Sales Tales #6 – Solving customer pain point with perseverance leads to greater than $ 25 M Software deal..

Seeding new products or capabilities helps increase the size of the addressable market. This however is not easy. This incident is a fine example of how to do it.

Challenge – 4G was making its way into the country and while there was excitement, it also presented a major issue for service providers. The networks would now have 2G, 3G & 4G from multiple vendors making the cellular relationship management a very complex activity. In addition, network congestion was deteriorating customer experience.

Solution – We had just acquired Self Organizing Networks (SON) products/capabilities and we all were very excited with the increased TAM but our excitement was short lived. CTO of a tier I cellular operator refused to consider our proposition as he did not believe in SON technology. Our spirit wasn’t dampened as we firmly believed SON can help solve major issues for the operators.

In order to prove SON is helpful, it was important for us to demonstrate its impact on the Delhi network w.r.t to reduction in drop calls, a major performance metric of the network. We convinced a senior official who after testing the software in tier 2 network allowed us to try this in Delhi. The result was incredible. A 40% reduction in drop calls. In addition designing cellular relationships became automated !!

Impact – We took the results (6 parameters changes) of the demo printed on a single sheet of paper to the CTO. The CTO upon understanding the impact immediately instructed supply chain to place order for a $ 2 M worth of SON for Delhi and Bangalore Networks and over period of time this expanded to more than $ 25 M software project for the company. This win was also the first for us in APJC.

Moral – Understanding and solving client’s pain points leads to incredible results and increased TAM is indeed a big outcome of seeding new products !!