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$
252m
increase in annual revenue
92
%
reduction in time to customer activation
5k
person hours saved annually, freeing up funds to double Solutions Engineer staff size

Objectives

The sales team at Akamai took an average of nine days to set up product trials for both new customers and existing customers looking to upgrade. Competitors did it in far less time, onboarding new prospects in a single day. Akamai’s Solutions Engineers were spending 40% of their time gathering data and answering questions about in-progress product trials, rather than supporting new opportunities. Akamai calculated that these inefficiencies cost the business $20 million every month through existing customers fleeing to the competition, and missed opportunities to acquire new customers who had expressed interest in their products. Akamai asked Tangible to help:

Improve acquisition and retention with a competitive sales process
Deliver a means to prove value to prospects and existing customers
Introduce a model for innovation that could be transferred to other teams and scaled
Approach

We brought our Value-centered Innovation program to the Buy Akamai team, including evidence-based design, strategy workshops, Just In Time (JIT) research, and hypothesis-led rapid experiments aimed at:

  • Centralizing data to reduce level of effort for sales specialists and Solutions Engineers
  • Presenting data to prove a product trial’s effects to prospects and customers
  • Introducing efficiencies into internal inter-departmental coordination processes

This process led to our designing a new Buy Akamai tracking tool that enabled the rapid set-up and real-time management of product trials, aggregated data critical to the sales process, and provided evidence of a product’s effects to both prospects and existing customers.

Results

After our engagement, 91% of prospects were able to activate a product trial within an hour of inquiring, and 100% received responses within 24 hours. Increased efficiencies saved Solution Engineers 5,000 person-hours per year, freeing up enough funds to double the team size from six to 12 employees. The entire Buy Akamai team reported higher job satisfaction, confidence and trust, and had more time for important tasks. With the streamlined conversion processes, Akamai was saving money, all while delivering to their end users a more transparent trial-to-purchase flow that inspired trust in the brand.

Services
Embedded innovation strategists
Rapid experimentation leadership
Process organization and modeling
Product strategy
CX design
Interaction design
Service design
Enterprise app design
Project management