TKF Telecom France brings its diverse sales ecosystem together with Freshsales

As a global supplier of connectivity solutions, TKF (BV Twentsche Kabelfabriek) supports the smooth running of key sectors like power, construction, manufacturing, and telecom. Their regional center in France, our center of focus in this case, primarily services the telecom sector with networking infrastructure solutions. The service includes the installation and upkeep of fiber optic cables for multiple telecom operators.

The need for a modern sales automation platform

TKF Telecom France sells to large enterprises usually involving a multi-threaded buying process across key decision-makers. Given this background, sales teams at the firm needed to follow a process that engaged multiple personas within a potential customer account. It also meant there was a need for tools to support this complexity.

 

However, their sales technology stack primarily comprised an email client and spreadsheet software that was unable to meet the demands of their business. Eventually, they faced multiple challenges:

 

• Handling complex account hierarchy: For starters, their sales tools were not equipped to easily map account hierarchies or manage desired patterns of engagement with contacts. More importantly, various elements of the deal resided in different tools, including their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) tool. It meant sales reps and account managers lacked a unified customer view given the data sat in silos across multiple apps and spreadsheets. Data opacity left team leaders with limited account context when onboarding new reps. This crippled collaboration across teams.

 

• Lack of partner synergies: By partnering with engineering firms who became resellers of their solutions, TKF Telecom France found an additional revenue stream. These firms influenced purchase decisions within their target accounts and recommended TKF’s solutions. However, their pipeline data was not integrated with TKF Telecom France’s sales stack. It meant Jean-Philippe and his team had no access to partner-driven deal information and were unable to support them with insights to help them sell better.

 

• Low team productivity and high cost of ownership: With multiple point solutions making up TKF Telecom France’s sales stack, teams had to resort to over-than-necessary app switching to get things done. This hit productivity. In addition, the tools increased ownership costs as each tool had individual pricing while maintaining them was a tough task. Owning multiple point solutions also meant it was difficult to access key data on pipeline numbers and sales team performance.

 

Freshsales delivers from Day 1 

They concluded that a central system would help them close the gap. As they explored how technology could address the challenges listed, they began to look for a CRM solution. In fact, as they were moving up the value chain of the market, they needed their CRM to scale and meet the complexity of their future sales needs. But as much as the CRM would need to be sophisticated to manage growing account complexity, it would also need to offer a simple, yet comprehensive view of the customer journey. That way, reps could skip navigating a feature-laden interface and earn back valuable selling time to focus on higher-order sales activities.

Here is how Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM) is helping them today:

 

• Larger deals and unified customer views: Sales Cloud has improved selling into large accounts, thanks to its parent and child account mapping capabilities. Stakeholders can visually depict the nature of every account and the history of buyer engagement with reps, right from the first touch. Moreover, multi-source data from external apps related to sales can now be easily integrated. That way, data is unified in the CRM. Features and modules like event tracking and the contacts module help TKF Telecom France build a comprehensive and unified buyer view for their sales teams.

 

• Improved channel collaboration: With its ability of role-based access, Freshsales has helped Jean Phillipe’s sales teams balance transparency with privacy by giving partners a level of access to the solution. The partners’ user roles are defined in a way that they benefit from organization-level analytics and insights that would not otherwise be accessible to them but are otherwise restricted to information proprietary to TKF Telecom France. That has grown their sales outcomes. In addition, there are knock-on effects. For instance, management has visibility into these deals today and can offer assistance when required.

• Optimized selling & accurate sales forecasting: As Freshsales has become TKF Telecom France’s primary sales system, Jean-Philippe has noticed productivity improvements across his sales teams. This is in part due to minimal app switching and data residing in one system. Additionally, Freddy, Freshsales' AI engine offers sales leaders the ability to surface granular-level insights into a variety of reports – from pipeline to productivity. While this is an early phase of TKF’s use of Sales Cloud, the management can determine the number of new projects which can be closed in 2021.

 

Bracing sales function for unpredictable times

Jean-Philippe is delighted to note that Freshsales has addressed key challenges hampering progress at his sales department.

 

He says it will be instrumental in TKF Telecom France’s digitization efforts across the organization, especially as buying behavior goes virtual during the challenging times the world is navigating through today. Jean-Philippe believes that the CRM has made TKF Telecom France’s selling resilient to brace for market headwinds that will unfold over the next few quarters.