Yesterday’s post introduced the topic “Opportunity to Cash” process. This process is mission critical to every telecom service provider.
The Opportunity to Cash Process involves multiple organizations throughout the business. For the sake of this post, I will break it into three major groupings:
- Getting the Order
- Activating the Service
- Billing and Collecting the Revenue
Ownership of the Opportunity is handed off as the opportunity progresses through these various phases. An Account Executive owns “Getting the Order”. A Service Delivery Owner owns “Activating the Service”. And a Billing Coordinator owns “Billing and Collecting the Revenue”.
Entrance and Exit Criteria, if well defined and religiously followed, ensures proper and efficient handoff of the Opportunity as it passes responsibility. I will use Zayo as an example to illustrate Entrance and Exit Criteria.
At Zayo, we define Stage 4 of the sales funnel process as “Sales Closed”, which is the Exit Criteria stage for Sales. That is, Stage 4 signifies that they believe they completed a sale and have satisfied. They question is “Have they satisfied their Exit Criteria?” Well, the idea is that the group they are handing-off to–Service Activation–gets to answer this question. How do they answer it? That is where Stage 5 comes into play.
Stage 5 is defined as “Order Accepted”. This stage is controlled by Service Activation. It means that they agree that Sales has satisfied their Exit Criteria, else Service Activation should not have pulled the order into Stage 5. It means that the Entrance Criteria to the Service Activation phase has been met.
The important principle here is the handshake between the two organizations. One organization declares they are done with their potion of the process–their Exit Criteria has been met. The other organization agrees–their Entrance Criteria has been met.
How can this handoff be tightened? How can Salesforce.com help? Tomorrow…
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