Tactics, insight and impact for energy companies: how to launch effective sales campaigns in the field
The last few years haven’t been easy on the energy sector. As energy bills increase, many consumers find it hard to trust large energy companies who seem to profit from putting up their prices. Meanwhile, the rise in wholesale supply costs has left several of the UK’s newer, smaller providers stretched to or even beyond capacity.
Against that backdrop, field sales campaigns need to work harder than ever. Consumers need more than lower prices – they need to know they can trust a potential new provider, and understand what sets them apart from everyone else on the market.
First, ask what your potential customers are thinking
Before you start sending sales agents out to people’s doors, there are some fundamental questions you need to answer. What problem are you trying to solve, and for whom? How can you help your potential customers to understand the value of your service? And what resources do your reps need in order to get that message across?
When it comes to energy, the problem is fairly straightforward – your customers need reliable, affordable electricity. The questions they have are less likely to be about what they’re buying and more about your company in particular.
Consumers often see switching energy providers as a hassle, so they need to know why you are different from their incumbent. That’s not just a question of cost – it’s also about trust.
People have seen their bills shoot up in recent years – some are even choosing between heating their home and buying food – and they need to know what makes one energy company different from another. Imagine what questions they will have, and work out how to arm your reps to put any concerns to rest.
Take a tactical approach to your sales territory
To roll out an effective sales campaign, you need to be tactical about where you’re sending your field sales reps and what outcomes you need them to achieve.
The difficulty for energy companies is that the market is very mature. When everybody already has a supplier and there are no new products or innovations to sway them, a tactical approach often means testing the waters on whether it’s a good time to sell, focusing on building trust or acquiring certain groups of customers.
Bringing that laser focus requires effective territory management. That means more than gathering addresses and assigning them to sales rep routes. It’s about getting the most out of your campaign tools to optimise the routes in an area, deploy reps efficiently and get reports on results as they happen.
PSI’s Territory Management solution can help here. It allows you to approach an area tactically by creating unique routes for each agent and ensuring no routes are overworked.
Outcomes are reported in real time, giving you the insight you need to react quickly to what’s going on in your sales territory. And there’s no limit to the amount of data you can upload and manage at one time, so you won’t be held back even when handling multiple campaigns.
Keep one eye on the bigger picture
With any sales campaign, there are two key areas to focus on – getting the most productivity out of your sales team, and delivering the best possible customer experience. And if you’re striking out into new areas, you need to ask whether the tools you’re using are still capable of doing that as your customer base grows.
A common problem for growing suppliers is that when they get near or reach enterprise size, they find they’ve outgrown the systems they were using before. The tech isn’t able to keep up with where the company is going, and some customers inevitably fall through the cracks.
Field sales might be your focus at your current stage, and you have a solution in place to cover that. But if that solution can’t also handle multichannel sales when you need it, it’s going to fall short. But if your partner is as used to working with big players as they are with new entrants, they will be able to follow you on the scaling journey.
Even if reaching that size isn’t on the horizon right now, you need to be acting bigger than you might be right now. Your ambition will always be to build a larger customer base, and mergers, acquisitions and amalgamations are a fact of life for the sector. Companies that aren’t thinking of that long term vision can quickly get caught out.
The PSI platform can be that reliable partner, whether you’re at the field sales stage or growing towards multi-channel. Our intuitive software puts everything you need to quickly create and launch campaigns at your fingertips. Real time reporting lets you monitor your lead capture and market penetration as it happens, and the data insights from that help shape the targets and direction of your next campaign.
There is a long game you can play here. If you start out with sales and territory management tools that can easily scale as you do, you can continue to roll out each sales campaign as effectively as the last. To learn more, check out our thoughts on boosting your customer experience with territory management or take a look at our Territory Management solution.
Tactics, insight and impact for Telcos: how to launch effective sales campaigns in the field
The telco industry is one that doesn’t stand still. As the infrastructure evolves and networks grow more capable every day, ISPs are constantly developing more products and rolling out to new sales territories.
The difficulty for their field sales teams is that so much change can be dizzying for consumers. When a sales rep turns up at the door, customers often don’t know what they already have or what else is on offer, and getting their interest can be the first and biggest hurdle.
An effective campaign has to go further than price and download speeds. It needs to help guide customers through the options available, and use the data at hand to make a tactical impact fast.
First, ask what your potential customers are thinking
Before you start sending sales agents out to people’s doors, there are some fundamental questions you need to answer. What problem are you trying to solve, and for whom? How can you help your potential customers to understand the value of your service? And what resources do your reps need in order to get that message across?
For ISPs, it’s easy for that value to get lost beneath industry jargon<link to Gigabit broadband blog>. You can’t take for granted that the people you’re selling to will know the difference between fibre-to-the-cabinet and fibre-to-the-premises, for example, or that they see a need for full-fibre in their daily lives.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes – imagine what questions they will have and what education they’ll need from your reps. From there you can work out how best to arm your reps to explain the options clearly and accurately.
Take a tactical approach to your sales territory
To roll out an effective sales campaign, you need to be tactical about where you’re sending your field sales reps and what outcomes you need them to achieve.
In the telco space, that tactical approach is a daily fact of life. The nature of constantly evolving technology and capabilities makes for a dynamic market. When new properties are ready for service, telcos need to react fast to what’s available, getting pre-marketing and sales teams in the area first to get ahead of the game.
But to get there first, your data has to be up to date. You need a system that takes in the latest address data so that you can create a tactical campaign off the back of it.
Bringing that laser focus requires effective territory management. That means more than gathering addresses and assigning them to sales rep routes. It’s about getting the most out of your campaign tools to optimise the routes in an area, deploy reps efficiently and get reports on results as they happen.
PSI’s Territory Management solution can help here. It allows you to approach an area tactically by creating unique routes for each agent and ensuring no routes are overworked.
Outcomes are reported in real time, giving you the insight you need to react quickly to what’s going on in your sales territory. And there’s no limit to the amount of data you can upload and manage at one time, so you won’t be held back even when handling multiple campaigns.
Keep one eye on the bigger picture
With any sales campaign, there are two key areas to focus on – getting the most productivity out of your sales team, and delivering the best possible customer experience. And if you’re striking out into new areas, you need to ask whether the tools you’re using are still capable of doing that as your customer base grows.
A common problem for growing suppliers is that when they get near or reach enterprise size, they find they’ve outgrown the systems they were using before. The tech isn’t able to keep up with where the company is going, and some customers inevitably fall through the cracks.
Field sales might be your focus at your current stage, and you have a solution in place to cover that. But if that solution can’t also handle multichannel sales when you need it, it’s going to fall short. But if your partner is as used to working with big players as they are with new entrants, they will be able to follow you on the scaling journey.
Even if reaching that size isn’t on the horizon right now, you need to be acting bigger than you might be right now. Your ambition will always be to build a larger customer base, and mergers, acquisitions and amalgamations are a fact of life for the sector. Companies that aren’t thinking of that long term vision can quickly get caught out.
The PSI platform can be that reliable partner, whether you’re at the field sales stage or growing towards multi-channel. Our intuitive software puts everything you need to quickly create and launch campaigns at your fingertips. Real time reporting lets you monitor your lead capture and market penetration as it happens, and the data insights from that help shape the targets and direction of your next campaign.
There is a long game you can play here. If you start out with sales and territory management tools that can easily scale as you do, you can continue to roll out each sales campaign as effectively as the last. To learn more, check out our thoughts on boosting your customer experience with territory management or take a look at our Territory Management solution.
Gigabit broadband in the UK: government targets and the opportunity for telcos
At the start of the decade, the UK government pledged to make gigabit broadband available across the country by 2025. Although this target has since been revised to 2030, Ofcom reported at the end of last year that 70% of UK households can now access gigabit broadband packages.
But despite the drive from both government and private companies to rollout the infrastructure, uptake from consumers is still slow. Part of the problem is that the gigabit initiative is still ongoing, and many households across the country aren’t aware they can upgrade yet. That’s not helped by a confusing picture of who’s responsible for the rollout, with private telcos, central government and regional authorities all involved at various stages.
But it’s not just gigabit that isn’t being fully embraced. Ofcom’s 2022 Connected Nations report also found that while 97% of UK homes can access 30Mb per second broadband, only 73% actually take it.
As more choices are put before consumers, it becomes harder for them to know which one is the best for them. Telcos have a huge part to play in helping them navigate their options – and a huge opportunity to build more loyalty and trust with their customers as a result. For new ISPs, there’s also a chance to lay down the right customer relationship from the get-go.
Safety and convenience matters just as much as cost
It’s easy to point fingers at cost or a lack of infrastructure as the reason behind slow uptake. But while those factors certainly play a part, the habits of individual consumers is just as large a barrier to overcome.
In the UK currently, 73% of broadband coverage is provided by just four companies: BT, Sky, Virgin Media and TalkTalk. BT alone occupies 25% of the broadband market.
Consumers feel safe with those larger telcos. They’re established companies, with years of service and customer reviews behind them. If something does go wrong with the network, they’ve got ranks of customer support to call on and engineers to deploy.
It’s hard for new, smaller telcos to compete against that. Even if the service they’re offering is thirty times faster, consumers still see switching to a less-established provider as a risk. Will they be able to deliver the promised speeds? If there’s a problem, how long will it take to resolve it? Are new ISPs less likely to stick around?
But more than that, consumers rarely want to think too much about their broadband provider. Shopping around for new deals is confusing and time consuming. Unless their bill shoots up or there’s something egregiously wrong with their current package, they’re unlikely to browse around at who else is on the market.
Effective field sales campaigns can be a powerful opportunity for newer ISPs to overcome those challenges. If there’s a perception of risk in switching to a new provider, field sales reps can listen to those concerns and address them directly. And most importantly, they can engage with potential customers about the options available to them.
Do consumers even know what’s available?
In 2022, internet service provider Zen found that 32% of UK adults said they couldn’t define what full fibre broadband means. When those that said they knew what full fibre meant were presented with possible definitions, only a third could actually identify the correct one.
When consumers weigh up their broadband options, they’re met with an array of jargon. Both Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) and Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) are offered up as fibre broadband, despite FTTC still using slower, less reliable copper wire for part of the connection. Terms like Superfast and Ultrafast broadband are used both as definitions for specific download speeds and marketing terms.
For many consumers, gigabit broadband is just another part of an already unclear picture. If they’re not sure what kind of connection they currently have, the prospect of upgrading it to gigabit is unlikely to have much of an impact.
We recently spoke to a BT customer who signed up to their first Wi-Fi contract in 2022. They explained that while they knew they needed Wi-Fi for their phones and TV, their knowledge about what service they were getting was limited.
“I was paying over £20/month for speeds of less than 3MB,” they said. “It was my daughter who found this out and realised we could actually get a much better full fibre service for a similar price. During initial sign up, no one took the time to explain these options, I could still be paying through the roof for bad internet!''
That education gap is a clear opportunity for telcos to reach out more directly to their customers. They have the expertise to decode all of the options and terminology, and it’s expertise that a large section of the market clearly needs to make more informed decisions.
For that to be truly effective however, it needs to go beyond defining things by download speeds. If they’re already uncertain what broadband they currently have, talking about megabits per second likely won’t illuminate much for them. Even if gigabit broadband is far beyond what their current package is capable of, they need to know what that means for their personal internet usage.
Speed won’t matter if consumers don’t believe it
A 2020 Censuswide survey of UK households served by the big four ISPs found that 22% rated their internet as “OK” or worse. 20% also said they felt they were overcharged for the service they received.
In theory those figures suggest that a large section of the market should be low-hanging fruit for providers offering gigabit speeds. But the problem for new or smaller telcos is that dissatisfaction with their established competitors often reflects poorly on the industry as a whole.
A common point of distrust for consumers is signing up to a deal that promises fast broadband with speeds up to 500Mb or more per second, only for their average speed to be far lower in reality. When one of the country’s largest providers lets them down like this, it makes them question how a telco they’ve not heard of before can deliver true gigabit internet instead.
With a smaller share of the market, new telcos are also more easily harmed by poor customer experiences. If they say they can provide gigabit broadband but their online reviews say their network is patchy or their engineers didn’t show up to appointments, consumers will question whether they can really deliver on their promise.
Again, this is an opportunity for new ISPs to create a competitive advantage from their field sales. Reps do more than speak to leads and close sales. They’re the bridge between a telco’s brand and its customers, and the relationships they build on their routes will be key to winning trust.
Building that trust isn’t easy, but it’s what consumers need to get on board with gigabit.
To learn more about building trust with your customers, read our thoughts on using territory management to boost customer experience and brand reputation and field sales: the untapped competitive advantage.
Knock down the data silos: How multichannel sales software can help your company work smarter
Customers are hopping sales channels more than ever before, but their expectations are also rising when it comes to getting a consistent experience across all those channels — whether that’s a brick-and-mortar shop, website, app, social media interaction or call to a contact centre.
Despite the fact that customers expect a seamless experience, most companies are a long way off delivering it. According to a NICE/BCG study, 97% of customers use multiple channels to interact with brands, but in doing so 76% are met with a poor and disjointed, experience. Naturally, this has major implications for brand reputation, customer loyalty and missed sales opportunities.
Companies need to focus on creating an entire customer journey that has no cracks and utilises automation where possible. And a simple place to start is with a platform that bridges the gaps between sales channels, sales reps and onboarding teams.
The trouble with legacy systems
To break down silos and implement an effective multichannel sales strategy, it’s not enough to launch an L&D programme or gather employees for a town hall style event. If you’re going to see behavioural change across your organisation, you need systems that support it, incentivise it, and make it effortless. That’s where multichannel sales software comes in.
Companies might find themselves in the position of having different software for each sales channel. One legacy system might have been great in the past for telesales, but completely unusable for field sales teams, so different sales software might have been a necessary outlay at that time.
But disjointed software, or worse, no software at all, results in an inconsistent and silo-based experience for customers, as well as for employees. If telesales and field sales teams have no consistent platform, it can lead to customers being targeted in an uncoordinated way from both sides, increasing the chance of a broken sale
Collaboration between teams
Sales teams are traditionally harder to unify than most. Part of this is due to a well-intentioned but perhaps outdated approach, where organisations would encourage sales team members to compete with one another, rather than collaborate.
Even for the wide range of organisations striving to do something different, the old competitive approach is reinforced by a legacy reward scheme – in which sales reps receive commissions on an individual basis, based purely on the sales they close.
It’s a reward system that’s impossible to change properly without new technology. But when field sales and telesales teams use the same multichannel sales software, they can be incentivised to collaborate easily.
If a field sales rep knocks on the door of someone who’s interested, but not quite ready, a call back can be requested at a time that suits the customer. Using multichannel sales software, the telesales agent who makes the call gets that warm lead, and if a sale is closed, both agents can share the commission on the sale.
The software captures who has spoken to the potential customer and when, so the joint effort of the sale can be rewarded. And that reward is certainly justified, since their collaboration provides customers with a more a seamless experience that inspires more trust in the brand and a greater chance of retention.
Real time data reporting
The right multichannel sales platform will support better data collection and reporting – which is the lifeblood of non-siloed teams.
Using multichannel sales software, webforms update the system immediately. Automation means there is no waiting for data to be collected from emails or paperwork and uploaded manually to a system.
Extracting sales data from a single platform rather than waiting for it to be collated from multiple sources helps teams to be more agile, reacting fast to areas that are underperforming. It can provide a single view of all sales leads, including history of contact with a customer, and it can be used to view any outstanding actions, e.g., if a customer has requested a call back, and if so, when they’d like it and through what channel.
This can remove duplication between sales teams and allows them to focus on potential customers that are more likely to convert on a given day. If someone has recently completed a web form for instance, your teams could spot that they registered interest in an upcoming product such as 5G or full fibre, and they can knock on their door already knowing who they are and what they care about.
That means no customer has to tell you who they are twice, no customer has to explain their situation twice, and no customer has to turn reps away twice. If there’s a second conversation, it’s more likely to be a welcome one, and it’s far more likely to become a conversion to decrease customer churn.
A seamless customer experience
By unifying sales teams onto a single multichannel sales software platform, siloed working can be consigned to history. Teams are incentivised to work together, customers receive a more seamless experience, and the rewards are seen at a bottom line level.
UNICEF Ireland uses PSI’s software to bring unity to all their interactions with potential and current donors. Justin Killeen, Pledge Manager, had this to say about their donors’ experience:
“When there’s a sign up, it's immediately in the PSI system… whereas other systems can take up to a week for the data to be accessible.
“With charities, brand is really important and you have to be so careful. With the PSI tools, you can see where your teams are going, who they’re talking to, their routes and the info they’re capturing.
“If a potential donor calls to check something, we can very quickly click on the system and see the info captured and confirm questions to customers straight away.”
To learn more about the tools you need to knock down silos, check out our thoughts on whether you should build or buy multichannel sales software.
Boosting your customer and employee experience using effective territory management
Customer experience and the bottom line are inseparable. According to McKinsey, companies that prioritise positive customer experiences see a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction, a 15% improvement in sales conversion, a 30% lower cost-to-serve and a 30% improvement in employee engagement.
Speaking of which, employee experience is almost equally important to a company’s bottom line. Happy employees are less likely to become quiet quitters or churn with the latest wave in the great resignation. They’re more likely to feel they belong and bring their all, resulting in more positive customer experiences.
There are no instant miracle-grows for employee and customer experience. To address them properly, it often requires major transformation, from product to organisational redesign.
For telcos and utilities that use multichannel strategies, though, there is low hanging fruit to be picked at the first point of contact – and this all comes down to effective territory management.
Territory management underpins customer experience
Whether they are approached by a rep or browsing online, customers can need time to make a decision, particularly if it’s one that ties them into a commitment of 12 months. In telcos and utilities in particular, it’s also extremely likely that the potential customer already has what you’re selling, and won't want to be hounded by a sales team to make the switch.
Knowing that a rep is going to call is more likely to result in a better customer experience than a call out of the blue, or worse, a call when the potential customer has made it clear that they won’t be interested in switching for several more months.
Customers have never had more choice than they do now and a negative experience with a brand is something that will stay with them, and may even translate into PR damage through word of mouth and social media.
Conversely, a positive experience created by a rep calling at an agreed upon time, i.e., doing what they said they were going to do, builds customer loyalty and trust in a brand. On one level, it’s a small thing, but these small things are what differentiates one brand from another in a crowded market. And these small moments can only happen if the right tools are in place to ensure communication with potential customers is coordinated carefully.
How multichannel sales tech helps
By using a territory management tool from the very start of your scaling journey, you make achieving market penetration far more likely. For Ogi, a new contender in the ISP and managed IT services space, it enabled them to use product and campaign data to deliver great customer experiences at scale.
Alexander Breverton, Ogi’s Telesales Manager, said that without the right solution for the task, “we wouldn’t have had the success we have had, it’s safe to say.”
Great customer experiences are fed by great data. If a rep can find out if a potential customer is happy with their current supplier or products, and record that data, and learn when they may be free to make the decision of staying or moving to a new contract – all this can later make the difference between a smooth sales process and a missed opportunity.
By recording all this with smart multichannel sales software, sales reps will be prompted when to re-establish contact. A second team won’t try to contact the same person too early or through an unpreferred channel, and they won’t start by asking the same questions as before. It’s a simple thing, but valuable to customer relationships.
Effective territory management tools can also be used to plot routes for reps based upon previously recorded customer data, anticipating what customers in certain areas might want or need. This could help create more of a bespoke and targeted approach, saving time for sales teams and potential customers by pitching products more likely to be more relevant to their needs.
The quality of territory management affects employees directly
For employees, effective territory management makes their entire experience less frustrating. They get better sales results by wasting less of their time contacting people who don’t want to be contacted.
Also, using the data recorded through initial contact, reps can be provided with warm leads to reach out to, once the potential customers are out of contract. This is more likely to increase conversion rates than knocking on doors of people who may not be interested.
All this equals better sales results. And this in turn leads to better pay and happier reps who are more likely to stay in their role.
Effective territory management can also be used to allocate field sales teams workloads more evenly, based upon their hours, their location and transport situation. Instead of being given an unknown number of doors to knock on in a housing development, they can know their exact routes and how many households they need to visit, which can help to make sales targets more motivating and less daunting.
Everyone wins
By using the right territory management tools, you can collate data that goes way beyond customer surveys. Reps can be sent to the right places, at the right times, to pitch the right products. Customers can be contacted at the time they want to be contacted and be provided with information that’s relevant to their needs.
Customer and employee experiences are built upon effective territory management, and when the experience is positive from the first interaction, that’s what your brand will be known for from the very beginning – and this is particularly important if your brand is new to the market.
To learn more, see how our multichannel software helped the new telco brand Ogi to grow or get in touch to schedule a demo.
How to build a business case for new multichannel sales software
If you’re a sales manager or director, and you see the strain your current system is placing on keeping your teams and customers happy, how do you convince those with a tight hold on the purse strings to loosen their grip slightly – and invest in realising the true potential of your sales success?
Here we lay out the business case for new multichannel sales software and three key points to include in your pitch: consumer centricity, ease of control, and automated compliance. All of which combine to improve sales beyond business-as-usual.
Keep customers on side at every touchpoint
Firstly, multichannel sales tech stops customers falling through the cracks. Some will never talk to a salesperson on the door or phone, others will never make a purchase decision online, and many won’t stick to a single channel.
According to McKinsey, over 50% of customers seek three to five off and online sales channels on their way to making a purchase. If you want the loyalty of that 50%, you need to break down the silos and create a seamless customer experience across all sales channels – and to do that you need the right tech.
Keeping tabs on all channels is vital if they’re going to work effectively in harmony. This can be a difficult task, though, particularly if to generate the data you need you’re relying on your sales teams’ manual reporting – which equates to less time spent closing sales.
The right sales software will be intelligent and efficient. It’ll keep your sales teams focused on their primary task and, at the same time, make them better informed with data captured across all sales channels. This helps them to close sales that would otherwise slip away – and this creates a significant ROI over time.
Automated multichannel compliance
Compliance with sales and data regulations is a major selling point when it comes to building a business case for investing in a multichannel sales solution. While the initial outlay for buying into a new system may seem like a large investment, it would pale in comparison to the cost of a fine for mis-selling a product or service, or mis-handling personal data.
Automation is key to a successful multichannel sales solution; removing some of the manual admin processes in closing a sale can save time between sales, yes, but more than that, it means your compliance is on autopilot, ensuring that nothing is being mis-sold. The right multichannel sales solution can also do the heavy lifting for you as regulations change around selling in your industry and being able to react quickly means your teams can keep selling.
The extra level of control is important for compliance, but also for customer retention; customers who are mis-sold products and don't come away with a positive experience are likely to look elsewhere.
Ease of control
The right multichannel sales system will give you control of sales and onboarding processes, territory management, and lead capture.
Sales managers can get a real time overview of sales data across all channels via a dashboard. This means they can identify inefficiencies easily, allowing them to make adjustments and see the impact of those adjustments in real time. This is an invaluable asset when trying to hit targets and KPIs, rather than having to wait for a reporting team to collate data and react based upon historical information.
For effective territory management, routes can be sent automatically to different representatives, ensuring no crossover or miscommunication. This also cuts down on the resources needed for assigning territories to sales representatives. Data collected and centralised within one system, means campaigns can be driven by business intel to improve overall conversions and results.
A watertight multichannel sales system will enable you to focus efforts in a strategic way. Without it, your sales teams can be knocking on all doors and calling all numbers, only to discover people who don’t want to buy or aren’t in a position to buy yet. Likewise you can miss potential customers who are ready to purchase.
The right multichannel solution will enable your teams to capture missed sales opportunities. They can then schedule a follow up at the right time from the right channel, whether that’s email, a phone call or showing up at their front door – ensuring no opportunities are ever missed.
Ultimately, that’s what multichannel sales software is unless you invest in it: a missed opportunity. It’s an investment, of course, but the return on that investment can be felt from all angles as you close more deals, waste less time, capture missed sales, ensure 100% compliance, and gain the ability to track that ROI in real time.
To learn more about how PSI’s multichannel sales software might help your business grow, take a look at the case studies of how we helped SSE Airtricity and Ogi. Alternatively, get in touch and see how our team can help you to build a business case for investing in multichannel sales tech.
Should you build or buy multichannel sales software?
This is the era of the frictionless customer onboarding experience, and companies can no longer opt out. All organisations are going after more personalised, more consistent and bottleneck-free experiences across multichannel sales and onboarding. Those who don’t get ahead will inevitably fall behind and get their customers stuck in the sales pipeline.
When your goal is to keep shuffling people through your sales funnel, the question is not if you should adopt better technology for customer acquisition and onboarding, but how? If the software already exists as an off-the-shelf solution, you can buy it - but should you? If you have the resources in house to build it, you can do so - but what are the implications?
We’re specialists in sales software for customer acquisition and customer onboarding, and we have first-hand insight into what it’s like to build, buy and customise software for this purpose. So here’s a brief overview of what we’ve learned.
Build: control your buyer experience
Building your own sales software has several distinct advantages:
- You don’t need to pay up front for new software
- Your organisation is in complete control of what you build
- You can build the software around very specific requirements
The build approach leaves your organisation with all its cards in hand. Your in-house developers can build the software to an exact design based on your sales goals, and your organisation only needs to pay for the upkeep.
So, if your organisation can spare the time and resources, can avoid the costs of purchase and get a platform that meets the needs of your entire team and customer base perfectly, why wouldn't you?
Well, the catch is that this perfect scenario can be difficult to attain.
First, it is a rare thing for an IT project to stay in scope, on time and on budget without a few unexpected hidden costs. In a Harvard Business Review study of 1,481 IT change initiatives, the average cost overrun was 27% and one in six projects had a cost overrun of 200% and a schedule overrun of nearly 70%.
You can’t blame it all on project management though. It’s often just a hazard of the field. Software focused on customer experience is constantly evolving – and the goalposts are too.
At PSI we’ve come across many companies that spent two and sometimes up to four years building the same type of software. By the time it is deployed, there's a whole new market of modern buyers and the company has moved on, along with competitive standards, often making the technology no longer fit for purpose.
Buy: Get sales software up and running fast
Purchasing software has its own advantages:
- Get it in the hands of your sales teams quickly
- Reserve your in-house resources for your core work
- Make the most of time-sensitive opportunities
When you choose to buy off-the-shelf sales software, you inevitably sacrifice some control and customisation. The software might not be ideally suited for your industry, and it may not perfectly suit your ideal customer journey for every channel.
What you lose in perfect fit, you gain in speed. When the need is time-sensitive, it’s often best to choose a quick off-the-shelf buying process so you don’t miss your window of opportunity.
You’re also purchasing peace of mind when it comes to compliance and watertight security. When you need to navigate GDPR or CCPA, or other data privacy regulations, it’s often worth buying software simply to avoid the risk of non-compliance with its associated fines and PR damage.
If existing software out there meets 60% or more of your requirements, it’s likely worth buying, even if it’s not a perfect fit. You may not have complete influence over the product roadmap but many vendors will collaborate extensively with potential customers to build or improve their products. If the software is designed to be customisable, you’re also far more likely to find a good fit for your organisation.
Typically building software from the ground up is best reserved for when the technology is at the core of your offering. For us at PSI, the beating heart of what we do is multichannel sales software, so it makes sense for us to devote as many in-house resources as possible to the task. But it also makes sense for us to purchase software that lies outside our core business.
While it can seem like a cost-saving to have your in-house developers reimagine how you approach customer acquisition and customer onboarding - you sacrifice much in opportunity. Every moment your developers spend on looking for potential solutions to your sales software is a moment they are not working on developing your core business, whether that means creating digital products for 5G or key infrastructure for analysing your company data.
Configure: Tailor existing software to your multichannel sales strategy
A third option, which isn’t always considered, is to buy highly customisable software. This is effectively a middle ground between building and buying:
- Get a sophisticated system fit for multichannel sales in your industry
- Configure the software to your unique requirements, and apply branding
- Do more projects in less time, with the same resources
Developers are used to finding a wide range of ways to stop reinventing the wheel. They’ll use open-source tools to build complex architecture or they’ll use “headless solutions” that provide backend functionality, so they can focus their expertise where it matters most. In other words, they source generic software from specialist vendors, and then use APIs to connect it with the unique elements of what they’re building in real-time.
Similarly, with customer acquisition and onboarding you can find highly customisable software that can be configured to your organisation’s unique vision and set up. This means you don’t need to compromise on off-the-shelf software that’s not designed with your industry or organisation in mind. And you can also get set up in weeks not years - which is how long you’d need to wait if you tried to build the same software in-house - so you can fast track the entire customer journey to accelerate business growth.
This customisation and speed is exactly what our Touchstone and Fusion products offer. “We’ve built features to enable us to build and change customer journeys without reinventing the wheel each time,” says David Costello, CEO of PSI Mobile. “This is the low code/no code scenario, and these products provide our customers with powerful tools to be able to do more complex projects in less time, with the same resources.”
If you're a business owner and want to learn more about how you can configure sales software to meet your sales goals, see our article on multichannel sales tech and how it fits together to give you a competitive advantage.
Restart, rebuild, reimagine – the story behind our multichannel sales tech
According to research by EPFL university, 73% of start-ups need to pivot to a different market over time. The sector first targeted by a tech company rarely stays the focus forever, and so it was with PSI.
Before we stepped into sales software we worked with pharmaceuticals, trading excess stock to prevent pharmaceutical waste. It wasn’t long before we saw the need for improved sales applications in that industry, and the first one we designed transformed a pharma company’s manual, slow processes and made their customer acquisition much more efficient. This would be an ongoing theme for many years to come.
Honing in on telco, utility and sales software
We were soon doing the same for mobile technology projects, and after experimenting with a number of different directions, we found our stride in 2010 when we overhauled sales processes with Miller Brown and Eir, Ireland’s largest telco operator.
“The PSI platform was an instant improvement,” says Mark Higgins, Eir’s Head of Field & Affiliate Sales. “Not only are our reps better equipped, but I now have instant insight into sales. I can see which bundles are selling well, which regions are hitting their targets and the progress of orders. All in real time.”
We had found our sweet spot so we honed in on it. Over the next 12 years we designed and provided sales software solutions for telco and utility. Our 1.0 platform evolved to service these industries with increasing focus.
Tearing down and building up to multichannel sales
“Over a long period of time, technology that is built up like this becomes quite unmanageable,” says David Costello, CEO of PSI. “So we took a clean slate and rebuilt the platform to deliver everything we’d learned how to deliver, but in an efficient and scalable way – switching to web technology enabled us to support multichannel sales more effectively.”
At this stage our solution was matured, omnichannel, and could be configured with our domain expertise. These are some of the aspects that made us appeal to Ogi, an ISP and managed IT services company that is transforming Wales’ digital landscape.
“It’s very unusual to go out to market, as a start-up business, with a sophisticated automated sales process,” says Sally-Anne Skinner, Chief Revenue Officer at Ogi. “This is what we have with PSI.”
How we stayed agile
Part of the reason we were able to get this far has been our ability to pivot and keep on the frontfoot of evolving sales software and the needs of our customers.
“We’re privately owned and we’re not VC backed,” says David, “so we don’t have funding that’s driving us down a particular path. This has enabled us to focus on a niche market and be agile in responding to what our customers want.”
This agility was key for SSE Airtricity, a leading green energy company, who had to respond fast during the pandemic to enable their business to deliver more with the same resources. They also needed to stay agile for future product updates.
“Time is a major factor in this,” says Ernest Asensio, Retail Efficiency & Systems Manager of SSE Airtricity. “We needed to respond to changing requirements both initially from dialling up web functionality for business units, but also recurring as these business units would have a lot of frequent product changes… PSI Touchstone enables us to respond quicker and easier to save resources across multiple departments.”
A long term solution for fast omnichannel sales
“We don’t just build and walk away,” says David. “We become an integral part of customer experience processes for our clients, and we constantly evolve these processes to do more with them.”
This is the case with Eir, who switched to PSI to manage their customer acquisition and onboarding in 2010. Usually, if a company stayed with a legacy system for long, they would have to take on the difficulties of moving the tech forward, along with the costs of the almost inevitable rebuild. Instead, Eir simply kept telling us what they needed and we kept evolving the system for them. And when we saw the opportunity to rebuild, we absorbed that cost.
“The simplicity of the system should not be ignored either,” says the Sales Director of Eir. “The PSI interface is simple, data is easily accessible, and the customer sign-up wizard is straightforward. This means that our reps can give more of their attention to clients, further smoothing the sales process and raising the quality of service we give them.”
PSI’s initial pivot to sales software and telco and utility onboarding was a result of listening to the market – and we’re still listening now. We’re paying attention to the market and to our clients, following the good ideas to deliver something of value.
To see what the latest version of our multichannel sales software can achieve for ambitious organisations, our work with Ogi is a prime example. Alexander Breverton, Ogi’s Telesales Manager adds, “PSI enables us to complete a quick sale in 10-15 mins from start to finish. This probably would have taken a couple of days in our previous out-of-the-box solution.”
To learn more about how we created this tailored solution in just a few months, see our case study on Ogi’s multichannel sales software.
Multichannel sales tech: How it fits together to give you a competitive advantage
In capped industries like utility and telco, you’re often targeting people who are already with a competitor and likely don’t actively switch providers. To stand a chance of winning these customers and their long term loyalty, you need to build trust through flawless customer experiences – that’s where multichannel comes in.
Your customers live in a multichannel society now. The standard is instant, convenient, frictionless onboarding – and anything less than this feels jarring. Customers expect to interact with brands face to face and over the phone and web, without needing to join the dots themselves.
Many utility and telco companies are working with legacy systems. Which means any that can master the complexities of this new multichannel playing field will gain a distinct competitive advantage.
What kind of system is needed for multichannel sales?
As McKinsey’s telco report Change the channel: A new multitouch point portfolio outlines, multichannel sales tech is what will set future telco industry winners apart. But it needs buy in from everyone in the business to bring all channels and departments together:
“Delivering a multichannel strategy and enabling cross-channel customer journeys usually requires significant changes in IT platforms,” the authors write.
“Target IT capabilities to be developed include, among many others, a cross-channel product advisory engine, a fully multichannel architecture offering, an agile operations platform supporting real-time automated processing, fully online event-driven CRM, and a fully parametrical product catalog.”
However, a complex system only needs to be complex under the hood. For sales reps it should be effortless – an automated breeze that enables them to whisk people through a tailored customer journey and close deals almost instantly anywhere, anytime.
Off-the-shelf options that try to achieve this are rarely a good fit for telco and utility companies. They’re designed for different customer journeys and fewer processes, so they create additional friction for sales teams and anyone trying to manage the back end.
To make cross-channel integration work behind the scenes, and to make it work effectively for customer journeys in utility and telco, often requires many tailored APIs. Zoom in on the multichannel architecture and it’s clear that this can’t be the work of just any developer.
Multichannel architecture: how it should fit together
When we configured our multichannel sales tech for Ogi, an ISP and managed IT services company, the engagement was as important as the delivery.
We worked with Ogi to shape a customer journey for field, tele and web sales, and we identified what APIs we would need to pull in and push out the relevant data.
While some systems might make use of only four calls, more sophisticated systems like Ogi’s can make use of up to 12 API calls. These can include requests, such as for product, address data and so on. They can also involve many outbound calls, sending information for payment verification, to book installations, to 3rd party systems and other sales processes.
All this makes the tech simple but specialised on the surface, enabling Ogi’s reps to make contact with potential customers and close deals in record time – without stalling points in the process – on the phone or in the field.
Beneath the surface, the cross-channel integration makes it possible to analyse sales performance metrics in a new way across field, tele and web sales. Ogi can see where they can retarget prospects that don’t complete the sales cycle, or where customer journeys needed to be tweaked further.
What’s an affordable route?
As a new contender in fibre, the Ogi team says they struggled to compete on price against other providers, so they needed to offer a great customer service as a USP.
“The sales processes we had in the business before PSI were not fit for purpose,” says Sally-Anne Skinner, Chief Revenue Officer at Ogi. “We would not have been able to go out to market and deliver the scale that we have and the penetration that we have without significant amounts of customer dissatisfaction and pain and resources.”
An out-of-the-box solution wouldn’t integrate field, tele and web sales in the way they needed. But sophisticated solutions are usually built gradually over many years, often from the ground up. Ogi couldn’t afford to wait.
They needed a seamless multichannel experience. Although customers would never think of it in these terms, in a multichannel world, they are coming to expect tailored customer journeys, unified by an automated backend system.
Using our full suite of products – Fusion Core, Pulse, and Touchstone – Ogi were able to create this seamless end-to-end sales journey across the three sales channels that they operate in. It was a world away from their former solution.
“If we were still using that solution,” says Alexander Breverton, Telesales Manager at Ogi, “we wouldn’t have had the success we have had, it’s safe to say,”
To learn more, see our case study deep dive into how PSI helped Ogi scale and penetrate their market
Power Your Field Sales Engine with the Right Technology
Not all technology is created equal, nor do all persona’s use it in the same way. When it comes to deciding on technology – whether making a purchase or building your own – today there’s a lot to choose from. Make the wrong choice and chances are that it won’t provide the functionality you need, which will mean an additional technology purchase and another outlay of cash or time delays for those that opt to build their own.
To save you the headache of determining what the right technology is for your energy or telco field sales business, we’ve compiled key user persona’s and their technology requirements.
What You Need to Know When Buying or Developing Technology for Your Field Sales Business
In the past, obtaining technology was a pretty simple undertaking. Today, however, the use of technology has become more commonplace and the technology itself has become more complex. If the technology you implement only provides for minimum functionality, users of the technology will encounter difficulties in performing their jobs. On the other hand, technology that contains all of the bells and whistles will probably result in functionality that’ll never be used.
This is especially true for energy and telco organisations since the nature of their business is complex. From multiple product types being sold through various channels such as field, online, partners, 3rd party websites, and franchises to the countless types of customers, including domestic, SME, property developer, landlords, etc., implementing the right technology can’t be underestimated.
The right technology shouldn’t be a game of chance. Essentially it should meet the needs of your business today and into the foreseeable future. By reviewing the following four persona’s and their technology requirements, you’ll be on your way to deploying technology that will boost productivity, give your field sales teams a competitive edge, and deliver a level of customer comfort that’ll enable you to quickly turn prospects into paying customers.
Field sales reps:
As the face of your company, these employees require technology that will empower them with the information they need when they need it. Be sure the technology provides:
- Leads that contain a rich data overlay, and are delivered directly to their devices. Walk and drive routes to maximise efficiency.
- Logic driven questions to ensure that the right product is offered to the right customer type.
- Validations of customer data while at the door, which improves the number of sales processed.
- Availability of performance tracking and reporting on the reps device.
- Training and continuous learning are delivered to the device.
Team leads (internal or agency):
To set your field sales reps up for success, team leads need the ability to quickly access and understand total figures, gaps in sales success and failure rates, and have the ability to quickly react. This persona requires technology that’ll enable them to:
- Maximise leads through team and territory management functionality.
- Track reps to ensure team and customer safety.
- Track and manage issues as they take place in the field.
- Obtain real-time tracking of productivity and results.
The business:
With the right technology, your business leaders (management team and the board) will gain an increased level of comfort about their door-to-door sales initiatives. Focused on the big picture, this persona requires technology that will:
- Deliver insights and oversights of what is happening in the field, as well as results.
- Validate the information received by the teams.
- Provide accountability, transparency, and control.
The customer:
While not part of your internal team, customers are integral to your success. As such, it’s important that the technology you choose provides them with a sense of security when providing your field sales reps with personal information. To provide this level of customer comfort, the technology needs to:
- Provide for a cohesive customer journey, one that can start at the door and conclude through a different channel, or start in-store and provide the customer with completion options such as a callback.
- Give the customer the ability to call the company to confirm that the rep at their door is a valid representative of your company. By using GPS tracking of the rep, you’ll be able to quickly verify or refute the claim.
- Allow the customer to finish the sign-up agreement on their own device – either at the time of the sale or at a later point in time.
- Send the customer a branded summary of the interaction and welcome directly to their device, so that they can immediately confirm the legitimacy of the transaction.
What happens when the technology doesn’t provide some or all of the functionality described above? The easy answer is... the complete opposite of the benefits that the right technology will provide. For example, when field sales reps don’t have the right technology the possibility of offering the wrong products to ineligible prospects is greatly increased. Or, without customer data validations, you run the risk that the sale will need to be reworked. This typically entails that another person within your organisation will need to contact the customer to confirm details such as email, mobile number, banking details, etc., which slows the entire sales process or worse – results in the loss of a sale.
From the customer’s perspective, technology that doesn’t provide the security needed may result in the field sales rep completing the sale on their own device and signing the customer up, which of course opens you up to fraud. Alternatively, if payments are taken in a non-secure way, the rep may be putting the customer at risk for cybercriminals to attack their account. And, finally, without a branded summary to confirm the agreement, the customer may feel that they have been scammed, which puts your reputation at risk.
Negating these risks relies on the technology you choose. By ensuring the technology provides all of the functionality described, you’ll be on your way to ensuring that your business is compliant with regulatory standards, your internal teams have the functionality required to be productive, and your customers have the security needed to become loyal brand ambassadors.
Give Your Field Sales a Boost with the Right Technology
Don’t leave your next technology decision up to a tick list of functionality. You need a solid solution that meets the needs of all the personas. PSI Fusion connects your people, processes, and data in a way that is unique in the business. We combine mobile and cloud technology with security and tracking to deliver the field-proven applications that enable you to rise above the competition in this lucrative, yet competitive space.
But, don’t take our word for it! Read on to see what some of our customers are saying about having the right technology.
“The main value we saw of the technology when it was sitting with the agency rather than us, was compliance, security, and the tablets in the reps hands. We always knew that the data we were providing the agency and our customers were secure.” Vodafone
“PSI creates robust processes that are very easy to audit. Through your system, every step is auditable, who did it, when, where, what the customer agreed to, and why they signed up. This makes it very easy, in the case of complaints, to determine what happened from both sides. In the case of poor rep behaviour, we can understand what happened, where they went wrong, and rectify the situation in real-time or as part of our longer-term training programme.” SSE Airtricity
“We were dealing with increased volumes of up to 500 or 600 per month, which can cause a lot of pain downstream. The automated way we were able to send customer service agreements, keep them informed, and the welcome journeys meant that we were able to take those tasks away from the customer support team.” Fibrus
Ready to get started with the right technology, contact us today for a demonstration.
