Prospecting Quick Reference Guide

New Account - IBM Cognos Express Business Intelligence

OVERVIEW

CUSTOMER 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, Xcelerator

Capabilities

Reporting / Dashboards, Analysis, Planning

Solutions

Solutions for Small and Midsize Businesses

Prospecting in IT
IT Roles
What to Ask

High Yield
Questions

If we could provide a solution

that would

How does the business get access to What happens when provide consistent information in a
corporate data today?
management is not
variety of interfaces from
able to get
dashboards to Excel to printed page
Are you often asked by business
information they
enable end users to satisfy their own
users for extracts of data? How do
need in a timely
you manage that process?
information requests without
manner for decision
needing to burden IT with each
Are business users able to create
making or do not
request
reports and analyze information or are
have the visibility
reduce the amount of resources that
they reliant on IT for this information?
they need across the
are tied up creating reports to allow
With your existing solution, are you
multitude of business
them to focus on more strategic
able to combine data from different
systems?
issues
sources?
Can business users create and modify How many people do enable your users to get an
you have creating
integrated consistent view of
their own reports without relying on IT
and maintaining
information across many data
or a technical user?
reports? What is the
sources
Do the current BI tools cause any
annual cost for

promote user self-service; to allow

unnecessary strain or performance
supporting your
your business users to create their
impacts on the data sources?
reporting
reports, do their own analysis and
Do you want to implement BI and
applications?
discovery, and assemble/interact
planning but resist due to limited staff
Does your user
with their own dashboards, but still
and/or expertise?
community have
allow IT to maintain control over the
How do you plan and budget your IT
self-service access
environment and trust the
spend?
and personalization
information they receive; IT can
in their current
spend more time addressing
reporting
strategic issues
environment?
prevent long running and potentially
Have they requested
disastrous queries from hitting your
more control? Have
systems
"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?

What to Listen for

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 Prospecting

Sales , Marketing, Channel Roles
What to Ask

High Yield
Questions

If we could provide a solution

that would

Are Sales managers able to have

When looking at your provide immediate insight into
visibility into all of the things that affect
customers are you
critical sales and marketing
pipeline conversion rates such as
able to determine
functions i.e. indicating the loss of a
sales by geo, marketing campaigns
which of them is likely
significant customer
success rates, sales by seller?
to be the most
increase up-sell and cross-sell
profitable, costly or
Can you pinpoint where in the sales
opportunities; provide specific
most satisfied so you
cycle there are inefficiencies to allow
recommendations from all available
can to be pro-active
for optimizations or resources to be
prod/services.
in managing them?
planned to accelerate deals through
provide multi-dimensional modeling
Have you engaged
this stage?
and analysis to identify your
in a formal plan to
Are you able to look at your customers
customers with the greatest and
resolve the lack of
buying trends in order to determine
lowest profit potential
information? What is measure and report on your
possible up-sell, cross-sell and
your perception of
services opportunities?
campaigns and promotions
the service level you
Can you pro-actively manage your
performance to understand your
receive today? What
customers with knowledge of who the
response and conversion rates
impact is this having allow for what-if analysis to
most profitable/costly or most
on your sales
satisfied/dissatisfied?
understand the impact of a
performance?
Are you able to identify which
promotion, region changes,
How do you report
promotional periods or campaigns
economic conditions to forecasts
sales forecasts and
were the most productive in
and budgets
variance to plan and
converting leads to actual sales?
actual data?
Can sales management perform the
scenario modeling necessary to
understand how changes in regional
coverage may impact sales?

What to Listen for

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 Ask

High Yield
Questions

Can you tell me how you get insight

What happens when
into the large amounts of information
you do not identify
and complexity with your operational
the early warning
activities to make decisions? Do you
signs of bottlenecks
have a single view of your business
or problems?
including all key metrics?
How do you react
How do you share this information
and manage when
with other stakeholders, like sales and
youre confronted
marketing, as well as other partners,
with changes with
suppliers, and vendors?
your customers and
suppliers?
Can you tell me how you track the
How do you share
daily volume of my call centers by
region and service center?
performance
information with other
How do you communicate information
groups, like finance
about production, inventory?
and sales, requests
Can you proactively analyze how
information?
changes in demand may affect
production? (i.e. manage stock-outs)
Do you have visibility into how your
suppliers are impacting your
production?

If we could provide a solution

that would
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

What to Listen for

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 Ask

High Yield
Questions

If we could provide a solution

that would

Do you have difficulty accessing and

How much time are
provide a consistent view and
using data from your financial
you spending
analysis of your revenue generation,
applications for your team to respond
producing reports for
cash flow, and assets from your
to new opportunities and improve
the organization
General Ledger
performance?
today in your current track customer payment patterns
method?
Are reports needed that compare
and forecast cash inflow on the
actual versus targets for management What is the impact on
basis of existing credit items and
to determine the effectiveness of the
your planning cycles
related terms of payment
business?
and budget
identify and help to investigate and
decisions?
How do you communicate plans and
profile key data on the ongoing
What is the time
forecasts to other groups in the
status of payables and cash outflow
company such as operations,
required to close your
based on existing invoices, terms of
research and development or sales?
books and complete
payment, and discount trends
regulatory and
How do you manage and maintain
provide both operational
compliance reports?
multiple spreadsheets and different
and statutory reports
versions to handle budgeting?
reduce the risk of data entry errors
Are you confident in the
and multiple versions of
numbers/formulas on the
spreadsheets
spreadsheets that people submit to
allow you to focus on revenue
you?
generation, cash flow optimization,
Do you find Excel to be slow and
and asset allocation
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?

What to Listen for

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
Objection

Response

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
operations
We dont have the
resources or expertise in
IT to implement

Start small, show immediate value then grow. Use trial to demonstrate ease of use and value.

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 Server
Business users prefer to
use Excel and dont
want to give up
independence
We need to have a data
warehouse first before we
embark on our BI strategy

Look at total cost of ownership (licenses, IT install/configuration and programming) reference the
Debunking the Myth data
What about additional software needed and the skills required for deployment?

Minimum 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.

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
No 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.