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Campaign Management

Best Practice

SMART SELLER TO SUPPORT SALES CAMPAIGNS FOR THE ENERGY WORLD

Energy suppliers are competing with each other to expand their customer base, retain their most profitable customers and maximise sales margins. Smart Seller is a solution designed by Reply to support sales campaigns for both gas and electricity suppliers, with a single or dual-offer approach.

Today companies are competing with each other to expand their customer base, retain their most profitable customers and maximise sales margins.
Competition among energy suppliers is at its most intense when dealing with large industrial and commercial (LI&C) organisations and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) because of their revenue and margin potential.
An effective sales force, the capability to forecast consumption for many different types of usage and the ability to price are key factors in the success of energy suppliers competing against their rivals.
Reply has developed Smart Seller, a software solution designed to support sales campaigns for both gas and electr​icity suppliers, with a single or dualoffer approach.
Energy suppliers can integrate this solution into their existing systems easily so providing their internal sales force or external sales agents with a powerful and secure tool that supports sales campaign planning and tracking.

PROCESSES AND FUNCTIONALITY

Smart Seller supports the main processes and functionality required to execute sales campaigns to sell and/or renew energy contracts, including the management of:​

  • Customer and site information
  • The sales force
  • The assignment of customers to sales representatives
  • The configuration and simulation of complex energy offers for LI&C and SMEs
  • Contractual options
  • Credit check requests
  • Authorisation processes
  • Offer versions
  • Orders​
  • ​Relationships with DCOs

Smart Seller allows Marketing and Sales to track sales/campaign results easily in term of revenues, margins, sales-side curves, risks, and so on. Moreover, it allows corrective actions to be defined and deployed quickly to the entire SalesForce, when necessary. The following simplified chart shows the main functionality required by gas and electricity companies.

SMART SELLER ARCHITECTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

Smart Seller is a client-server software solution, consisting of two main applications:

  • ​​A central system with the functionality needed  to manage integration with other systems,  communications and workflow;
  • A distributed system, capable of operating stand-alone and running on laptops, to distribute and make constantly available the information needed to configure and negotiate the offer with the client.​

IMPLEMENTATION APPROACH

Before it can be used by energy suppliers, Smart Seller must be configured and integrated with the existing systems, such as those used for demand forecasting/pricing, CRM and order management. The main functionality to be configured includes offer types and prices, indexes, details of the sales organisation, authorisation process, and so on.​

​LOOK AND F​​EEL

​​The ‘look and feel’ of the application screens has been designed to provide an aggregated view of the main customer information, a user interface that is intuitive and easy to use, and a graphicsbased display of offer simulation results, for ease of understanding. While the typical Smart Seller user will be a senior professional (such as a Key Account Manager, Sales Representative or Sales Agent), the ease of interaction is designed to streamline customer-facing activities and allow Key Account Managers and sales people to discuss and configure complex offer options in front of the customer