 4X.

 III. Training Results

 JDH Group implemented the X2 Pre-training process in 7 CINERGY Communications locations and facilitated (5) 2-day X2 Boot Camps. After a review of the customized X2 Initiator™ Desktop training tool, participants made live prospecting calls utilizing the X2 conversation methodology and individually entered into coaching sessions with Jeff Hardesty, developer of the X2 Sales System™.

2-Day X2 Boot Camp Results

• Conversation-to-appointment ratios increased to 69% for a conversion improvement of 635%.
• 177 targeted ‘Top-down’ appointments were set
• Based on the number of new ‘Top-down’ appointments set and their current performance numbers, the training ROI estimate was 1142%

12-Month Results

• Although CINERGY Communications management would not disclose exact revenue growth figures, they attribute a portion of that growth to the X2 training.
• X2 Sales System™ incorporated into CINERGY Communications Learning Management System
• Sales Force Automation system customized to the X2 Sales System™ competency methodology