SCi Sales Group Ltd - US Telecoms Services Company - 3rd Year of Service

What was the position of the Company when approaching SCi

This US Teleconferencing company was originally a White Label provider of conferencing services on behalf of third parties and tier one telecoms companies in the US and European markets. Having achieved success with its new own label strategy in the US, this company wanted to enter the European market under its own re-branded label and set of services. The company set desired target markets which included large corporate companies and global multinationals.

Strategic Requirements - Market Development

The company was looking to extend its international sales growth in the UK and the strategic objective was to ensure that the market was aligned with the parent company's US blue chip customer base.

Scope of the project

Initially a 3 month sales and marketing campaign requiring 2 outsource sales professionals on a fulltime basis. This later extended and is now in a third year of contracted agreement.

The selected agency was required to:

• Provide quick and cost effective new market sales growth.
• Develop and adapt a local sales and marketing strategy.
• Deliver an active database of targets with a strong CRM support mechanism.
• Deliver and service sales leads evolving a sales pipeline and revenue opportunities.
• Provide both pre sales and direct sales support.

• A lack of brand recognition versus existing market vendors.
• The competitive UK telecommunications market meant that audio conferencing was often sold as a non-differentiated/commodity product.
• The nature of the proposition was such that billing could only take place once the client started to generate 'traffic' or minutes, so closing the sale did not immediately translate to revenue.
• The market was seeing a rapid entry of new providers and generated competitive price competition and aggressive expectations.

The results

• Using SCi as their UK sales team, our client engaged directly with targeted prospects to communicate the benefits of their proposition.
• Despite trading in Europe for the last five years, by the end of 2003 (eight months later) one third of the client base - a net increase of 50% - was attributable to SCi.
• Clients included a top Premiership football club, several high visibility financial institutions, one of the world's highest profile advertising agencies, a major UK supermarket chain, a US based international airline, a leading player in the construction industry as well as local government agencies.