Client Reference Sun Microsystems Lead Process Optimisation

Over the course of a twenty-week engagement bChannels worked with the team at Sun UK to rebuild the process for qualification, distribution and reporting of leads. We managed the necessary changes to the Oracle and Pivotal applications that drive lead funnel reporting.

The Challenge

Sun UK had implemented two successful telesales organisations for cross-and up-sell and maintenance renewal, that was starting to make up a large share of the business.

However, their after-market sales business was only being integrated into the sales funnel as run rate at a late stage, making it hard for the business to accurately forecast revenues. They wanted a single source of the truth.

bChannels services for Sun

bChannels was already involved in an overall engagement to rework their sales model to support integrated vertical market instead of product-focussed teams.

As part of this, bChannels mapped the processes and systems used for generating, closing and fulfilling this after-market business so that it could be owned by the new teams. This involved a large number of interviews with marketing, sales, IT, service, operations and finance resulting in the first-ever end-to-end process map.

The map demonstrated the duplications and swivel-chair integrations involved in the existing processes. As any major systems changes would need to be driven globally over a long period, bChannels instead devised a series of practical measures that could be taken with the existing tools and people to dramatically improve the efficiency and visibility of the demand creation and reporting processes. We then supported their implementation in a pilot campaign.

Why this matters to Sun

The pilot proved successful and the new processes are built in to Sun UK's operations. More importantly, forecasting accuracy for run-rate business has improved several-fold.