RFP wins come more often if you write the specs.

Customer: A manufacturer of large emergency vehicle equipment primarily sold to municipalities across the country and soon to be expanding into export markets. 

The Challenge

Our client’s main competitors were much larger companies with more resources and higher efficiencies of scale. Since their product was well known for higher quality, they were often invited to pitch RFPs, expending substantial effort into winning the business. A political or management committee, based on the recommendation of an RFP process owner, made the final decisions. Since these owners had little RFP process experience, often the recommendations were being driven by price. Soon they realized they were being included for the purpose of rounding out the RFP field. So significant sales effort was being expended with very little chance of winning—and more often resulting in a loss. Low morale and above average turnover dominated the sales force.

The Approach

Starting with an understanding of the pressures and obstacles the RFP owners were under, we recommended a campaign to become a resource for this influencer. Soon, coupling a Purchase Funnel Map with the use of inbound and content marketing, the client slowly became the source of the RFP specs for many RFP owners, making their jobs easier. 

• Customer Avatars — Understanding that RFP owners were overworked and lacked the resources and experience of a purchasing department became a launching point.  
• Purchase Funnel Maps — The expense of the client’s equipment created a purchase obstacle in itself. By soliciting smaller first purchases needing no committee approvals, the sales team was able to build trust so when it came time for a larger purchase RFP client became their trusted advisor.
• Inbound Marketing — We launched an inbound content marketing program, tied to a specific stage in the buying process, designed to provide valuable resources for overworked RFP owners.
• Story Selling — By presenting customers with stories built on the same experiences, trust was built more effectively.

The Result

Sales increased 125% over a four-year period, sales teams became more effective by adopting a helping strategy and retention rose dramatically.

Designing the Customer Experience In Quick Service Dining

Customer: Overseas operations for a large quick service restaurant chain.

Customers expect more today. This is true around the world. A major quick serve restaurant discovered they could see substantial increases in sales, higher customer satisfaction as well as employee engagement simply by engineering that experience at every customer touchpoint.

Customer Experience Design is not just changes in how employees interact at the store level, it’s a revolutionary transformation in how an entire company thinks and acts.

The Challenge

Like most companies, the client was focused on store-to-store operations and systems in their UK markets, dynamics in menu offerings and marketing efforts. As a result, customers were often placed into general demographic age categories and no single experience stood out from the competitive options available in fast food.

The Approach

We began by helping the management team realize the entire organization’s focus needed to shift from inside out to inside in: starting with the customers’ needs. This was easily accomplished once they heard what customers had to say. A series of in-depth interviews with customers began to reveal that customers were actually satisfied buyers, but they had developed no emotional connection with the individual experience of dining in these restaurants. The client began to understand customers’ unconscious behaviors and the emotions and attitudes that drove these behaviors.

With the customers’ perspective, we also conducted a Customer Ecosystem Workshop to identify gaps in customer experience in order to design processes to reinforce the key emotional needs the customers felt, while at the restaurants: fellowship/closeness, good cheer and positive energy.

The Results

This understanding brought alignment and clarity to the company’s direction, allowing them to create a vision all employees could get behind.

To consistently evoke the emotions customers needed, the team began to adapt existing processes toward being real with the customer, delivering food customers crave and a warmer, cozier décor.

We trained employees to leverage the customer motivations to begin to connect on a personal level. Menus were slimmed down, but additional varieties were added among favorites.

Restaurants reported a 46% increase in sales and a 22% improvement in customer satisfaction. More importantly, employee engagement and satisfaction also started to rise.

Implementation of Story Selling pays big dividends for financial services company.

The Client

Transitioning from an insurance and annuity provider to a comprehensive financial services organization, this financial services company needed to restructure the sales process used by the field representatives.

The Insight

Most consumers have very little knowledge of the differences between financial services companies. They are inundated with messages from a variety of wealth advisors, insurance sales people, mutual fund companies and even banks. Only a rare few consumers understand the differences and those have been educated.

The Challenge

With more than 1,500 field representatives, this client needed to create a new selling process that incorporated the newly minted Customer Avatars™ created by Helicx. Not only did they need to inform existing insurance customers that they now provided a more holistic approach to financial services, but they also needed to appeal to a very different market of high wealth individuals. The current sales approach was successful for transactional sales, but it did not encourage a deeper understanding of what people wanted to do with their lives and how that impacted their financial decisions.

The Approach

We rode along with field sellers in order to better understand the purchase behaviors of customers. Using our proprietary methodology, we built stories that touched on the issues that drove customers to change providers: the issues that concerned them, rather than built to the client’s product offerings.

Then we built out a program with the sales leadership group and a plan for roll out to the field. We worked closely with corporate and field leaders together to develop the tools, training, communication and workshops to transfer the knowledge to the field and those who responsible for teaching new sales teams during onboarding. To increase buy-in and reinforcement, the actual training was conducted by the company’s sales management with our coaching.

Customer Avatars™ — Included in-depth understanding of how customers perceived finances as well as what they were looking for from an advisor. It was recognized that reaching a high-wealth individual with wealth manager education would not be cost-effective, however, reaching a upper middle class market largely ignored by the wealth manager population was ideal.

Customer Ecosystem™ — To gain an understanding of the behavior a buyer demonstrates as they move through their buying decision.

Story Selling Marketing — Rather than run traditional advertising, the marketing group became story writers, developing relatable stories in stages for different Customer Avatars, then leverage those stories into highly targeted content messaging.

Story Selling Implementation — Then the sales management helped train the field reps, further reinforcing their own expertise in coaching the process. Videos were created to help show role-playing situations how reps could overcome obstacles while leading their customer “to” their solution.

The Result

The company was successful in rolling the program out nationwide and the building of a referral network became easier for the field team utilizing the library created by marketing for consistent drip messaging. Since the representatives built comprehensive profiles of customer need, they became much more knowledgeable about the customer’s complete picture. Now they offered a more comprehensive financial solution, portfolios grew nearly 37% through incremental service sales. Referrals rose by 29% and new customers hit a ratio of 3:1.