Commercial Impact
Following a sustained period of challenging market conditions, BT’s Corporate and Public Sector (CPS) division set out on a transformation journey to achieve a stretch five-year growth target. It engaged EY teams to help draw more value from its customer base, through better execution of commercial priorities, with a focus on long-term customer value and multi-product solution selling.
EY used a collaborative, hands-on approach and pioneering blend of strategy consulting, data science managed service and commercial excellence to i) realign the commercial strategy to growth themes and prioritise commercial objectives to guide the transformation, ii) integrate 100+ data sources into a single customer view and apply machine learning and AI to identify high-quality leads and potent insights for commercial campaigns and iii) support sellers to effectively execute the campaigns in the market.
The project had to overcome a number of challenges. They included turning fragmented and inconsistent data into a single, consolidated view across products and segments for the first time in BT CPS’s history and redefining the perception of ‘base management’ from simple ‘next best action’ prompts to timely and actionable customer insights.
EY teams orchestrated various commercial functions, including sales, marketing and propositions, into a single unified commercial engine that encourages collaborative activation, outcome-based conversations and solution-based selling.
EY teams’ cross-service line approach brought a holistic solution to the client and challenged its thinking. Arguably, one of the biggest success factors was the collaborative approach of blending EY expertise with BT resource into ‘squads’ that collaborated in every step; for example lead engine models and co-activated campaigns were jointly developed and their success measured as part of Trading. This put the client’s needs front of mind and built them into the solution. EY teams’ commercially innovative fee structure also underpinned the collaborative nature of the engagement.
The pioneering use of AI, the data integration efforts and comprehensive activation and change efforts have all paved the way for a new ‘segment of one’ customer experience and insight-led selling approach at an unprecedented scale for a B2B enterprise. EY team has increased BT’s sales rigour while also improving pipeline health, deal velocity and conversion rates.
Within just nine months, EY teams had co-developed a standardised sales process enhanced by impactful sales content and led the design and activation of 10 commercial campaigns. EY also generated an outstanding sales-qualified revenue pipeline, and above historical average sales conversion. The engagement has made a significant contribution towards BT’s five-year plan – all achieved against significant market headways and at a speed and scale that was unprecedented for BT CPS.
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