Growing as a BXP: 3 New Programs for Your Sales, Marketing, and Workforce

Dave Stewart, Vice President Corporate Strategy, Calix

Selling is critical to becoming a successful broadband experience provider. Why? Because nothing really happens in business until you sell something your customer wants or needs. As Michael pointed out in his article, “Growing as a BXP: 3 New Programs for Your Sales, Marketing, and Workforce,” hardware trends like Wi-Fi 7 and XGS-PON are great, but they are not enough to drive sales. Similarly, the simple act of rolling fiber is not enough to drive sales. At the same time, competition continues to heat up. The days of being the only fiber provider in town are pretty much gone—soon, every market will have at least two broadband providers.
 

That is why your business needs a sales engine as well as a selling culture. Selling is now critical in the ultra-competitive and disrupted broadband industry. The ability to identify customer pain points and needs and to provide value will help your business compete for the future.
 

Embracing selling across your entire business can be a huge first step in the shift from competing on speed and price to selling the experience customers actually want and need. At Calix, we know that creating a dedicated sales function can be new for many service providers. That’s why we developed the Calix Sales Acceleration Program. With this series of engagements, we will help you harness powerful sales strategies and tactics that will drive revenue.

Calix Sales Acceleration Program: Four Modules

The Sales Acceleration Program includes four modules:

• Building a Culture of Sales. Join a strategic consultation with the BSP Senior Leadership team to help you understand what a “sales culture” is, learn how to cultivate it, learn how each functional area plays a role, and then align around next steps.
  
  
• Sales Operations and Planning. Learn best practices and executional strategies for sales planning, incentives for success, sales methodology, and sales tools and technology.
  
  
• Sales Leadership 101—Profile Hiring, Training, Coaching, Funnel Management. Sales and cross-functional leaders learn best practices and skills for sourcing and hiring sales talent, coaching successful sales teams, and developing sales talent.
  
  
• Frontline Enablement. Enables frontline sellers to effectively ask discovery questions, actively listen to responses, and provide solutions that deliver value.
   

Our Sales Acceleration Program will build your sales engine and help every employee understand how they can contribute to a selling culture. That way, you can continue your mission: to grow value for your business and for the residents and businesses you serve. After all, you know your communities best. With a successful sales engine in place, you will ensure that you—and no other provider—continue your legacy of doing good for your communities.
 

Interested in how the Calix Sales Acceleration Program can help you? Contact Bridget Watkins at bridget.watkins@calix.com.

Scott Neuman, Corporate Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Calix
 

Many broadband service providers began life as something else—telephone company, electric cooperative, cable company. For many, their mission was simple: Bring a line to the house, connect it, and then provide a reliable service to a growing collection of houses. Today, broadband providers are becoming experience providers across multiple markets—and that demands a radically different approach to how they bring new services to market and launch targeted campaigns to support revenue goals.
 

To transition to a broadband experience provider (BXP), broadband providers must think about the human impact of their services—on residents, businesses, and entire communities. If you consider your residential offerings, for example, you are not just serving some general group called “subscribers.” You are serving different people with different needs. Work-from-homers, gamers, seniors, students, new couples starting out, small business owners, multi-family dwelling owners—the list goes on. You must learn who they are and what they need so you can market to them successfully.
 

At Calix, we have helped many customers rethink their brand and how they interact with subscribers—from the design of their website to how they promote all the ways they are creating “sticky” experiences that delight subscribers and generate loyalty. Some of the results we have seen are remarkable. For example, in a competitive market filled with large rivals, Orange County Fiber transformed their go-to-market strategy with enhanced residential offering experiences. Subscribers and members swiftly adopted five new tailored Wi-Fi packages. The launch drove 100 upgrades in the first 48 hours! Within a week of launch, Orange County Fiber increased total customer lifetime value (CLV) by 30 percent.
 

How do you create a go-to-market capability that can produce this kind of success? We’ve created a Go-To-Market (GTM) Enablement Program to help you every step of the way.

Calix GTM Enablement Program

Our GTM Enablement Program offers workshops that can transform your brand in a matter of weeks, including:

• A cohort experience to learn and share best practices with other successful BXPs.
  
  
• A market analysis from Calix’s Business Insight Services to identify where to get started.
  
  
• The creation of a new go-to-market model that you can put to use immediately.
   

Once the program ends, you can either partner with a marketing services expert for ongoing help or use tools from Calix to execute your GTM strategy in-house.
 

We can help you differentiate from your competition as an experience provider with offerings designed to improve the lives of your current subscribers and future subscribers, including device management, gaming optimization, parental controls, advanced security, outdoor lifestyles, and more. These are experiences so enjoyable that, when your competition shows up in your market, your subscribers will say, “Why would I leave my provider that understands me?”
 

To take advantage of Calix’s Go-To-Market Enablement Program, reach out to Joe Kohegyi, director of customer engagement and subscriber marketing, at joe.kohegyi@calix.com.

John Durocher, Chief Customer Officer, Calix

As Michael mentioned in his article, “Growing as a BXP: 3 New Programs for Your Sales, Marketing, and Workforce,” many general managers (GMs) are transforming from service providers to broadband experience providers (BXPs). This brings great opportunity as well as particular challenges, including with your workforce. During a recent Advisory Board meeting at Calix, we discussed how GMs can address such issues: getting your team on board, making the right key hires, and ensuring teams work in a way that creates the best customer experience.
 

During this discussion, it dawned on me that, while leadership was once about trial and error, today’s leaders have access to science-based tools that can enhance organizational performance. One such tool is the Predictive Index (PI), which we used at Calix to help us make our own transformation from being a networking innovator to the broadband industry’s only platform and cloud company. Our PI training provided our managers with insights into their teams’ behavioral drives and motivational needs, enabling them to tailor their leadership approach. By leveraging these tools, we enhanced our organization and navigated the transition more effectively.

Predictive Index—What Is It?

The Predictive Index is a tool based on behavioral science that’s been time-tested to pinpoint traits and reveal what makes people tick. Using it will help you better understand your people so you can:

• Hire smart
  
  
• Build better managers
  
  
• Build high-performance teams
  
  
• Develop employees to reach their full potential
  
  
• Make it easier for different people to collaborate
   

Go Even Further With Our Workforce Enablement Program

As important as the tool, though, is how you apply Predictive Index insights to your culture.  

That is why Calix has developed a full-scale Workforce Transformation Enablement program. The workshops in this program will help you understand how to get started in training your workforce for a future of selling, marketing, and supporting services oriented around subscriber experiences, across residential, business and community markets. It will also help you find, retain, upskill, and scale your workforce to meet the demands of today’s increasingly competitive broadband markets.
 

We know that your employees are critical to the success of your business as you become a BXP. With our comprehensive Workforce Transformation Enablement program and the Predictive Index tool, you can fast-track your workforce to become an experience-providing powerhouse.
 

To get up and running with the Predictive Index and Workforce Transformation, contact Dave Stewart, vice president of corporate strategy, at david.stewart@calix.com.