Cognos Planning - Prospecting Quick Reference Guide

Prospecting Quick Reference Guide

New Account - IBM Cognos Express Business Intelligence

OVERVIEWCUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT RESOUCES

The purpose of this guide is to help you accelerate your prospecting process. Once you have identified the right person, formulate questions to uncover their need(s) with a combination of Qualifying and High Yield questions. Qualifying questions provide you with sufficient information to determine if the prospect has a business issue that a Cognos solution could solve. High yield questions focus on impact, perception and confirm specific information regarding the business situation. This Guide will help you create and ask both types of questions in the correct sequence, building trust and credibility along the way.

As you dialogue with your prospect, ask that person to review some suggested resources on www.ibm.com/cognos:

Events Try before you buy

Products IBM Cognos Express: Reporter, Advisor, XceleratorCapabilities Reporting / Dashboards, Analysis, PlanningSolutions Solutions for Small and Midsize Businesses

Prospecting in ITIT Roles

What to AskHigh Yield QuestionsIf we could provide a solution that wouldWhat to Listen for

How does the business get access to corporate data today?

Are you often asked by business users for extracts of data? How do you manage that process?

Are business users able to create reports and analyze information or are they reliant on IT for this information? With your existing solution, are you able to combine data from different sources? Can business users create and modify their own reports without relying on IT or a technical user? Do the current BI tools cause any unnecessary strain or performance impacts on the data sources? Do you want to implement BI and planning but resist due to limited staff and/or expertise?

How do you plan and budget your IT spend? What happens when management is not able to get information they need in a timely manner for decision making or do not have the visibility they need across the multitude of business systems? How many people do you have creating and maintaining reports? What is the annual cost for supporting your reporting applications? Does your user community have self-service access and personalization in their current reporting environment?

Have they requested more control? Have "rogue" applications appeared to fill gaps in service? What happens when you need to combine information from multiple data sources to produce business reports? Does the business trust or have confidence in the information they receive? provide consistent information in a variety of interfaces from dashboards to Excel to printed page

enable end users to satisfy their own information requests without needing to burden IT with each request reduce the amount of resources that are tied up creating reports to allow them to focus on more strategic issues enable your users to get an integrated consistent view of information across many data sources promote user self-service; to allow your business users to create their reports, do their own analysis and discovery, and assemble/interact with their own dashboards,but still allowIT to maintain control over the environment and trust the information they receive; IT can spend more time addressing strategic issues prevent long running and potentially disastrous queries from hitting your systems Cannot keep up with the information requests from the business Too much time and resources on BI requests and not enough time to spend on more strategic initiatives Lack of IT resources

Many versions of the same requests Desire for self-service BI

Difficult to access and combine data from multiple systems

Requests for information takes too long to iterate Business constantly questions the numbers Heavy dependency on IT BI tools require a large data warehouse strategy so were waiting Desire to implement BI but concerned about lack of IT resources or expertise

Line of Business ProspectingSales , Marketing, Channel Roles

What to AskHigh Yield QuestionsIf we could provide a solution that wouldWhat to Listen for

Are Sales managers able to have visibility into all of the things that affect pipeline conversion rates such as sales by geo, marketing campaigns success rates, sales by seller?

Can you pinpoint where in the sales cycle there are inefficiencies to allow for optimizations or resources to be planned to accelerate deals through this stage? Are you able to look at your customers buying trends in order to determine possible up-sell, cross-sell and services opportunities?

Can you pro-actively manage your customers with knowledge of who the most profitable/costly or most satisfied/dissatisfied?

Are you able to identify which promotional periods or campaigns were the most productive in converting leads to actual sales? Can sales management perform the scenario modeling necessary to understand how changes in regional coverage may impact sales? When looking at your customers are you able to determine which of them is likely to be the most profitable, costly or most satisfied so you can to be pro-active in managing them?

Have you engaged in a formal plan to resolve the lack of information? What is your perception of the service level you receive today? What impact is this having on your sales performance? How do you report sales forecasts and variance to plan and actual data?

provide immediate insight into critical sales and marketing functions i.e. indicating the loss of a significant customer

increase up-sell and cross-sell opportunities; provide specific recommendations from all available prod/services.

provide multi-dimensional modeling and analysis to identify your customers with the greatest and lowest profit potential

measure and reporton your campaigns and promotions performance to understand your response and conversion rates allow for what-if analysis to understand the impact of a promotion, region changes, economic conditions to forecasts and budgets

Forced to be reactive, not proactive, to critical situations, such as: declining pipeline, increase customer churn, lowering conversion rates Lack of visibility into sales and marketing activities and effectiveness Inability to track marketing effectiveness CRM application, like salesforce.com, does not provide the analytics insight needed Lack of early visibility into actual marketing expenses versus budget

VP/Director Operations, Manufacturing, Customer Service

What to AskHigh Yield QuestionsIf we could provide a solution that wouldWhat to Listen for

Can you tell me how you get insight into the large amounts of information and complexity with your operational activities to make decisions? Do you have a single view of your business including all key metrics? How do you share this information with other stakeholders, like sales and marketing, as well as other partners, suppliers, and vendors? Can you tell me how you trackthe daily volume of my call centers by region and service center? How do you communicate information about production, inventory?

Can you proactively analyze how changes in demand may affect production? (i.e. manage stock-outs)

Do you have visibility into how your suppliers are impacting your production?

What happens when you do not identify the early warning signs of bottlenecks or problems? How do you react and manage when youre confronted with changes with your customers and suppliers? How do you share performance information with other groups, like finance and sales, requests information? allow you to establish, analyze, and monitor integrated operational plans across multiple initiatives and divisions

match product demand with production capabilities to create an appropriate plan and be able to monitor and analyze it share this critical information with your vendors, partners, and suppliers provide multi-dimensional analysis to identify call volumes over time and track them by product, service, or agents provide insight into your top suppliers so you can negotiate better terms

reduce the risk of costly stock outs due to parts shortages/inventory

perform what-if analysis to see the impact costs have on changes in production runs

Lack of visibility into overall performance of supply chain prevent them from responding and taking corrective action Multiple silos and views of performance Complexity and outsourcing make it harder to responding to changing business and customer needs Complications in supply chain management systems Do not have access to relevant data to make decisions

Difficult to provide a single view of operations across the organization

Difficulty analyzing data to make decisions on impact of changes

VP/Director of Finance

What to AskHigh Yield QuestionsIf we could provide a solution that wouldWhat to Listen for

Do you have difficulty accessing and using data from your financial applications for your team to respond to new opportunities and improve performance? Are reports needed that compare actual versus targets for management to determine the effectiveness of the business? How do you communicate plans and forecasts to other groups in the company such as operations, research and development or sales? How do you manage and maintain multiple spreadsheets and different versions to handle budgeting?

Are you confident in the numbers/formulas on the spreadsheets that people submit to you?

Do you find Excel to be slow and cumbersome when working with complex data sets and pivot tables?

How much time do you spend manually aggregating and managing budgets rather than working on strategic initiatives? How much time are you spending producing reports for the organization today in your current method? What is the impact on your planning cycles and budget decisions? What is the time required to close your books and complete regulatory and compliance reports?

provide a consistent view and analysis of your revenue generation, cash flow, and assets from your General Ledger

track customer payment patterns and forecast cash inflow on the basis of existing credit items and related terms of payment

identify and help to investigate and profile key data on the ongoing status of payables and cash outflow based on existing invoices, terms of payment, and discount trends

provide both operational andstatutory reports

reduce the risk of data entry errors and multiple versions of spreadsheets

allow you to focus on revenue generation, cash flow optimization, and asset allocation

Frequent requests for financial information, such as: product revenues and headcount costs from others outside of finance

Inability to do portfolio analysis

Need the ability to measure actual against targets

Difficult to analyze large volumes of financial data

Difficulty accessing and analyzing data from financial systems Complex/inefficient budget processes Frequent requests for financial information, such as: product revenues and headcount costs from others outside of finance

Objection Handling

ObjectionResponse

We cant afford to do it right now (cost/lack of budget)Can you afford not to make better, more informed decisions? Proof points in ROI case studies, references and analyst research. Stress low entry cost and IBM Global Finance offers. With special promotional financing rates you can now get Cognos Express for less than $25 per user/month, subject to IBM Global Financing approval **

I dont want to disrupt current business operationsStart small, show immediate value then grow. Use trial to demonstrate ease of use and value.

We dont have the resources or expertise in IT to implementMinimum IT skills and resource required stress the Easy to install, Easy to use and Easy to buy value prop Offer them the free try and buy program.

Perception that Cognos is too expensive Stress the Easy to Buy message - packaged and priced right start small, start anywhere, deliver immediate value, and grow.

With special promotional financing rates you can now get Cognos Express for less than $25 per user/month, subject to IBM Global Financing approval **

Cant I get most of this capability for free with MS SQL Server and SharePoint ServerLook at total cost of ownership (licenses, IT install/configuration and programming) reference the Debunking the Myth dataWhat about additional software needed and the skills required for deployment?

Business users prefer to use Excel and dont want to give up independence With Express Xcelerator you can still leverage your existing Excel investment and skills but transform and enhance your spreadsheets to overcome risks and limitations with its in memory analytics server which houses centrally managed data, business rules, hierarchies calculations

We need to have a data warehouse first before we embark on our BI strategyNo you dont, You can start by getting control of your data by leveraging the power and speed of an analytic server that features a modern in-memory architecture thats included with IBM Cognos Express. You dont have to start with an expensive and time consuming data warehouse. It allows you to extract maximum value from your data by transforming volumes of data into information about the business, allowing business users to analyze information in a business context comparisons of things such as product or channel performance, in light of other important factors like regions, customers, and time.