Company at a Glance
Serena is a leader in Application Lifecycle Management for the enterprise. With 29 offices in 14 countries, it is the largest independent company dedicated to helping IT capitalise on its software development initiatives. More than 15,000 organisations around the globe, including 96 of the Fortune 100 and 90 of the Global 100, deploy its ALM solutions.
The Challenge
To understand fully the buying processes of Top UK 100 Enterprise and Government organisations: the criteria for decision-making at each stage in the process and the core issues that influence the specification, procurement and implementation of the enterprise software solution.
The Strategy
We designed, developed and implemented a programme of qualitative telephone research of sample key account organisations, based upon the Sales Process Engineering planning system. The strategy was to question directly senior IT, procurement and other personnel and then model their purchasing processes for the category. The critical data on buying behaviour could then be used to develop a matching, integrated sales and marketing process plan.
The Project
We developed the project plan: to assess the requirements of Serena’s sales and marketing teams for information on buying behaviour, and agree how data could be practically used at the completion of the four month project.
The research population included a representative sample of active, former and ‘wish-list’ customers. The plan scheduled milestone objectives and activities, and included the design of a template questionnaire as a guide for telephone interviews, with the flexibility to pursue issues of interest and concern to customers – and therefore of intrinsic value for the research.
The Results
The research identified and modelled for the first time the buying process that top 100 IT customer organisations employ: how, why and when they decide to buy, and what influences the decision. Some stages in the process are conscious and formalised; others are less so: but a consistent, verifiable staged progression was confirmed and tabulated.
The results enabled the design of an end-to-end solution-delivery process – one that could be measured and optimised, to align the vendor’s services and communications exactly with customer requirements at each stage in the buying process. This adds value by accelerating definition of the problem and solution for each prospect, to reduce operational costs and improve productivity for customer and vendor alike.