Case Study 3: AT&T
Issue:
AT&T has a large sales force of distributed employees who were in need of a new strategy for penetrating accounts at a higher level. In general, most employees were attempting to engage Directors and VP’s at target companies and rarely building relationships with C-level managers who ultimately make the decisions on large information technology and telecommunications purchases. AT&T was searching for a communications and training plan to refocus their sales employees on executive level decision makers and ultimately increase revenue per customer for the company.
Strategy:
After thoroughly researching the current penetration strategies, skill set and knowledge of sales employees as well as the critical issues for high level executives in the target companies our approach was four-fold:
- Develop a penetration model for the sales employees that took advantage of the high value of customer financial information and the positive cost savings and revenue generation impact telecommunications services can have on customer financials.
- Locally deploy messaging to sales employees describing the value of speaking their customer’s language and how making the change in penetration strategy would substantially increase the employee’s own paycheck.
- Testing, measuring and adjusting the above three elements based on feedback from employees, company executives as well as field based results of the communications program.
Results:
The communications and training program has been heralded as a tremendous success not only by AT&T executives but also sales employees. Following testing of an initial location with the communications plan as well as the training execution, feedback was received and modifications were made. Additional cities were launched with a substantial increase of positive feedback and 96% of respondents voting positively for the program. A graphic following the creative work examples paragraph highlights the incredible results of the program.
