Global shipping giant DHL employs the world’s largest express shipping network to service over 120,000 destinations in 228 countries and territories. 5,900 offices, 36 hubs, 275 gateways, 254 aircraft, and a team of 68,700 air express professionals support their worldwide coverage.
In almost every way DHL provides their enterprise customers with the fastest, most efficient service possible. In almost every way save pricing.
When a member of DHL’s sales team found a potential enterprise customer, they sent their client’s specs on to upper management to figure up a quote. Then the sales person waited, sometimes for up to three weeks, for the price.
DHL found that three weeks was more than enough time to lose business to competitors, and so began the search for a solution.
What does broadband optimization have to do with DHL’s new price-quoting process?
Flashback several years to a crucial meeting between budding business developer Daphne Carmeli and broadband whiz Nachum Shacham, PhD. Dr. Shacham was working on optimizing broadband for use in video conferencing – searching for the most efficient way to send information. Daphne was looking for the solution to maverick selling.
A maverick sale is a sale that either loses money or does not make as much money as it could. The loss can come from selling under cost, selling under company objectives, selling below potential, through quick agreements to last-minute requests, just to name a few.
Daphne, whose MBA rests upon the foundation of a B.S. in math, wondered if the same algorithms that Shacham developed to determine the optimum information transfer could apply to pricing procedures.
Meet the founders of Metreo, “the first company to offer manufacturers and distributors a suite of supplier-driven solutions that they can use to negotiate profitable deals.”
“If a company would lose five thousand dollars by accepting a deal,” said Ms. Carmeli, “then rejecting that deal makes money. We serve CEOs who are accountable to Wall Street.”
Now, just over two years later, Metreo has landed DHL, their largest client to date, with their Supplier Response (SR2) web-based software. According to Metreo, SR2 “is a set of patent-pending optimization technologies, business process services, and data and application integration services that manage the entire negotiation process with the customer.”
The deployment and configuration will take place over the next few months, in a series of phases, each of which will allow DHL to begin saving money. Daphne expects DHL to make money on the software before all the phases are complete.
As SR2 becomes operational, the DHL sales team can offer optimal prices in the field, and have access to key data about clients that will stop money losing practices such as inconsistent quoting and spending too much time with people who consistently don’t buy.
SR2 cuts out the time spent waiting for approvals, making the sales team scrappier and able to contend effectively with the competition. Future DHL deals will be optimum for both DHL and their customers.
The DHL deal was Metreo’s latest coup – for a global enterprise to place their trust in such a new, relatively untried company speaks both for the perceived value of the SR2 solution and Metreo’s ability to communicate this value. Their website is a perfect example of their communication skills.
Their recent acquisition of 22 million in venture funding certainly speaks towards Ms. Cameli’s communication skills. These millions were their third round of funding. The first came in 2000, during the bleakest days of the dotcom crash. The investors are paying attention to Metreo.
But what will they do with all that money? “Grow,” said Ms. Carmeli. “We’re hiring more sales staff, more developers, more everyone.”
It’s true – visit their site and you’ll find a big red sign that reads “Now Hiring.” With their goal of profitability by 2003, a growing list of enterprise level customers, and an analyst-estimated market of 15 billion, Metreo is a smart choice for both investors and those with the passion to help build the sales side solution.
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
