Who: Grass Valley™, San Francisco The world’s premiere broadcast and professional solutions supplier with more than 3,000 active broadcast customers and tens of thousands of professional users generating content using Grass Valley tools.

When: Dialogue Marketing’s services customer since October 2010.

What: Using Dialogue Marketing’s inside sales services and award-winning customer relationship management (CRM) software, the manufacturer has been able to cut operational expenses in half and generate more than $500,000 a month in sales.

The Problem

Grass Valley, the world’s second largest manufacturer of high-end broadcasting equipment, was tasked with driving $8 million in annual service sales, while lowering their overall costs for selling service contracts and contract renewals. It was important for Grass Valley to be the leading provider in North, Central and South America, but their in-house team was costly; therefore, the company began searching for a solution.

The Solution

With 30 years of experience and a validated set of best practices, Dialogue Marketing goes beyond traditional inside sales services to improve businesses’ relationships with their customers and help drive sales.

The provider recognized Grass Valley’s equipment is absolutely mission critical for clients, such as broadcast stations, school television stations, sports television, multi-broadcasting stations, public broadcasting stations and more. Dialogue Marketing’s objective was to ensure all Grass Valley products are covered and protected through current service agreements. If Grass Valley fails to sell the service agreement, customers are at risk of lost revenue if, for instance, their Grass Valley television camera malfunctions and they do not have service to repair it. Without the service agreements Dialogue Marketing sells on behalf of Grass Valley, television productions do not happen and revenue is lost.

Together, Grass Valley and Dialogue Marketing collaborated on lead generation, customer care, technical support and value-added profit centers, while together they created a thorough training program to provide sales representatives the necessary technical background to match their technical solution sales skills.

1. Dialogue Marketing immediately recruited two sales professionals with extensive experience selling technical solutions. Both sales professionals were trained using Dialogue Marketing’s proprietary sales process, sales qualification tool and sales forecasting modules, as well as on Grass Valley’s internal quoting tools.
2. Next, Dialogue Marketing’s sales representatives began renewing expired and expiring contracts, sought out new business and up-sold each contract. Representatives look at every product each customer has, reviews whether or not it is under contract or serviceable and ensures those that are serviceable have a service agreement.

“In regard to sales output, we can’t ask for more!,” said, Robert Warner, sales director, Americas Global Services, Grass Valley.

In addition, as Dialogue Marketing took on more of the selling responsibility, Grass Valley’s executives were able to work on larger and more strategic opportunities, further improving operations.

“Yesterday's call centers have undergone a transformation,” said Alejandro Vargas, chief executive officer and president, Dialogue Marketing. “They are no longer static answering services, but now value-added profit centers that build long-term enterprise value and lifelong customer relationships. To be successful, businesses must use the tools and resources available to manage every single contact in each stage of the customer cycle, from pre-sales to technical support.”

The Results

Grass Valley’s sales process requires multiple technical calls and emails. Dialogue Marketing cut the company’s operational costs in half. In addition, average monthly sales have reached more than $522,000 – 124 percent quota over the history of the project – and continues to increase. Last month, Dialogue Marketing closed more than $749,000 in sales with a single deal worth more than $153,000 – something that cannot be accomplished through a traditional call center.

“The overall organization of the program, launch and professionalism came together very well. We are pleased with the results!,” said Warner.

Since the initial implementation, Grass Valley’s confidence in Dialogue Marketing has continued to increase, adding more responsibility to sell more. Recently, Grass Valley gave Dialogue Marketing access to their internal systems, including their internal database of products.