The Openreach Story
The challenge
Openreach was created in 2006 to give Communications Providers equal access to the wires and fibres that connect tens of millions of homes and businesses to local telephone exchanges in England, Scotland and Wales. The company offers its customers the products and infrastructure they need to meet the ever increasing demands of bandwidth-hungry and value-conscious end users who rely on the network to deliver everything from TV to text messages.
As part of a drive to grow revenue, Openreach identified the opportunity to provide project management and engineering services to help customers meet their business objectives more efficiently.
Two comprehensive service product sets were developed, Project Services and Engineering Services, but the documentation focused on the service details and not how these services could be sold. The salesforce was comfortable selling tangible network based products, but had little experience of selling services. Jackie Bedford, Head of Portfolio Marketing, could see what was required: “We needed to help our salespeople venture out of their traditional comfort zone to sell these services. It was clear that we wouldn’t be able to do this without external help”. Openreach’s Sales Director, Phil Mottram, also recognised that this would be a major barrier to growing services sales, so he asked Solutions for Sales to provide a solution.
Action
Solutions for Sales proposed a Solutions Workshop, to develop and refine a set of compelling, customer-orientated propositions, followed by a Marketing Workshop to capture the “how to sell” information for a Project and Engineering Services Sales Guide. Openreach knew that to achieve the culture change from product to services selling they needed an effective roll-out. This was achieved by SfS running their active learning event, the Sales Development Workshop, and by a further SfS session at Openreach's regular Sales Live event.
Results
The Solutions Workshop successfully identified four propositions that addressed the real business challenges faced by Openreach’s customers. These provided a tangible way for the salesforce to communicate how the services could provide solutions to their customers’ business issues.
The propositions were an immediate success, with the terminology being used in internal presentations even before the Sales Guide was complete. One proposition, ‘While we’re there’, which was developed at the workshop, is seen as a major revenue opportunity for Openreach.
The Sales Guide has been very positively received – after the Sales Development Workshop 91% of attendees felt better able to sell Engineering and Project Services. It has now been incorporated into the new Sales Hub and is used daily by Openreach salespeople seeking solutions to customers’ business challenges.
“The Solutions and Marketing workshops delivered real benefit. Using a proven workshop framework, we were able to get a cross section of sales, products and marketing people in one room and use their collective knowledge and expertise to generate a really customer focused approach to selling our services portfolio.”
Jackie Bedford, Head of Portfolio Marketing, Openreach
“The resulting Sales Guide was very good – money well spent.”
Martin Rankin, Client Business Development Director, Openreach
The Strategic Sales Program is only available from Solutions for Sales Ltd.
For more information please email or call +44 (0)1702 586742.