Escend technologies

Escend helps semiconductor and electronic component manufacturers gain global visibility into their design-win pipeline by providing demand management software that enables tracking and management of opportunities and design wins in one unified, global database. For our customers, this has resulted in:

• Increased design-win to order conversion rates
• More accurate revenue projections
• Improved manufacturing and inventory planning
• Faster, consistent and coordinated global response to customers

Escend was formed in 1999, just prior to the start of the tech decline with a product originally designed to meet the sales account management needs of high-tech sales reps. With the tech recession, technology sales rep firms saw their revenues shrink, limiting their ability to purchase and deploy enterprise-class software solutions such as Escend.

More notably, semiconductor and component manufacturers’ customers – original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) – aimed to drive down costs by accelerating the trend that had begun in the mid-1990s: outsourcing production of their end products. This outsourcing trend resulted in a huge chasm between the demand creation and demand fulfillment processes of semiconductor and component manufacturers. Essentially, design wins occur in Europe, Asia and North America, while manufacturing of end products occurs in low-cost regions such as China, S.E. Asia and Mexico.

These fundamental shifts created new challenges and new opportunities for Escend. The new opportunity was the larger and more profitable target customer base of semiconductor and component manufacturers (versus sales rep firms), which began experiencing the “pain” of their customers’ disconnected demand and supply chains. The challenge was to position the company to sell in this large and demanding market space.

In 2003, Escend raised $7 million to redesign its product to incorporate needed global functionality for semiconductor and component manufacturers, including Web-based functionality, integrated business rules and workflows, multi-language and currency capability, fast and easy deployment, and scalability.

Prior to working with KeyRoad Enterprises™-CustomerCentric Selling®, Escend was faced with the following challenges:

• No bookings in two years.
• Murky positioning and messaging.
• Selling too low at its prospects without real access to “C” level executives.
• A homegrown forecasting process with no ability to repeat, audit, and measure its pipeline.

The way Escend was doing business amidst these challenges, resulted in missed revenue targets, higher than projected cost-of-sales, limited qualified leads in the pipeline, less than 10% accuracy in its pipeline, and inability to secure additional funding for growth.

“We decided to embrace, implement and train our entire sales, sales support and marketing organizations in the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology” said Elaine Bailey, Escend CEO. “We were looking for a methodology to enable our team to:

• Diagnose a prospects needs and goals with a bias towards Escend’s strengths, giving us a better understanding of exactly how our prospects could achieve their goals by deploying our products and services.
• Develop a set of tools, including messages, templates, and prompters, to help our sales people engage in intelligent “prescriptive” conversations with customers about the use of our products and services.
• Implement a consistent set of pipeline milestones with specific deliverables at each critical stage of the sale and proactively drive a faster and more successful sales cycle. We were looking to significantly improve the accuracy, reliability, and predictability of our pipeline and forecast.”
Bailey says: “We engaged the services of KeyRoad Enterprises, a CustomerCentric Selling® affiliate and its president, Philippe Lavie. I have seen significant results directly attributable to both our work with Lavie and the CCS® tools and methodology:
• We closed – within 3 months of completing the training – a $628,000 deal
• We improved the accuracy of our pipeline and our ability to forecast by 80%
• We secured a 3% response rate on our first post-CCS® prospecting campaign, an increase of over 300% compared to previous campaigns”

For more information on Escend Technologies, visit their website at: www.escend.com. Reach Philippe Lavie by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .