AT&T: Pricing Automation Tool Development

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SBC, now part of the new AT&T, ran a managed hosting business consisting of a complete line of web hosting services, ranging from single-server dedicated hosting to highly complex multi-server hosted environments. With redundant world class data centers, redundancy in network and power, and state of the art physical and network security, SBC provided best-in-class managed hosting services.

At the time the SBC Managed Hosting sales team lacked a pricing automation tool and manually generated all necessary paperwork for each new quote, from proposals to contract documents, which SBC estimated required up to eight hours per new customer. This bottleneck reduced the amount of time the sales force could spend bringing in new business. Further, the sales team lacked tools to fully articulate the Total Cost of Ownership of the SBC hosted solution vs. customer-built solutions, and in particular to demonstrate the hidden costs that a customer would need to incur with a home-built solution that were built into SBC’s prices.

Callan Consulting worked with the SBC Managed Hosting team on an automated sales tool development project to roll out a web-based pricing/TCO automation tool. The tool had a product configurator enabling the representative to easily create a number of different solutions and perform “what if” pricing analysis. Once satisfied, with the push of a button the rep can generate all required documents, including proposal, credit application, and a complete set of contract documents.

The pricing automation tool also performed a build-vs-buy TCO analysis for the proposed solution, pre-populated with typical cost information for home-built solutions. Its flexibility lets the rep decide which components to include in the analysis or overwrite the pre-populated data with customer-specific costs.

The automated sales tool development met with rave reviews within the SBC sales organization and executive management team, with some commenting that the pricing automation tool was the best sales tool they had ever seen. Within three months of rollout, SBC estimated the tool reduced the amount of time to generate a quote to one hour (from eight), and that it had seen an uptick in sales activity attributable to the reps’ ability to produce quotes and proposals more easily.

“All I can say is …GREAT JOB. In case you didn’t hear the twenty-one-gun salute in the background :)”

Sales Engineer