Maybe someone was keen to work with AndreaMckinsey Ltd in the past?

Global Telecom Vendor
UK Director of Strategy
January 2005
Approach: Cold, conversation on the phone
Positioning: Project on Sales & Marketing services market


· Who am I talking to? What are your main responsibilities?

I am in charge of strategy in general, business strategy, customer vision, market research, relationship with consultants. The most important responsibility I have is to work on the development of the business strategy, which means product strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy and partner strategy.

This is XXX we provide communication products and services to large enterprises and government organizations in the UK. Fixed and mobile devices, enterprise communication solutions, network infrastructure and everything clients require in the communication area.

We have a big range of products and services: among the products we have network infrastructure products, devices, connectivity solutions. Also we do managed services, maintenance and support, integration and consulting.

We look at the whole of the UK. My internal clients are the sales organization, product managers and consultants. Also I have to keep relations with large enterprises, distributors, resellers, indirect channels and independent consultants.

We are 4 people in strategy, our marketing and sales organisation is made of 250 professionals and we have a yearly turnover of £600 million.

I have a personal budget but for more expensive services I need to go back to my internal clients. Our financial year ends in September, but I have budget to implement strategy and seek help on some of the issues now.


· Business Questioning – What do you need to achieve, where is the pain?

The main challenge we are facing is the transition from a digital communication market to an IP based communication market. This is a big change in products set, distribution channel and business model. It all started about 3 years ago and we are more advanced in terms of product range, we are less advanced in terms of service model and distribution model. Traditionally we come from a TDM based voice environment and now we are going towards a software based model. Changing from hardware to software isn't easy. We partner with a number of organisations that provide us with the hardware and we mainly work on software now, sometimes the solutions is packaged as a XXX solution, sometimes as a mixed XXX and Partner solution.

Within the partner organisations and within the client organisations we have traditionally been speaking with Telecom Managers, now we need to change that and identify new decision makers, mainly Infrastructure Managers and IT Managers.

Another problem we are facing is that XXX is used to work within a mature market with an established position, we are used to have established relationships with our partners and clients and our sales model used to be more of a reactive sales model, with the client requiring our services and approaching us. (Actually we are used to have a mixed sales model, in the managed services area we are proactive already).
Because we are entering a new market where we don't have established relationships, we need to be more proactive in identifying and winning partners and new business and we are not used to do that.

We run a number of different campaigns and it depends on the objective. It can be a market awareness campaign, or for generation of prospects or early customers perception. We need to both grow existing business and we need to do a lot of work to win new business.

All these are important issues, but I would say something we really need to do is to work on our partnering model and we would look for a company with a strong track record to work with us. We will also need to generate new business from a new type of people within the client organisation. Everything is going to be critical moving forward.


· Services Questioning – What do you do in house, what do you buy?

In house we have some strong campaign management skills, strong PR skills, some market research specialists, market segmentation specialists.

I can't tell you now, in detail, what specific actions we are looking to take, but generally we need to look at how to reach new contacts, how to get references for new products, we need to test business models.
More specifically we are looking for some consulting expertise in channels: the issue is that technology buying audiences are changing, many of the channels we use are not appropriate any more, we need to establish fresh relationships with new partners. We are looking to do that over the next quarter.

Our budget for external services for the enterprise customers, which are the most important ones, is about £2 million.

Externally we use services for PR management, market research, competitive analysis, collateral creation, web hosting and events production.
PR management is mainly journalist and press relations, market research is a mixture of standard published reports and some more consulting services, especially in analysts hours. When we need advice we speak on the phone with analysts and they charge for the conversation. That tend to cost us a lot of money but it is often very useful.

We will keep current services but we also want to do more focus groups with customers and prospects. We will be working with organisations that provide forums services.

We work with a number of specialists boutiques, covering all the areas I mentioned earlier.
The biggest slice of budget goes to 2 organisations: Y and Z
XXX is one of Y's largest global accounts, we, in the UK, get loads of information in a more cost effective way thanks to our Global HQ buying power.
We tend not to use a lot of consulting services from them, apart from analysts’ hours.
We use Z mainly to get a second view on things and to complement Y.

Because of the relationship we have I am very satisfied with Y and with what I get from them. It is the breath of their expertise, they cover absolutely every market we work in and in terms of help they provide me with and in terms of time effectiveness they are very good. Because of XXX buying power, we get the service discounted, but we don't tend to purchase consulting services because of the cost.

We use Z to get a second view on the market, but now that you ask me, there isn't much I get from Z I don't already have from Y!

We have a gap in focused pieces of research work, something simple, rapid and at a low cost, primary research. We want to find someone that when we need can get us some focused intelligence for £5K a shot. For instance something we need to do now is to see whether it is worth for us to enter the second hand, used digital telephone market or not. We are traditionally strong in the digital market, would that be good for us to enter the 2nd hand equipment market?

New services are purchased for different reasons: this is as the result of customers’ requests, or it can be because of an initiative to establish a position. For instance we have just launched a new product in the data managed services market, to follow the trend of convergence of voice and data.

We are open to new services and service providers, the decision is made between me, the Marketing Director, the Services Director and the Managing Director.