CASE STUDIES

Small Medium Enterprise – Vodafone Assist CD

Introduction

The Assist CD delivered against the following key objectives:

1. Deliver key messages to existing customers
2. Generate new business
3. Support the sales process
4. Educate the sales teams
5. Evaluate correct areas for resource

Background

The Mi liberty team wanted a better understanding of how the comms tools we were creating for Vodafone were being used and what their effectiveness was. We found that when we asked for feedback it was difficult for Vodafone to give us an answer as there was very little in the way of measurement tools being used. So we asked if we could find out.

Vodafone Enterprise had an intranet that the direct sales team and channel could both access. It had 873 different marketing support tools available on it and in addition the sales people had many hundreds of DIY presentations on their laptops. Collateral stocks in the warehouse were very high and the reason that usage of most of the pieces was so low was because sales were unaware of the availability and how to get them, and didn’t understand what was current, or what kinds of scenario each one was for.

Understanding

We therefore embarked on some research to understand the situation in more detail which included:

• Full audit of all literature and comms material used by the sales channels
• Going on sales trips and meeting with sales teams
• Mystery shopping corporate and SME customers to see what Vodafone sales teams actually used in practice – which we also benchmarked against other networks. We set up a simulated acquisition brief.

Solution

A CD ROM was created which was in essence the ‘shell and delivery mechanism’ for the full range of collateral, only this time it explained, using the sales cycle and customer profiling which pieces were intended for which scenarios.

It enabled sales teams to both use the material electronically as PDFs and also to order physical collateral.

Most crucially, it provided a tracking mechanism linked to an internal stats website that marketing could monitor to see who was using what, where and when.

Outcome

It quickly became apparent what was being used and what wasn’t, so marketing was able to adapt and or phase out certain collateral lines.

The ability to easily access up to date PDF versions of material meant that less had to be printed overall – this delivered a budget saving of 40% on print production.

Sales loved it because it made their lives much easier

“I think this CD is excellent – well done, a brilliant sales and reference tool that doesn’t rely on me being online so I can use it with my customer”

Meanwhile marketing loved it because they could see their material being actively used.

Whilst all involved in the project clearly recognise that it is never possible to attribute such measures entirely to one factor, the ‘straightening out’ of the way in which customer communications was managed did clearly have a positive effect on bottom line results in terms of:

• A reduction in customer churn
• An increase in sales achieved.

download case study