Case Study Brief: Custom Sales Packet Creation

Fortune 500 Telecom Company Achieves Major Cost Savings & Increased Sales With Automation Solution

SITUATION AND CHALLENGE

RESULTS AT A GLANCE

Automating workflow process creates over 100,000 individual sales packets annually

Client immediately realized a 27% cost savings

Increased client “face time” by 25% - the equivalent of adding over 300 additional sales reps

Additional savings in staffing costs by repurposing 6 full time employees

A global telecommunications company with thousands of national field sales representatives was challenged with the ongoing burden of manually creating custom sales packets for their customer renewal process. Prior to partnering with On Demand Technologies (ODT), each sales representative spent hundreds of business hours manually creating the packets. By doing so, each rep was losing valuable time in the field with their customers and prospects – time that could be better spent retaining business and generating new sales.

CASE DETAILS

Situational Analysis

Prior to leveraging ODT and Praxis^TM, each field sales representative would manually create an individual custom sales packet for each client. To do this they had to access multiple online systems to search and download a variety of components that comprised the sales packet. In addition, some static portions of the packets were pulled from pre-printed inventory. The reps would print contracts, account profiles, client-specific artwork, product material, marketing demographics, and competitive data. On top of that, it was difficult to simply print the items to a single office printer shared by an average of 34 other reps in each location. The company estimates that each rep was spending at least 25% of their time building the packets. The process was slow, laborious, error-prone, and most importantly, significantly reduced the sales potential of each rep.

Even after all of the time and effort spent, the finished sales packets were still not ideal, as they comprised varying paper sizes, uneven pagination, and inferior print quality as a result of using standard office grade printers.

Meeting the Challenge

The telecom company recognized the problem and engaged ODT to automate the process of creating hundreds of thousands of packets. ODT and the telecom company analyzed the situation and quickly determined that ODT’s Praxis workflow automation was a perfect solution. Praxis is an architecture that enables companies to customize the automation of manual workflows and processes. It is highly configurable to fit each client’s unique requirements and supports virtually unlimited scalability to accommodate rapid increases in usage.

Successful Results

ODT worked with the telecom company to map out the process flow that each sales rep used to manually create packets. Then, ODT quickly configured Praxis to perform those steps automatically: accessing all of the online systems, downloading required information, and formatting pages for consistent, high-quality digital delivery. Finally, ODT delivers the ready-to-use sales packet, whether it’s printed at an ODT digital print facility and delivered for immediate use by the sales reps, or the documents are delivered to a wireless device such as an iPad. ODT offered a custom-fit solution for the telecom company’s sales team - on demand.

Using Praxis, ODT and the telecom company were able to implement a successful solution in a matter of weeks. By contrast, using traditional software development methods, the telecom company’s IT team estimated the project would take well over a year to complete. In addition, the Praxis-based solution is highly scalable, easily supporting additional sales reps and future growth without additional investment. The telecommunications company simultaneously realized significant cost savings and increased sales. By automating the creation of custom sales packets for over 4,000 sales reps, costs were reduced by 27%.

Now that sales reps are no longer spending time manually creating the packets, the company estimates that they have added the equivalent of 300 additional reps at no additional cost. The support staff required to aid sales reps is no longer required, enabling the company to reassign those resources to other tasks. Additionally, the automatically-produced packets are drastically improved in terms of consistency and quality, the output medium is flexible to fit to business tools, and there is no pre-printed paper to store (or waste).

SUMMARY