Success Story: Black Box

Partner Profile

Black Box Corporation is a trusted provider of comprehensive communications and infrastructure solutions. As a value-added reseller of platforms and applications from the industry’s top manufacturers, and a provider of technology products and services, Black Box designs, builds, and maintains today’s complex voice and data networks.

Headquartered in Lawrence, Pennsylvania, Black Box Network Services has the largest footprint in the industry, with 194 offices serving 141 countries. With more than 4500 Team Members worldwide, Black Box serves more than 175,000 clients in every major industry sector.

As a Cisco Gold-Certified Partner, Black Box Network Services holds many specializations including: advanced unified communications, advanced wireless, advanced security, and routing and switching. Black Box’s 30+ years of voice and networking experience, maintenance capabilities and offerings, allow Black Box Network Services to deliver comprehensive Cisco solutions for businesses of all sizes across a variety of industries.

The Challenge

The foundation of the program was to change our sales teams' behavior from a reactive to proactive selling style which included a systematic and repeatable way of contacting customers and prospects with pre-defined messaging, and vigorously measuring results so that we could determine success," says Black Box Vice President, Peter Marquis.

Don O’Neill, Sales Director for Black Box, explains further: “We’re a legacy oriented sales organization that has a very good install base and farmer sales people. It is imperative that we go through a transformation in the pursuit of net new business with organic sales. We needed modern tools in order to complement that transformation. Up to recently, we had been using ACT to organize our data. Everyone we spoke with told us we needed to be using salesforce.com."

While investigating the possibilities, Black Box quickly discovered that they would benefit from some help to deploy a system as robust as salesforce.com and drive the adoption rate in their sales team. However, the number of possible options for professional service partners was overwhelming. Then, O’Neill received a call from a Business Development Manager at Cisco, introducing him to Baker Communications.

He said, ‘Hey, take a look at this,” recalled O’Neill. “I said, ‘Wow, thank goodness.’"

The Solution

What O’Neill discovered is that the Baker strategy involves embedding a salesforce.com adoption strategy into a highly structured sales play, so that every step of the process not only builds salesforce.com CRM “muscle memory,” it also drives revenue. In this case, the play was built around a Cisco UC Collaboration Breakaway initiative.

Baker Communications’ 12-week UC Collaboration Breakaway Play integrates new skills with highly focused marketing and demand generation programs that delivers 20X1 ROI or more. The play align the interests, goals and objectives of both sales and marketing to drive superior results, while generating immediate sales pipeline and short-term sales. The activities of marketing, sales and training co-occur in a highly coordinated, collaborative effort to execute a revenue generation strategy from start to finish.

The Results

Change always brings some initial confusion. Even willing sales organizations can have a difficult time letting go of their existing methodologies and inefficiencies. Many give up before seeing any real breakthroughs. O’Neill admitted his team experienced some of this confusion when the play first began.

“At the start, the UC Collaboration Breakaway Play sessions seemed like organized pandemonium,”laughed O’Neill. “There were disruptions to what we were accustomed to doing. Then the realization clicked into place, ‘I’ve got to stringently match the disciplined direction that Baker is giving to us.’With that, things started falling into place. We’re just over half way through, but now we’re seeing tangible results.”

With Black Box halfway through the play, O’Neill was impressed by the highly interactive way the UC Collaboration Breakaway Play sessions were structured and delivered.

“It encourages interaction,” said O’Neill. “If fact, you want to hear from everybody in the group at least three times throughout that 90 minutes to make sure they’re tuned in and not focused on something else in front of them. If they are focused on something else, they get found out rather quickly. That interaction is very positive and energizing for us.”

Peter Marquis shared the following results:

"From a revenue perspective, the program has generated

• 22 Opportunities
• $3.9 in Program Pipeline
• $212,900 in Closed Revenue
• The region's overall pipeline jumped 13% in Q3 when the Baker program was in play.
• Lastly, we know of at least one account manager who is now selling Cisco who had previously been focused in other manufacturers. The sales director used the Play to indoctrinate him into the Cisco portfolio.

In addition to the revenue, some other important benefits have been realized:

• Strengthened Black Box account manager and Cisco account manager sales integration (1,500 targeted accounts that individual Cisco reps have given BB for the Play)
• The power of SalesForce.Com (this pilot has led to our local commitment to the tool)
• A transformative sales process built around proactive prospecting and a disciplined cadence approach for marcom and telephone campaigns
• Increased knowledge on Cisco Solution Selling tailored to customer business requirements.

We are hoping to replicate and improve on these results when we repeat the program for our Long Island Voice division. That division has recently hired a sales team (1 manager, 4 reps) of Cisco-only representatives who will work out of the Manhattan office. This program will serve as the foundation to aggressively and methodically build their Cisco pipeline. I look forward to working closer with your team and Baker. "

Even mid-way through the play the results are not only outstanding, but a clear indicator of what Black Box can expect by the end of the 12th week.

Gateway to Success

“What Baker offers is a turnkey approach. It was custom-tailored for us, which accelerated the process,” explained O’Neill. “Our goal is to achieve net new sales. In this competitive marketplace, that’s not always just going to happen, because there are so many competitive forces in play; more resellers, more people in our business. It’s become a very challenging environment for us to work in.”

However, with salesforce.com adoption wired directly into the Unified Communications Breakaway Play, Baker Communications was able to engage Black Box in a CRM paradigm that effectively modified sales team behavior, leading even many seasoned, “farmer” salespeople to start achieving net new sales only seven weeks into the 12 week play.

O’Neill especially appreciates the way the play was completely organized from collateral to cadence, giving management the chance to have precise, timely, detailed information at a glance.

“We can see how we were progressing, not only on a weekly basis, but on a daily basis and in some cases an hourly basis,” said O’Neill. “Sometimes it energized people and in other cases it exposed people. It’s really been a wake-up call all the way across the board within our organization.”

Even with five weeks remaining in the play, Black Box has already undergone a significant transformation, one O’Neill intends to maintain. “I have people within my group who are coming up with variations of this play,” he said. “Some are specific to Cisco and some expand beyond it. We started out with 200 contacts for each of our 12 sales reps. Now, I have one guy that’s got 2100 contacts for another, and he is already devising and putting together MarCom for it.”

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