With the recent buzz around the new iPhone 4 and excitement for the coming of 4G cell networks, the battle to come out on top is at an all-time high. Recently, Sprint became the first network to offer 4G service, but this exciting jump ahead does not come without complications – and it is exactly these types of things that make it the perfect time to sell into cell providers.

Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse stated in their most recent earnings call that they have been having difficulty with their supply chain, especially surrounding their 4G phones since the launch of the new network. “Now, a combination of the economy improving and all of a sudden some real increased customer demand for these high-end devices is putting some strain on the supply chain. So we are working with our suppliers very closely…to try to get as much inventory as we can. We are supply constraint…we could definitely sell more if we could get more.”

Now that Sprint Nextel has finally gotten a leg up on the competition (mainly Verizon and AT&T) now is the most crucial moment to ensure that they maintain their competitive advantage. Disruptions in their supply chain while the spotlight is on them will cause permanent setbacks for their 4G campaigns moving forward, especially when Verizon and AT&T catch up to the game.

Not only does Sprint have to worry about its 4G service, but also if it wants to remain a player in the wireless market, it needs to solve its problems with its standard service quality. Since Sprint bought Nextel in 2005, the company has been struggling with the integration of the two networks while supporting the customer base of both sides. They suffered from initial technical problems that caused call quality issues in 2006, but even in 2009, they still haven’t found the solution. For now, the company has selected Ericsson to run its network, but moving forward they plain to pair down their two separate networks to eventually run as a single entity.

In the meantime, Sprint Nextel’s customer management organization is working to fill their service gaps in hasty efforts to maintain the current subscribers of their wireless services. They are planning initiatives that are designed to improve call center processes and procedures and will be investing in solutions to improve satisfaction when problems so arise.

At a time when the company is finally getting some traction to take a competitive advantage is a very tough-to-crack space, it seems that Sprint Nextel is encountering some serious supply & service issues. These things are at the very base of a successful company because they directly face the customer. You can bet the company will be heavily investing to ensure that these complications don’t ruin their current brush with success in the wireless world.

For more actionable projects and initiatives within the Fortune 1000 and Global 500, check out the Technology Business Drivers document with more than 25 FREE samples just like this and start winning more business.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

For many years, technology and programming seemed like a foreign world to many people, even within their own companies, if they weren’t working in IT. Now that so many kinds of technology have become part of daily life, the idea of these systems and processes are a little closer to home and easier to understand as crucial to the way we operate.

Rather than being a part of the invisible background behind a company, technology decisions now involve the entire enterprise. As Mark Lees, Director of Marketing at CSC says, “Any company is the sum of its business processes.” In this video clip, Lees discusses how the future of technology lies in its ability to solve business processes. In an economy where budgets are tight, technology must be leveraged to “provide a competitive advantage and lead to customer growth,” rather than focused on flashy toys (or “cool features and functions,” as Lees calls them) for developers and IT architects to play with. IT decisions need to be customer driven to emerge from the recession.

For example, American Express has a number of initiatives underway that will rely on technology to enhance the cardmember experience; American Express has created a new Global Services Group that unites their U.S. and international cardmember servicing organizations, as well as most processing and support functions across the company, including among others, technology support and certain key processing functions in areas such as finance and human resources.

These kinds of initiatives are technology-fueled programs that cater to the needs of the customer, ensuring that the investment won’t fail to produce a favorable ROI. Mark Lees notes that IT enables “customer growth, customer service, and customer innovation” through its ability to make these business processes more effective, and this is where companies can gain a competitive advantage. He highlights the fact that these processes are executed by people utilizing technology to manage data.

“A credit card company can be described as nothing more than a database. The credit card company mines that database for information on its customers and offers them products that are most appropriate to them.” This is the conclusion Lees comes to in his discussion; companies essential ARE technology.

Whether it is database management or supply chain efficiencies, technology has become the center of organizations today – and their success depends on their ability to optimize these business processes through technology. Knowing that this is the case, there is only one way to approach selling technology to the enterprise: solve their business problems by optimizing their crucial business processes.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Outsourcing major business processes to major providers, especially offshore outsourcing companies like Wipro and Mahindra Satyam, has been a common fix for decreasing IT budgets in a struggling economy. As these providers support more and more Fortune 1000 and Global 500 giants, many of who are direct competitors, the issue of overuse, and consequently, security, come into play. While working with a more experienced and renowned company may seem more safe, companies like Credit Suisse, who are dealing with very sensitive, private client information are turning to smaller, “less risky” providers to work on their projects.

Initiatives such as risk mitigation and working with niche suppliers is a part of Credit Suisse’s multi-year IT transformation, aimed at creating centers of excellence across India, China, US and Singapore. These centers will specialize in different set of capabilities in the banking domain, such as efficiency, productivity and support. Credit Suisse has been outsourcing its software application maintenance and development projects to Wipro and Cognizant for a few years, but from 2009 forward will work with almost eight smaller, niche firms, such as Headstrong, as the company seeks to mitigate risks associated with two large suppliers. The bank was also reevaluating their contract with HP in the middle of 2009 and was potentially looking to sign a contract with another company for managing their servers and desktops.

Divyesh Vithlani, managing director and chief information officer of Credit Suisse Asia Pacific said, “As part of our second phase of outsourcing, we plan to outsource almost 40 percent of niche projects to around six to eight smaller vendors,” he said. Some of the niche projects would include delivering solutions based on the banking software T24 offered by Temenos, apart from other specific applications. “We want redundancy and do not want to concentrate our risks,” he added.

So what does this mean? For reps at smaller outsourcing companies, this could be a huge opportunity to displace the outsourcing giants that continue to shadow over potential deals with big-time Fortune 1000 prospects. With this competitive insight, you could have a new value proposition to allow you to break into these accounts.  How will you make sure that enterprise IT budgets, like Credit Suisse’s will be spent on your company’s services? It’s all about the competition: these companies compete with each other just as much as you’re constantly looking for ways to gain the upper hand on your competitors. As soon as you mention that one of their competitors has taken action towards solutions like yours, their ears will be WIDE open.

For more current technology initiatives and free technology sales leads in the Fortune 1000 and Global 500, check out our Technology Business Drivers document.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Extractable, modifiable, clean, accurate, comprehensive: in an age of customization and automated analysis in mass quantities, these are qualities that we demand of the data we input so that the output is reliable and useful. Whether you’re running through lists of corporate contacts to add to a database for marketing programs or using metrics on consumer buying data to analyze buying trends to optimize your supply chain, we depend on data for so many different aspects of business.

As technology becomes more sophisticated, businesspeople are demanding speed and ease in their data gathering endeavors in order to save as much (precious) time as possible. In marketing and sales especially, there is strength in numbers; blasting a campaign to 80,000 contacts that may not be good prospects is faster and cheaper than handpicking singular people to spend your precious time calling to pitch your product. Dun & Bradstreet understands it’s customers’ need for fast and accurate data; they know that if they can’t provide a platform that is easy to use in order to extract their “commercial data,” which also needs to be kept clean and updated, they will lose market share.

The company expects to spend approximately $110 million to $130 million over the next two years to strengthen its leading position in commercial data and to improve its current technology platform. According to D&B president and CEO, Sara Mathew, “We will create a new data supply chain leveraging outside vendors who have state of the art technology.” The company has migrated its data management responsibilities to Acxiom, who will provide data center operations, technology help desk, and network management functions, which were formerly managed by CSC.

Acxiom was chosen to focus on increasing speed, data processing capacity and matching capabilities. D&B is investing huge amounts of money to provide customers with a seamless integration of higher quality, real time data through a range of “new age” work flows including mobile solutions, social networks, and text alerts. According to CEO Sara Mathew, “Our current infrastructure can be improved. It has impeded our ability to meet emerging customer needs at a time when customers are demanding an increased space of innovation to cope with the softer economy.”

Dun & Bradstreet is clearly tuned into the most recent changes in marketing and technology, and more importantly, how these things affect their customers’ business endeavors. They realize that they must invest in their platform, or their accurate and comprehensive data will be rendered useless. In this economy, people are choosing the easiest and quickest solutions in order to save money, and D&B knows that spending a little extra to optimize their user interface will more than make up for itself with customer renewals and new business.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Especially in a struggling economy, business needs are at the crux of what ultimately closes a deal and ends in a successful sale. As a sales rep selling technology, understanding your prospect’s business needs enough to align your solution with their specific plights is the key to closing business. As it turns out, sales reps aren’t the only ones that might be overlooking these broad, strategic business pains in the process of their efforts to sell technology.

According to experts at Santa Clara University’s, Information Technology Leadership Program, many CIOs and IT executives lack the ability to think strategically about corporate business initiatives and problems when thinking about the effects of their actions for the short and long term. “It is clear to us that most of them don’t understand, for instance, how to base their work not just on assigned tasks but on a broad understanding of the environment the company is operating in, or how to build the capabilities of their IT organizations with the future in mind,” said the experts in their Wall Street Journal report, Why CIOs Are Last Among Equals.

Why is this a problem for enterprise technology sales reps? “Consider the fact that major corporate strategic initiatives in recent years that rely heavily on information technology haven’t been led by IT people—movements like total quality management, business process re-engineering, online commerce. More recently, the leadership for Web 2.0 initiatives appears to be coming from outside the IT department in most cases.”

There are two equally important and very different approaches that reps need to take in order to make a sale successful, especially if it they are selling enterprise solutions that affect the entire company. A good rep must be able to “plug in” to their prospect’s general business pains and pitch their solution as a TRUE solution to those needs. Simultaneously, they must also be well versed and incredibly knowledgeable about the technical specifications of the product to earn CIO/IT approval and eventually get both departments to sign off on the contract and delegate a portion of their precious budget to the solution.

This may sound like a lot of extra legwork, but in an economy where every dollar spent is scrutinized, you can be sure that both IT executives and high-level execs holding budgets will be involved in the approval of the deal.

Check out the free Top 10 Technology Buyer’s Tips document for insights and tips from top execs about how to go about selling solutions into the enterprise.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.