Pronto Connections

In this day of modern technology, you would think that dedicated service providers could handle incoming calls efficiently, courteously, and effectively to help you succeed in your competitive business environment. Our clients believe Pronto Connections can. We are committed to helping companies improve their revenue and their customer satisfaction by acting as their internal customer service, order processing, and lead generation department. We work with consumer product companies, non-profits, catalog, and medical companies nationwide. We answer over 3.5 million calls a year 24 hours a day, in English and Spanish. We manage inbound e-mail inquiries and provide reporting on all activity.

When Pronto Connections first met KeyRoad Enterprises-CustomerCentric Selling® at the end of October 2006, they had three goals:

1. To grow the company revenue by 20% a year for the next three years.
2. To grow by acquisitions if/where it made sense.
3. To bring all sales executives to generate $750K on new business per year.

At that time, Pronto’s current situation was that 70% of leads came from referral, with the remaining coming from tradeshows and cold calling. Michele Ringwood, President and CEO of Pronto Connections, identified several company challenges with the following questions and statements:

• “Once first contact is established, how do we more effectively manage the buying cycle?”
• “We do not disqualify our prospects early enough.”
• “We are not good at managing decision-by-committee, as we focus too much on our champion, not all the key players involved in the decision.”
• “Our messaging is not consistent across our external communication.”
• “We are not great at identifying our prospects’ goals early or at diagnosing their current situation prior to prescribing our service and attempting to drive a sale”.
• We are too impatient, costing us deals that could have been won if we had given the prospect the opportunity to make a decision to buy at the right time for him/her.”

The capabilities Ringwood was looking for included:

• Bringing process training using the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology to her sales team in calendar Q1 2007.
• Securing advisory services (consulting time) on an on-going basis starting in January 2007 to help implement a more effective sales engagement roadmap.

KeyRoad Enterprises provided them with these capabilities, and to-date Pronto’s sales force has been trained and is in line for achieving its stated objectives. “Working with Philippe Lavie, KeyRoad president, has made a world of difference in our ability to generate our expected revenue”, says Ringwood. “We now have:

• A sales engagement process that mirrors our clients’ buying cycle
• A series of templates for our prospecting activities (referral and cold)
• A sequence-of-events template to help our client in their buying decision process
• An internal pipeline grading system to manage our sales force activities
• An external support for our sales force to use in their daily sales activities”

Finally”, says Ringwood, “we can directly attribute closing over $1.5 million in the past 60 days to the work we are doing with KeyRoad. We are likely to finish ’07 with 45% growth not 20%!”

For more information about Pronto Connections, please visit their web site at: www.prontoconnections.com.