Accenture High Tech Solutions for Serving the Small and Medium Business (SMB) Segment

Some estimates place the revenue potential as high as 50 percent of annual sales.

Is your business ready to capitalize on this emerging—and increasingly important— customer segment?

To achieve high performance and capture the growth opportunity locked within this lucrative market, you need to:

• Develop a clear strategy for penetrating the SMB space. This involves understanding the needs of this highly fragmented market and targeting your offerings to take maximum advantage of highvolume sales opportunities.
   
• Establish and streamline organizational structures and collaborative relationships that not only engage your SMB customers, but also allow you to reduce your sales costs, build skills quickly and penetrate the SMB market before your competitors.
   
• Optimize a unique, end-to-end SMB execution capability that achieves economic and operational gains across marketing, consulting, system integration and sales.

With the Accenture SMB Routes-to- Market Offering, we can help you reach the right customers in the right way at the right cost. The offering syndicates industry-wide best practices to help clients align critical needs and achieve SMB imperatives.

Opportunity is knocking
Electronics, high-tech and communications companies understand that continued revenue growth cannot be derived from enterprise customers alone. Market saturation, maturing customer bases and the risk of commoditization are making it much more difficult to find—much less win—significant sales opportunities among large customers. In addition, the cost of acquiring and serving global accounts is quite high (and rising). Profits made from enterprise sales have been eroding for quite some time, and will almost certainly continue their downward slide.

The SMB market, in contrast, looks increasingly attractive. While specific definitions can differ by geographic region, industry or offering potential, the SMB market is commonly described as including companies with five to 1000 employees. Currently 77-million strong, the number of SMBs is growing by approximately two million each year. In 2003, this group’s spending on information technology (IT) and telecommunications hardware, software and service topped $800 billion. More good news: year-overyear spending growth among SMBs continues to outpace that of larger businesses. By 2009, the purchase tally is expected to exceed $1 trillion (See Figure 1).

Yet, with this new market opportunity comes significant challenges:

Expensive Segment to Access
Because the SMB market is so highly fragmented, conventional approaches and channels used to reach enterprise customers are much less effective. As many companies are learning, simply applying enterprise sales and delivery models to the SMB market results in sub-optimal customer interactions.

Large Market/Fragmented Growth
The fragmentation that exists within the SMB market becomes particularly apparent when assessing these customers’ needs and product/service requirements. Companies in the electronics and high-tech arena must understand these disparate needs before they can design and deliver tailored offerings that will best meet the SMBs’ objectives.

Internal Obstacles & Barriers
Understandably, companies are striving for first-mover advantage in the lucrative SMB space. The result, however, of this accelerated push to market in this fragmented space is internal complexity and confusion, most often characterized by ineffective, inconsistent, non-scalable operating procedures and execution capabilities.

To address these challenges and take advantage of the potentially significant opportunities that await, companies need to consider evolving best practices, standards and tools to expand sales channels and embrace SMB market penetration.

It seems that large-scale IT vendors often get the packaging right, but never deliver on the actual service, support, or appropriate sales structure to identify and serve this sector.

Information Week, 11/30/04

“To deliver to this market space, we recognize one of our key capabilities is market segmentation—knowing who we are selling to, when and where.”

Bill LePage CISCO Systems Vice President - Worldwide InsideSales

Accenture’s ongoing research into the characteristics of high-performance businesses reveals that top companies are obsessed with winning the battle for the customer. In the SMB space, this means more than simply repackaging your existing sales model, stripping down your product portfolio or opening a call center phone line dedicated to small- and medium-sized businesses. It means fundamentally changing the way you go to market. We often find the capabilities needed to effectively implement and run your SMB initiatives are markedly different from those used to service your enterprise customers. For example, SMB and commercial companies have different support, financing, and infrastructure requirements. Expansion of your strategy to suit customers’ unique needs may also require an expansion of these capabilities.

Based on our deep industry insights and proven customer relationship management capabilities, we have developed an end-to-end solution that is unique to others’ tactical or siloed offerings. Our integrated SMB approach typically includes strategic guidance, process, and system reengineering to operationalize critical sales functions. And we have bundled these capabilities to deliver a comprehensive solution that helps you achieve first-mover advantage (See Figure 2).

Accenture’s SMB Routes-to-Market Offering: A set of strategies, best practice processes, tools and business process outsourcing arrangements that can help you:

• Operationalize your strategy
• Maximize customer segment penetration and profitability
• Drive greater revenue and decrease expenses
• Maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of SMB interactions
• Improve the customer experience and brand loyalty
   

This solution, which we call the Accenture SMB Routes-to-Market, comprises three core components:

SMB Strategy & Offering Development
Through robust customer analytics, data integration solutions and leading data warehousing and prospecting services, we help you define and segment your SMB customer base. We work with you to generate customer and partner insights that allow you to define and target sales opportunities for maximum advantage. In short, we help you create an offering that meets your customers’ requirements and satisfies your financial goals.

SMB Resource Alignment
At Accenture, we know that a solid SMB strategy will only get you so far. Success lies in leveraging collaborative alliances and partnerships to engage the right talent and skills. Our strengths in organizational structure and design allow us to align competencies and implement high-performance SMB programs that increase speed-to-market and lower the cost of selling.

SMB Execution
At Accenture, we help you minimize internal complexities by creating superior, highly manageable SMBspecific capabilities to embrace new partners and build routes to market. Our capabilities enable you operationalize across the functional spectrum— from marketing, channel and sales operations to systems integration to finance and accounting. We package our comprehensive industry know-how of channel partners with proven solutions, including SMBtailored support services, applications, training practices and tools, to help you get your program off the ground or to the next level of performance. Understanding that your fastestgrowing customer segments are not limited by geography, our execution expertise also includes region-specific capabilities. And we offer a full range of outsourcing services for various sales and sales operations functions, which allow us to help our clients enter the SMB market quickly and in the most cost-effective manner.

Accenture offers what no other provider can: a revolutionary, endto- end solution that helps companies achieve high performance—and higher revenues—by optimizing their entire SMB go-to-market life cycle. Our solution leverages a new consulting model that revolutionizes the traditional consultant-client relationship and positions Accenture as a true strategic partner for your SMB initiatives (See Figure 3).

The Accenture SMB Routes-to-Market solution is also grounded in our:

• Breadth and depth of skills in designing and operationalizing successful go-to-market strategies
   
• Leading customer relationship management capabilities that help our clients win the battle for the customer (regardless of the customer’s size)
   
• Proven consulting, systems integration and business process outsourcing expertise—and the ability to blend these competencies to create a one-of-a-kind offering
   
• World-class program implementation and management capabilities and highly skilled, global resources prepared to help you achieve long-term success
   
• Alliance relationships with many of the world’s leading service providers, as well as many of the emerging players poised to revolutionize service delivery
   
• Commitment to helping our clients achieve high performance at every turn

In our work with hundreds of clients in the electronics and high-tech industries, we have developed a keen understanding of the risks and rewards that await those companies preparing to make their inevitable move into the SMB space. Along the way, we have packaged our most relevant insights and capabilities to help these companies turn their SMB vision into a reality. The SMB Routesto- Market offering is part of our continued commitment to our clients and their needs for faster time-tomarket, more efficient use of resources, lower sales acquisition costs, increased margins, increased customer satisfaction and higher revenues.

The Accenture SMB Routes-to-Market offering is led by Kevin Bandy, who is a member of the leadership team for Accenture’s Sales Transformation practice. He serves as global lead for assisting communications and hightech companies improve their sales capacities to net top line revenue growth through increased productivity and efficient sales operations. Other executive team members helping companies establish a long-term commitment to SMB organizations with new kinds of talent and specialized capabilities include Ron Ref, Jeff Baumgarten and Naveen Jain.

No one can help you build your SMB capabilities more effectively than Accenture. Let us help you build an integrated, end-to-end SMB sales capability that will position you for high performance and competitive advantage.

For more information on how Accenture’s Routes-to-Market offering can help you reach smalland medium-sized businesses more quickly and more effectively, contact Kevin.F.Bandy@accenture.com.

Copyright © 2006 Accenture All rights reserved.

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Committed to delivering innovation, Accenture collaborates with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With deep industry and business process expertise, broad global resources and a proven track record, Accenture can mobilize the right people, skills, and technologies to help clients improve their performance. With approximately 140,000 people in 48 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$16.65 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2006. Its home page is www.accenture.com.