Case Study: ITS Communications

COMPANY OVERVIEW
Name: ITS Communications
Industry: Telecommunications
Client Since: March 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 ability to get in front of Prospects
• Improve number of new appointments
• Set appointments with ‘Targeted’ decision makers to increase Results

I. The Challenge

 ITS Communications had recently rolled out a new service initiative, IXC Direct, to their selling regions. The product was tailored to medium and large enterprise companies. Although it had a ‘Right to Win’ in the business arena, the sales reps were having difficulty getting in front of the right target prospects to introduce them to the service and ROI benefits. Once they received an audience with a prospect, their ability to gain the business was high.

Added to this challenge, the business market is bludgeoned with solicitation calls, especially from telecommunications sales representatives. It 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 medium and large enterprise customers, with both hard and soft dollars. Sales leadership was open to a systematic approach tied to results.

II. The Strategy

 JDH Group’s X2 ROI Survey diagnostic process showed that the ITS sales team needed to double their new appointment sets per month in order to meet their sales objective. Realistically, they could only accomplish this by increasing their prospect conversation conversion ratio to the 45%-50% range to spend less time to get the required number of new appointments each week. They currently were ineffective as a group competency with a 10% Conversation-to-appointment ratio.

Secondarily, the team needed to target the ‘Fiscal authority’ level of contact 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 ITS team’s prospecting competency minimally to 40%, or an improvement of 4X.

 III. Training Results

After the ITS sales team met all the benchmarks of the X2 Pre-training, JDH Group arrived in Grand Rapids for the 2-day X2 Boot Camp. 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 Boot Camp Results

• Conversation-to-appointment ratios increased to 45% or a conversion improvement of 450%.
• Based on the number of new ‘Top-down’ appointments set, the training ROI estimate was 720%

12-Month Results

• Average monthly appointment improvement of 300%, from 40 to 120 appointments.
• 24% increase in Revenue
• X2 Sales System™ incorporated into ITS Learning Management System and all new-hire training for Ramp-to-quota improvement