Build IT Services business
“The Leadseed platform has enabled us to transform our business. The support we have had from LeadSeed – including action plans on how to make the most of the application deployment – has been crucial to the success of the project. We perceive this to be a long term strategic partnership, not simply licensing of an application”.
Thomas COLLINS – IT Services Business Line Director.
The Situation
Perception within the installed base that Ricoh were not an infrastructure services company: The sales team was not skilled or confident in delivering messages around the new services to their existing customers. The Ricoh customers already had established relationships with infrastructure services companies which needed to be displaced for Ricoh to gain traction
The Challenge
The objective of this activity was to help Ricoh France to expand out from its core business of printers, copiers, and printer management to broader infrastructure services. The business was facing three clear challenges in achieving its goals.
The Solution
Since the route to market for the IT Services proposition was via the sales team, the focus of activity was built around the skills and capabilities of the 450 sales people working with the target customer base. The classroom training on different infrastructure topics such as backup, security and so on, needed to be supported by effective sales tools. The LeadSeed solution provided the structure and propositions to enable the sales people to deliver the right messages to challenge existing perceptions.
LeadSeed worked with the technical team at Ricoh to develop the most appropriate set of questions to determine the customer need and to map the answers to value propositions within the supporting customer report. This was an iterative process with feedback from customers and sales helping the team to refine the process and the level of detail for optimum results.
The strategy focused on securing initial buy in to Ricoh by offering a free of charge service to audit a specific area of infrastructure. Based on the knowledge gained, Ricoh were then able to present back their findings with recommendations to demonstrate their technical understanding of infrastructure and enabling them to present a service solution proposal. This approach challenged the status quo with the incumbent infrastructure provider by delivering value add early in the engagement.
The results
In the first two years, over 3000 assessments have been delivered, building a highly detailed map of Ricoh customer infrastructure estates and enabling targeted sales and marketing approaches. Ricoh France are now delivering around 100 assessments per month with their incumbent accounts. Approximately one third of these lead to closed sales for the infrastructure services part of the business. The success of the French installed base project has lead to two further projects being set up.
Leadseed is now incorporated into marketing lead generation activities to identify new customer prospects. The data gathered in the self assessment is pulled into the 360 assessment tool for sales people to follow up on.
Leadseed has been rolled out to 10 other European Ricoh businesses.
LeadSeed is a B2B Conversation As a Platform generating qualified lead using “give to get” principle and building trust, gaining relationship. It combines the latest digital marketing technic with proven sales methodology.