Project: The SBC Sales WebTool

The Old Business Process: SBC's web hosting sales force consists of over 200 people across the country who every day provide clients with custom built quotes and corresponding contract documents.

In the old process flow, each sales person would get a copy of an Excel spreadsheet that contained hundreds of cost elements for every individual item that can be applied in a quote. The sales managers would update this spreadsheet when prices changed, which could be frequently, and then all the sales people would need to make sure they had the latest copy of the spreadsheet.

After a sales person chose the various items in the spreadsheet to complete a quote for a client, they would then have up to 8 Word contract documents (statement of work, attachments, etc) that would need to be populated based on the results of the Excel sheet. This would entail a number of copy-and-paste actions which were prone to human error.

This process had the drawbacks of human error of course, but also the common occurrence of spreadsheets and contract documents being out of date since each individual sales person kept their own set of copies. In addition, the sales managers had no insight as to who was building quotes for what clients, for how much, and how often.

The Solution: We determined that the ideal solution was to create a Web Application to have a centralized place for the sales people and the managers to log in, create, and manage quotes from any standard web browser.

Our web tool allows the managers to create user accounts, product lines, cost elements (with up to 12 different cost levels based on term, etc), and more. The managers can create elaborate dependencies that dictate what products are viewable based on already chosen elements for a given quote.

Once a user creates a quote, they can review it with cost details and totals, and when satisfied they click a button to auto-generate all the appropriate contract documents -- the system determines which documents are required based on the quote, and populates all the cost and client information, giving the user tremendous time savings.

Additional Improvements -- TCO Analysis: Further business improvements were made by working with our marketing consulting partner Callan Consulting. It was determined that the sales team lacked tools to fully articulate the Total Cost of Ownership of the SBC hosted solution vs. customer-built solutions. In particular they didn't have a tool to demonstrate the hidden costs that a customer would incur with a home-built solution but are built into SBC's prices.

To solve this, we built a product configurator into the web tool, enabling the user to easily create a number of different solutions and perform "what if" pricing analysis. The web tool performs a build-vs-buy TCO analysis for the proposed solution, pre-populated with typical cost information for home-built solutions. Its flexibility lets the rep decide which components to include in the analysis, or overwrite the pre-populated data with customer-specific costs.

Results: The tool met with rave reviews within the SBC sales organization and executive management team, with some commenting that this is the best sales tool they have ever seen. Within three months of roll-out, SBC estimates the tool reduced the amount of time to generate a quote to one hour (from eight), and that it has seen an uptick in sales activity attributable to the reps ability to produce quotes and proposals more easily.