How Telenor and Vainu's partnership transforms the way of work for sales and marketing through real-time insights

Key takeaways

• Telenor is the largest telecom provider in the Nordics with over 186 million customers worldwide.
• Telenor looked for a partner that could provide them with reliable company data and support the development of their data-driven sales strategy.
• Telenor uses Vainu’s company data in several business streams: for prospecting and account monitoring, and data scientists are using Vainu's data in analysis and predictive models.
• Already during the first two quarters of using Vainu, Telenor saw significant improvements in their sales metrics.
  
  

The company

With over 186 million customers using their services and products every day, Telenor has become the largest telecom provider in the Nordics. There are many reasons why, but a strong focus on customer experience and being an early adopter of digital technologies have been key to help support customer-centricity. The telecom industry is evolving rapidly and technologies such as 5G, IoT, and AI are reshaping the industry and creating better possibilities for innovation on a massive scale. This puts pressure on the companies to continuously adapt to the opportunities in the market to best engage with their customers.

The challenge

Changes in buyer behavior are forcing digital transformation

Today, telecom companies are reacting to the business challenges following digitalization and changes in customer behavior. Today's buyers have access to more information than ever before, which makes them more demanding. Salespeople and marketers must have a clear understanding of their customers' situation and adapt their approach accordingly. And the best way to do that is by using relevant information about them that's reliable and up to date.

Telenor has a lot of customers, and hence a lot of aggregated and anonymized customer data they need to handle in a secure way. Telenor is on a journey to become more data-driven to serve their customers better based on insights about their needs. However, to give their customers the experience they deserve and be fully data-driven, it's crucial to understand when their needs are changing. When driving this internal transformation, the team noticed they were reacting too slowly on buying signals, and the company data Telenor's salespeople had access to was often outdated or irrelevant.

To maintain their position as one of the industry leaders in a fluctuating market, Telenor looked for a partner that could not only give them company insights but also inspire and motivate them to use the data in a structured way to be more data-driven in their sales processes. That's when they found Vainu.

The solution

A growth partnership with the goal of real-time sales and marketing

For the past three years, Vainu has partnered with Telenor, empowering them with real-time company insights. In the early days, it was mainly about the prospecting capabilities and account insights, but over time the collaboration has grown into a strong partnership in which Telenor and Vainu help each other to develop and take it to the next level.

Every quarter, Telenor and Vainu have a joint steering group meeting to discuss improvement areas and ongoing trends, from using company data even more effectively to suggesting product improvements to Vainu. The joint belief that data will transform sales- and marketing processes for B2B, as it did nearly a decade ago in B2C, has inspired the partnership and pushed both companies to evolve and improve.

Today, Telenor uses Vainu's company data in several business streams. Sales representatives use Vainu for prospecting and account monitoring, and data scientists use Vainu's data in their predictive models. In addition, there's a project in place to use real-time company data in the marketing team as a part of Telenor's lead enrichment and lead management processes. According to the team working in collaboration with Vainu, Vainu has been one of Telenor's most important partners for company insights and sales enablement and has helped the team develop data-driven sales and marketing processes.

Full company view in the CRM brings better sales opportunities

Telenor has a large sales organization divided into several horizontal and vertical streams. Most sales prospecting is done through Vainu: salespeople can find customer look-a-likes or companies showing growth potential within their segments.

Vainu's data allows Telenor to create automated and targeted workflows directly in their CRM, based on relevant changes related to their prospects. In the CRM, they can see information such as acquisition activity among customers, which is an important growth and retention signal. Similarly, salespeople can access information about social media indexes which they’ve seen has a proven impact on churn. “By enriching the company profiles directly in our CRM, we are now able to put real-time information directly in the hands of the salesperson. Vainu helps us prioritize our activities and to be more productive,” says Christer Wredemark, SME Sales Manager.

As part of their digital transformation, Telenor has invested a lot in analysis and data modeling to build a recommendation engine that predicts future customer outcomes. Since adding Vainu's open data to the equation, they've been able to react much faster. Now they can empower their salespeople with all relevant information about whom to contact, when, and what to say. Reps can get recommendations such as which contracts need to be renewed as well as which companies have gone through mergers or other relevant business changes. “For me as a salesperson, it means that I can give my customers a better experience, being more consistent and professional in my approach,” says Fredrik Hansson Bunpuckdee, SME Sales Specialist.

Results

The constant search for improvement together with the new, data-driven strategy, is already showing results. After implementing a mandatory field in the CRM, where sales reps can document the source of the sales opportunity, Telenor can track opportunities from Vainu in a more structured way. During the first two quarters of 2020, Telenor saw a 42 percent conversion rate on sales opportunities from Vainu. In addition, after the first six months of 2020, they've measured a 67 percent positive ROI on the investment.

As Telenor themselves explains it on their website: “...to accelerate digitalization, no single company is an island: partnerships are crucial for innovation.” Telenor and Vainu have already collaborated for a few years, but the journey towards changing the way B2B companies work with real-time data has just started. A two-way partnership with continuous learning is essential to offer tailored customer experiences similar to the ones we see within B2C.