Investment in Telecommunications

To protect the confidentiality of our client and their customer, we have not detailed names.

Profile

How can a piece of software be worth millions of dollars? That depends on what it does for the client. In recent years, investment in technology was seen as an essential commitment to the future, and broadly received the support of most Board members. However, cynicism has increased around technology sales, and decision-makers now need hard proof of the benefits. The bigger the price tag, the better the proposal needs to be. How is this done?

Background

This global telecommunications company provides hardware, services and systems solutions that monitor and manage communications networks. An opportunity arose in what was an extremely competitive sales situation. A global mobile operator approached them to supply a Quality of Service, performance monitoring system for their 2Mb framed services. This represented a multi-million pound deal and was being aggressively pursued by a number of competitors.

Problem

In response to an RFP, the company knew they had to work very closely with the customer to manage the process. The cost of their solution was higher than the competition and the client's budget! They needed to provide clear cost and revenue justifications that would deliver an acceptable return on the incremental investment proposed.

Solution

Shark was used as part of the sales process allowing them to identify and quantify the real business value of their proposition and related it to bottom line benefits for their customer. Over 300,000 man-hours per year were used to fix service-affecting faults and the company could reduce that significantly. This meant substantial labour saving could be made. The company also knew it would dramatically reduce the number of lost calls in service outages and would therefore lead to increased revenue generation. Using the Shark ROI tool, they found common ground and negotiated jointly sponsored benefits and discussed the financial output results - Payback, NPV, and IRR - together!

Result

The company was successful at demonstrating their focus on the business value of their solution and augmented the technical bid perfectly. The customer agreed to move forward with their solution. Shark delivered quantifiable ROI measures through a professional business case that met the minimum return requirements of the customer's purchasing processes. It established credibility and trust within their client. Shark proved it made good business and technical sense to invest further in a solution that was initially more expensive than the competition.

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