The Thales Story
The challenge
The development programme for Thales e-Security’s ground-breaking new security architecture, SafeSign™, was nearing completion. With the steady growth of online business there is a real need for an integrated transaction security solution. SafeSign allows Thales' customers to replace the many different security systems they have accumulated over time with a single solution that offers: – A comprehensive security solution for advanced authentication of multiple tokens and multiple trust infrastructures; – An Identity Management System for managing users, their digital credentials and issuing authentication devices; – Hardware Security Modules for secure key storage and cryptographic processes. Thales relies on distribution partners around the world to sell and support the SafeSign™ product family, and Paul Meadowcroft, Head of Transaction Security of the e-security activities of the Thales Group, needed to find a way to effectively capture, document and communicate the business benefits of SafeSign™ to Thales’ partners. He needed material that could substantially improve the effectiveness of his direct and indirect sales teams, and enable them to express customer benefits in terms that key business decision makers could understand.
Action
Thales were planning their annual global partner kick-off meeting, and wanted to use it to launch the SafeSign™ product set. They wanted to provide their partners not just with information, but with a set of sales tools that would galvanise partner sales. They saw the Strategic Sales Program from Solutions for Sales and thought it could be the answer. Solutions for Sales were contracted to develop a Sales Guide and Interactive Sales Kit, with a deadline to deliver for the Partner Conference in 8 weeks.
Results
The Solutions for Sales approach is based on an established methodology that has been proven for countless other companies, and one that minimised the impact of the exercise on Thales’ heavily committed in-house resources. Paul commented “The Workshop organised by Solutions for Sales captured all the right information”. Emma Harrington, the SafeSign™ Product Manager, particularly liked the Interactive Sales Kit: “The structure makes it really easy to access all of the sales materials, and the ‘show me more / show me less’ feature allows a busy salesperson to get what they want quickly. Our partners were really impressed, one of them commented that it was the best sales material they had ever seen”. The result – Thales’ channel partners are re-energised, and sales leads are running at 4-times the rate they were before the conference.
“We wanted to increase sales of SafeSign™ through our channel partners. We launched the Sales Guide at our partner conference and the number of sales leads increased four-fold.”
Paul Meadowcroft, Head of Transaction Security of the e-security activities of the Thales Group
The Strategic Sales Program is only available from Solutions for Sales Ltd.
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