CIO, Cigna · the Chief Information Officer at Cigna, one of the world’s largest health care companies with $32 billion in annual sales, Dr. Boxer buys approximately $1 billion

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pg8THE NEW BUYER’S DNA DECODED How today’s decision makers make purchase decisions

DR. MARK BOXER CIO, Cigna

Striking Gold With Sales Reports featuring Scott White

pg 27

Why Inspecting Big Deals Is Such A Big Deal featuring Pete Hayes

pg 51

2 SalesBenchmarkIndex.com

EDITOR S NOTE

DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW YOUR CUSTOMERS AND PROSPECTS MAKE PURCHASE DECISIONS? YOU MAY

THINK SO, BUT YOU DON’T. HOW CAN I BE SO SURE? SINCE 2007, MY FIRM HAS SURVEYED B2B EXECUTIVE

DECISION MAKERS WHO BUY COMPLEX PRODUCTS AND SOLUTIONS. EACH YEAR WE RECEIVE NEARLY 25,000

RESPONDENTS, SO I’VE REVIEWED OVER 200,000 DATA POINTS OVER AN EIGHT-YEAR PERIOD. THE PEOPLE

YOU SELL TO TOLD ME YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW THEY BUY.

But many of you are in denial. You produce personas and buyer journey maps as proof that you know your buyers. Yet, these simple tools are not enough. They barely scratch the surface and are usually inaccurate. And if you rely upon them solely, you will miss your numbers.

One buyer who can clearly attest to that is Dr. Mark Boxer, who we profile in this month’s cover story. As the Chief Information Officer at Cigna, one of the world’s largest health care companies with $32 billion in annual sales, Dr. Boxer buys approximately $1 billion worth of technology products and services per year. According to Gartner, this is one of the largest IT budgets in the world.

Practically every technology company calls on Boxer with their top sales teams, making him uniquely qualified to discuss how decision makers buy and how sellers should sell.

Our article gives you a close-up look at how Boxer wants to be called on. His buying behavior is representative of the executives in our research sample. And his story summarizes our research findings, providing a quick way for you to realize your gaps.

After reading it, you will no doubt want to change your sales strategy and sell the way customers want to buy. But you might need help.

In this edition, we present practical advice from CEOs, heads of sales, marketing, finance and HR. We take a look at how to adjust the hiring profile, demand generation programs, forecast and pipeline management process, sales management coaching cadence, sales methodology and the big deal inspection process.

All of this advice is meant to help you accomplish one thing: make your number. By adjusting your sales strategy to reflect the way your customers buy your products, you will be successful.

Enjoy,

GREGALEXANDERCEO, SBI

3SalesBenchmarkIndex.com

CONTENTSCOVER STORY PG 8The New Buyer’s DNA DecodedDr. Mark Boxer, Cigna

Culture Clash: A Tale of Two Sales Processes > Kelley Steven-Waiss, Extreme Networks ............................PG 5

Building A “Sustainable” Marketing Model For Growth & Profitability > Jack Whalen, Phillips 66 ..................PG 16

Driving Change Without Resistance > Brad Mirkovich, Concur ...........................................................................PG 19

A Very Accurate Assessment Of Forecast/Pipeline Management > Christina Dieckmeyer, SBI ..................PG 23

Scott White Discovers Strategic Gold in Sales Reports > Scott White, Rackspace ........................................PG 27

Risky Business: When Profits Are Down, Invest In Sales > Perry Offer, Dialogue Group ...............................PG 31

Tearing Down Walls: How Kelley Tate Built An Era Of Trust Between Finance And Sales > Kelley Tate, Cummins Power Systems ...............................................................PG 36

Inquire Before You Acquire: A Six-Step Process For Private Equity Investors > Matt Sharrers, SBI .................PG 39

“Before” And “After:” Shifting A Startup Into High Gear > Alex Shootman, Apptio ..............................................PG 43

What CEOs Need to Know About Their Marketing Strategies > Rashid Skaf, AMX LLC .................................PG 48

Take A Closer Look: Inspecting Big Deals Is Part of The Process > Pete Hayes, Equinix ................................PG 51

Expert Insight: Marketing Strategy Development > Vince Koehler, SBI .............................................................PG 55

Crash Course: How Caliber Collision Scored Big By Repairing The Customer Experience > Greg Clark, Caliber Collision .....................................................................................................................................PG 58

Keep Sales OPS From Becoming Sales OOPS With a Sound Strategy .................................................................PG 61

How PegaSystems Is Taking Sales Enablement To The Next Level ....................................................................PG 63


CULTURE CLASH: A TALE OF TWO SALES PROCESSES

When Extreme Networks of San Jose, Calif., acquired competitor Enterasys Networks of Salem, N.H., in September 2013, no one expected a difficult transition. On paper at least, the two companies seemed like corporate twins: Both were network switching companies. Both had a little over 650 employees, and both reported just over $300 million in annual revenue.

But that’s where the similarities ended. When it came to their sales operations, the differences soon became painfully apparent, says Kelley Steven-Waiss, who became Extreme Networks’ senior VP of global human resources the following March and helped oversee the company’s cultural integration.

“The sales culture was very different in each company and so were the go-to-market strategies, Steven-Waiss recalls.

“We needed to reform the way that we were approaching our strategy for sales, and from an HR perspective,” she says,

“This was going to be a tall order.”

The two companies’ very different approaches to making the number made integration much tougher than anticipated.

“Enterasys followed a direct and partner-led sales model, which emphasized greater deal volume over revenue numbers, and because it was privately held before the acquisition, margins were just as important as revenue, if not more so,” Steven-Waiss says. On the other hand, Extreme Networks, which is publicly traded, relied more on its partners and used a less-standard methodology for the sales process. Additionally, the two sales teams differed on their degree of emphasis on the services side of the business.

“When the integration plans were drafted, we didn’t really address the cultural differences and risks up front. It caused a lot of clashes within the sales force,” says Steven-Waiss. “The two sales cultures were servicing our customers in different ways and ‘running at each other rapidly.’ It was creating a lot of confusion and cannibalization within a pitch as if we were still competing organizations.”

Extreme Networks first hired consulting firm SBI after the merger to conduct a search for a Chief Revenue Officer, and its consultant stayed on to help drive the sales transformation. Steven-Waiss worked closely with the sales team to define a new go-to-market, sales strategy and org design, as well as implement SBI’s five-step program for talent management.

“SBI brings with them a framework to guide a go-to-market that is aligned to the corporate strategy and ensures you have the right talent to win,” Steven-Waiss says.

She was confident SBI’s approach would make a difference because she’d already leveraged their talent solution at a former employer, Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (IDT), a semiconductor products manufacturer in San Jose, Calif. Here are the five steps Steven-Waiss and the sales team are in the process of initiating:

1 PROFILES AND COMPENSATION: Determines needed competencies, whether compensation is competitive, and whether the company is providing incentives for those skills. SBI has a framework for tying incentives to behaviors and strategy, which clients like Extreme Networks tailor to their own sales commission needs.

2 TALENT ASSESSMENT: Assesses team members for competency at their jobs and asks what gaps still need to be filled and what training programs are needed.

3 SOURCING: Determines the company’s time-to-fill metric and whether programs are in place to shrink that time frame.

4 ON-BOARDING: Asks how long it takes a new hire to get up to speed and what mentoring and classroom training is needed.

5 SUCCESSION PLANNING: Examines how the company is developing future leaders, as new positions open up. Lets your employees know you are thinking about their career paths at your company.

featuring > Kelley Steven-Waiss SVP of Global Human Resources, Extreme Networks

written by Dan Perry


continued

“ What gives every new head of sales

HEARTBURN is the risk in hiring new account executives. ”

Profiling is an important starting point, says Steven-Waiss. Being able to target the right skills and attributes and on-board talent more quickly and efficiently means that those employees become productive faster too, contributing to corporate revenue sooner than they might have otherwise.

“What gives every new head of sales heartburn is the risk in hiring new account executives,” Steven-Waiss says. “You’re wondering, ‘Will I see the ROI in this hire?’ and ‘How long is it going to take for them to ramp up?’” A big help: SBI worked with Extreme to identify ideal new hire profiles which align to the new sales culture and go-to-market and for which the company can customize and use to shorten training time.

Next came talent assessment, which allowed Extreme Networks to identify the gaps in skill sets and competencies and figure out which sales style was most appropriate for their operation and what skills/attributes would close that gap. Farmers, Steven-Waiss explains, are more thoughtful, more deliberate salespeople who get to know the subtleties of customers’ ecosystems. Hunters, in contrast, will walk into a customer’s environment ready to sell on the spot.

“Neither approach is preferable in all situations. But for a sales solution that entails a whole platform of services, the listener-farmer is the better choice,” she says. At IDT, the company concluded it really needed more farmers. “Our business was getting much more complex, going from digital, to digital and analog, and adding a lot of power management products.”

Salespeople don’t always successfully transition from hunter to farmer, or vice versa. “You can’t always reform a salesperson from their style of selling,” Steven-Waiss says. “There’s something different about an individual who has the patience to sell through a longer sales cycle and the ability to understand the technology in depth. We need our sales teams to be able to listen and recognize opportunities to satisfy our customers’ pain points.”

Sourcing also flows naturally from the information gathered during the assessment process. “At IDT, we definitely decreased our time-to-sell because we knew whom we were chasing,” Steven-Waiss says. “We had very specific skill sets we were looking for.” They also used LinkedIn to search for individuals with certain capabilities and past experience.

On-boarding of account executives improved dramatically at IDT, dropping to 90 days from six months. Likewise, succession planning got easier because of SBI’s push to reach further down into the organization to identify talent. This approach gave HR a clear picture of each employee and what skills they needed to reach the next level. It enabled Steven-Waiss’s team to address readiness and close training gaps. In addition to training, she used approaches such as rotating talent in and out of key roles.

Although Extreme Networks has not yet completed the five-step process, Steven-Waiss says working with SBI has already helped the company answer some key questions: “Who are we and how do we sell to our customers, and how do we structure sales appropriately to make that work? What’s the discipline in sales to understand our customers and the way they buy?”

The five steps are challenging, she says, but well worth the effort. “It’s a lot of work, I’ll be honest,” she says. “It is not for the faint of heart.”


DR.MARKCIO, Cigna

Dr. Mark Boxer, Executive Vice President and Global Chief Information Officer at Cigna Corp.,

oversees a significant IT capital and expense budget. As a result, just about every technology

product and services company calls on Mark with their top sales teams. This makes him uniquely

qualified to discuss effective enterprise sales strategies.

FROM

VENDORTO VALUEDPARTNERThe New Technology Purchasing Model.

“The days of selling generic products and services have gone by the wayside. Today, we’re talking about solutions, whether it’s social, mobile, cloud or analytics,” Boxer says. “The companies that do the best with our team are the ones that understand our business, know the competitive landscape, can articulate our strategy and then orient around those solutions that best help us advance our technology strategy and, more importantly, our business strategy.”

The relationship between CIOs and technology vendors has changed dramatically in recent years. In fact, at Cigna, they are migrating away from the use of the word “vendor.” Boxer views the companies that sell technology solutions to Cigna as “partners” in what he terms “the extended enterprise”— in every sense of the word. Cigna is working on a much more focused basis with fewer partners in the mix, and with that, the expectations have increased. Beyond just delivering a product or a service, he expects technology partners to function as thought leaders and trusted advisors; helping to protect and enable the business as if they were sitting directly on his team.

While companies that try to sell to Cigna must be price-competitive, that’s only part of the value proposition. They must also understand what it takes to partner creatively within this new extended enterprise that requires collaboration with Cigna’s IT team, other companies and even competitors.

“Because we’re not just going to buy on price, and we are in it for the long term, it’s about total value delivered,” he says.

Companies that understand that long-range vision tend to be the most successful. In leveraged application services, for example, where in the past Cigna used to work with many different partners—and chased the lowest price point—Boxer now works with fewer strategic partners and focuses on business value. “CIOs are thinking more like general managers, and they think about running IT organizations as a business more than they ever have been before:

written by Robin Schatz


continued

‘How do we extend the value of IT beyond the provisioning of infrastructure and applications?’ They’re looking for their partners to step up and say, ‘How do we help you optimize the value you are delivering to the organization and how do we help you accelerate your business strategies?’ CIOs are also looking for those partners to share in the risk. If things go well, we’re willing to give them incentives. If things don’t go as well as expected, we expect them to share in the downside as well.”

Today’s CIO wears many hats. First, they need to be a business leader who drives the transformation of the business through innovation. Second, they must be a recruiter and champion of talent, responsible for motivating, retaining and attracting the best talent. Third, they are a product manager whose job is to advance the health care services and solutions Cigna offers to clients and customers. “And the last role is as a

futurist and venture capitalist: How do we demonstrate and make real the innovation of our business and the art of the possible?” Boxer says. The role of CIO is made substantially less complex when there is a clear strategy and strong partnership with the business. “I am very fortunate that Cigna’s strategy and value proposition are clear and equally fortunate to have strong relationships with the global business leaders. It makes the process of selecting partners and technologies that much easier when there is universal alignment around the enterprise goals and objectives,” Boxer says.

For tech companies that want to sell to Cigna, it’s all about understanding Cigna’s challenges, its competition and how their particular solution is going to play into Cigna’s business strategy. Dr. Boxer is looking for companies that can “come and talk about how we can grow our retail capabilities, how we can create a more personalized customer experience, how

“ THE DAYS OF

SELLING PRODUCTS AND SERVICES BY THE WAYSIDE.”


we can use analytics to make people healthier, as opposed to, ‘We have this tool kit; what do you think about our tool kit?’ or, ‘We have this technology; what do you think about this technology?’”

“If they come in talking about their capabilities and their technologies in the context of how it’s going to advance our business and technology strategy, then they’ll have a much greater opportunity with us, and they’ll consistently do better with us,” Boxer says.

Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index, says that Boxer’s enlightened approach to buying technology is happening all over the corporate landscape. “Understanding how your customers and potential customers make purchase decisions is priority number 1, 2 and 3 for the Chief Sales Officer of technology companies. Yet, I see many underinvest in doing this correctly, stopping at the basics such as creating buyer personas and buyer journey maps.”

Alexander continues: “Consider what Dr. Boxer expects from the sales teams calling on him. He is not interested in sales teams who understand their products. He wants sales teams who understand how their products will give him an advantage. If you are a head of sales, ask yourself if your sales team could clear this hurdle. By my estimate, less than 5 percent of technology vendors could.

“He wants technology vendor sales teams to understand who his competitors are, and help him win. Many large tech vendors have health care verticals, but how many of these sales teams understand Mark’s competitors well enough to help him win? Having consulted with many, I can tell you the answer is not many.”

GENERIC HAVE GONE


continued

“And these are just a few of the items Dr. Boxer highlights. Consider his recommendations on how to price your products to align with his interests, how to invest in pilot projects, and why he went from multiple vendors to fewer partners. CIOs are consolidating the IT spend, doing business with targeted firms. The message is, ‘Understand your buyer better than anyone else or lose,’ states Alexander.

Being a CIO requires a sophisticated skill set, particularly in the health care vertical, which has undergone dramatic changes on the regulatory, business and technology fronts.

“There are a few things that make the CIO role particularly complex, including the scope and scale of what we deal with, geographic dispersion, and rapidly changing market forces,” Boxer explains. “Accelerated change is happening within the health care vertical, and it’s a particularly complex, challenging set of market dynamics to manage.”

Dr. Boxer, who has a master’s in both Finance and Information Systems, as well as a Ph.D. in Global Public Health, knows his business inside out. He has spent his entire career working in technology, and most of that in the health care field. Before becoming Cigna’s CIO in 2011, he served as Group Vice President, Government Healthcare at Xerox Corp. and as Deputy Global Chief Information Officer, overseeing the development of all software products and information services for the company. Before that, he was part of Anthem’s executive leadership team, serving in various leadership roles including Chief Operations Officer, Chief Information Officer, President of Consumer Health Plans and Chief Strategy Officer.

This is also Boxer’s second stint at Cigna. Before Anthem, Boxer was Senior Vice President of Information Technology and eCommerce at Cigna Health Care and the Chief Information Officer at Healthsource, which was acquired by Cigna. Prior to that job, he spent 10 years with HP in consulting and outsourcing.

“I’ve been selling, providing, and buying products and services,” says Boxer. “I think that gives me a unique perspective because I’ve sat on both sides of the buying and selling table. So I understand the challenges and opportunities that those who are trying to call on CIOs face, but I also understand from the CIO perspective what it takes to be successful, connecting with CIOs and selling to CIOs.”

Given Boxer’s chock-full agenda, you’d think he might not accept a cold call or entertain pitches from smaller, unproven startups. But in the quest for continual innovation, he realizes the value that smaller companies can bring to the table.

“They don’t get dismissed out of hand, or filtered out of the organization, because there’s a lot of innovation happening in smaller firms.”

Cigna has a vetting process, using the company’s connec-tions in the venture capital world for filtering through the many hopefuls who’d like to meet with the CIO. “Many times these people are quite surprised that we invite them in,” he says. Boxer will often ask startups with innovative ideas to sponsor a pilot project before Cigna makes a longer-term commitment.

An example of a small IT vendor who had success selling its product to Dr. Boxer is MDLIVE. Based in Sunrise, Fla., they approached the global health services giant about adopting its telehealth program. Dr. Boxer went onto the company’s website and enrolled himself in the virtual service, which uses voice, video, email and mobile capa-bilities to connect patients with board-certified physicians for routine health issues.

“I wanted to experience it not as the Cigna CIO, but as Mark Boxer, the customer,” he says. “Do I do that for every single startup or partner we consider and evaluate? No. Did I feel there was enough opportunity in telehealth where I thought it was worthwhile? Absolutely.”

It wasn’t long before the CIO got the chance to put MDLIVE through its paces. Boxer came down with a minor illness during a business trip. Under normal circumstances he would have waited until he returned home or tried to find an urgent care clinic that could see him at the last minute. Instead, he saw this as an opportunity to test the promise of telehealth. Within less than 30 minutes, he had explained his symptoms to the doctor via a virtual office visit, who viewed his medical profile online and ordered a prescription for him from the pharmacy closest to his hotel.

“I had a fantastic experience with telehealth,” he stated, explaining why the global, Bloomfield, Connecticut-based Cigna ended up partnering with the small, five-year-old, venture-backed Florida company, to offer telehealth to its clients.


“When you think about it as an alternative to standing in line at the urgent care clinic for medical concerns that are routine in nature, whether it’s the flu or an ear infection, the convenience and immediacy of telehealth makes it a viable option. Beyond the convenience factor, high-quality care is able to be delivered at a lower cost in comparison to either an emergency room or other setting. At the end of the day, it’s really about delivering the right care in the right setting at the right cost.”

Talking to hopeful startups with innovative technology approaches to improve patient care and convenience and optimize costs is all in a day’s work for Boxer, who controls a global information technology budget exceeding $1 billion a year — certainly one of the largest in the health care sector — and none too shabby for any industry. With these resources, he is able to invest in technologies that support Cigna’s global strategy of improving the health, well-being and sense of security of their customers. This includes identifying innovative solutions that help Cigna’s customers navigate the health care industry, introducing new approaches for better managing chronic conditions, and implementing new approaches for protecting two of Cigna’s most important assets — its people and its data.

“I have responsibility for the technology across all market segments and geographies,” explains Boxer. That includes everything from desktop services to architecture and infrastructure, as well as all the applications and supporting technologies. “Whether they’re developed directly by Cigna or provisioned by our partners, I have direct accountability and oversee the delivery. I take that responsibility seriously and hold our partners to a demanding standard, no matter what their size or state of maturity.”

After MDLIVE came knocking at Cigna’s door, the team at Cigna initiated an extensive due diligence process that’s used for evaluating innovation partners.

“The company did a few things right when they approached us,” Boxer says. “They approached us understanding where the solution fit and where it didn’t fit. So they talked about how their model works and where it should be applied, but they also said how it shouldn’t be applied. They understood the sweet spot for their solution.”

Secondly, says Boxer, “they had a business model that was friendly to our business model, so that it integrated seamlessly into our business processes. We in IT partnered with our product development and care delivery organization, and collectively we managed a rigorous assessment process that considered the customer experience.”

At the time the deal with Cigna was announced, in May 2013, Randy Parker, CEO of MDLIVE, said in a statement that his company and Cigna had a “closely shared vision for bringing the best technology to bear” to provide consumers with personalized and accessible service.

Also significant to Boxer is that the company has a strong management team and strong backers, including John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple.

But perhaps equally significant was the fact that MDLIVE offered to try some pilots with Cigna “to prove themselves out on their dime to demonstrate the value to us and, most importantly, the value to our customers,” Boxer explains.

As a CIO, he only sees more changes ahead for his own industry and the evolving extended enterprise — changes that all would-be partners should keep in mind as they think about knocking on a CIO’s door. “The lines are beginning to blur between business process sales and technology sales, and I think the partners that orient around that quickly are going to have a leg up — whether it’s around capabilities for customer relationship management, or around capabilities for a personalized experience — that’s going to be important.”

Understanding the importance of omni-channel solutions is also a requisite, especially for vendors that want to serve the quickly changing health care market.

“The last dimension is innovation, those companies that proactively come to us with capabilities because they under-stand where our business is going, and that have things to offer us that others have not offered us,” says Boxer. “They will have a leg up too.”


continued

In Boxer’s Own Words…

Q: What’s the most challenging part of your job as CIO?

A: The absolute pace of change, the challenge for talent and the “new retail nature” of health care. The cycles times are shortening, and every single day we’ve got to think about how we add more value for our business partners, but more importantly how do we create an outstanding and relevant customer experience.

I always tell my team we need to think about ourselves, as one option among others for our business partners, and why would they choose us as their technology provider of choice. So we ourselves have to be customer-centric within our organization, and with each of our business partners.

We have to deliver solutions faster, less expensively, and we’ve go to make sure we get them right from the start — and we’ve got to proactively bring in innovation to help them advance their business strategies. Our cycle times are shortening, competitive pressures are growing, and the cost pressures are increasing. Again, if you think about the dynamics of change in health care, let alone the dynamics of change in technology, the forces are moving fast, and that means we have to step up our game and have the absolute best talent.

Q: What’s your typical day like?

A: I spend a lot of time thinking about talent and people. Really, we only have two assets as a company: 1) we have our information and 2) we have our people.

I also spend a lot of time with clients. I think it’s hard as a CIO to understand challenges unless you’re actually out there on the front lines understanding the issues our customers and our clients face every day. That also provides grist for innovation and helps us stay grounded in thinking about the right solutions.

We love to do collaborative innovation with our clients. I can think of many examples where we’ve done innovation with our clients based on dialogues I’ve had with them. For example, we created a virtual physical therapy tool, we created an early stage mobile diabetes app, we gamified health risks assessments, and we also created a fitness game for a client to help incentivize employees to be more active — the concept for that that came out of time I spent with clients and customers.

On April 5, 2012, the board of directors of oil giant Conoco Phillips voted to split the company, and Jack Whalen’s world changed yet again.

He’d been with the nation’s third-largest integrated oil company for 11 years, working on the marketing and sales side of its downstream refining operations. While his division was huge, with sales that placed it sixth among the Fortune 500—the profitability of the exploration and production business often overshadowed it in the eyes of the Wall Street investment community.

Now, Phillips 66, the spun-off, Houston-based energy manufacturing and logistics company, would have its own investors to report to, at a time when gasoline brands of integrated oil were watching high-volume retailers and private-label distributors gobble up 20 percent of their collective market share. After 30 years in the business, Whalen knew marketing efforts were going to have to get a lot more innovative and efficient if they were to help keep the new company growing and profitable.

“We had a lot of longtime customers wondering what their life was going to be like now that they weren’t affiliated with an integrated oil company, and we had an immediate need to generate more leads and business,” Whalen recalls. “We needed a sustainable model to move forward with.”

Whalen, a Sales Manager at the time of the split, became the Manager of Brand Value at Phillips 66. With this move into marketing, facing a market and consumer who had drastically changed, he and his team took over a focused effort on evolving the customer offering and renovating the brands. Over the past two years they kicked off a series of marketing campaigns

that reconfigured the way the company communicated with its customer base, digitized lead generation and the rollout of a consumer-focused brand revitalization effort.

The Phillips 66 branded business in the U.S. is supplied through three gasoline brands—the 76® brand in the western U.S. and the Phillips 66® and Conoco® brands in the central part of the country. The company, with over 14,000 employees, also markets gasoline under the name JET® and Coop in Europe.

In the U.S., most of the company’s branded fuel is sold through service station dealers, who either own and operate or own and lease stores. The majority of these contracts function through third-party marketers, making the task of talking directly to the retailer more of a challenge. There are close to 7,000 service stations that are branded Phillips 66, 76 or Conoco.

A BETTER CONVERSATION WITH CUSTOMERS:

The first area of focus for Whalen was setting up a direct communication line to both these current customers and potential customers via a newly established demand- generation team.

“We knew there were two key things we needed to focus on,” Whalen said, “The first of those was getting marketing more involved in the customer conversation, especially because we knew that a lot of customers do not engage the sales rep until they are pretty far along in a buying cycle.”

To accomplish this, the team launched a B-to-B website in June 2014, designed to help new retailers better understand the reality of owning convenience store/gas station operations.

“It’s an integral element in Phillips 66’s efforts to reach new-to-brand customers and prospects,” Whalen says.

BUILDING A “SUSTAINABLE” MARKETING MODELFOR GROWTH& PROFITABILITY

featuring > Jack Whalen VP of Marketing, Phillips 66written by Vince Koehler


“The site is not a traditional marketing site for Phillips 66 products. Instead, it highlights relevant articles from industry and business resources and other thought leadership content. We focus on material that speaks to problems common to gasoline retailers and areas in which Phillips 66 felt effective execution was critical if a business wanted to remain profitable,” Whalen says.

The site addresses users agnostically, providing useful information whether it leads to new business or not. The content generates inquiries for more information, and Phillips 66 has a Lead Development Representative in place to help provide what answers or information users need.

Whalen explains that when ready, information gathered by the demand generation team is handed over to the sales team with all the specifics about the problems the customer or potential customer needs to solve; what their convenience store looks like; and the details of their business relationship with Phillips 66. When marketing and sales staff open up these conversations, they are able to talk to prospects about actual needs, based on their inquiries.

“It isn’t a sales call,” he says. “We’re calling with information that would help the customer. These are conversations prospects want to have.”

Every visitor to the website becomes a potential customer, and every interaction garners a little more data about the needs of that retailer. In the first five months of operation, the site produced 125 qualified marketing leads and close to 50 sales leads, according to Whalen.

“Not only were we hearing from the retail gasoline business,” Whalen says, “we got inquiries from people in the aviation world about fuel and from companies that did not sell gasoline retail but wanted to buy gasoline for fleets of trucks. The website helped us open up dialogue with people we might never have stumbled across through cold calling.”

The website represents a rich repository of data that once was controlled solely by individual sales reps. With the information that Whalen and his team are collecting, they are better able to anticipate needs and provide customers marketing campaigns at the point they are most likely to be interested—when they would help customers the most.

“We’re just starting, but I see this as potentially a major advantage in the future,” he adds. While this is just a beginning according to Whalen, the work is excelling by trade standards. The campaign work and B-to-B website Whalen and his team put together recently won not only the 2014 Best of Energy category at this year’s American

Marketing Association Houston Awards, but also 2014 Marketer of the Year, recognizing the best of marketing work across all industries.

Besides gathering information that helps marketing and sales, Whalen and his team are also investigating whether there are metrics that they could make accessible on mobile devices to help customers. He and his department also are starting to think about ways they can use longtime customers to act as ambassadors for Phillips 66.

“We’ve just scratched the surface on data and analytics,” Whalen says. Marketing is working hard right now to refine the metrics to help make a convincing business case for the effort.

A BETTER EXPERIENCE FOR CONSUMERS:

“The second area of focus for us was to revitalize the brands and improve the site experience for consumers,” Whalen said.

The marketing team has labeled this initiative the brand revitalization effort — which focuses on putting a brighter, more modern image in the market, but also elevating brand standards across the network of sites. “Details of the effort are being introduced to customers in the first quarter of this year,” Whalen says.

This is where the Lead Generation effort has paid off. In support of the brand revitalization initiative, the Lead Generation team is developing a multipart campaign to help with adoption and change management during the go-to-market phase of this effort.

Additionally, they are working on a special campaign targeting new customers along the California coast, highlighting the new image Phillips 66 is taking into the market. Although Whalen’s demand-generation team is busy juggling multiple campaigns, it only consists of four full-time staff members.

Besides having limited resources, Whalen and his department also remain mindful about not overwhelming customers with messaging and making sure he has proven the effectiveness of each tactic before he jumps into the next.

“I try to make sure the communication is business-critical,” Whalen says, sharing that he and his team apply rigor around prioritizing what gets sent out. “If we lose focus on that and overwhelm the communication channel we’ve created, we lose the conversation with the customer.”

“It will take time, but we’re getting to a place where we will have the data and means to deliver campaigns efficiently and effectively every time,” Whalen concludes.


DRIVING

CHANGEWITHOUT RESISTANCE

The Stor y of Successful Sales Adopt ion at Concur Technologies.

It was March 2008, and Concur Technologies Inc., a $129 million expense-reporting software

company based in Seattle, had recently acquired Outtask, which specialized in travel booking

software. Brad Mirkovich, now Concur’s General Manager of the Americas, got right to work

instituting a best practices framework and creating consistency where none had existed before.

Back then, many companies were just beginning to move key business functions to the cloud. With this acquisition, Concur was poised to offer its customers something they’d never had before: a simple, quick way to handle all their expense reporting and travel booking needs. Problem was, the Concur sales team was used to selling an expense product, not an integrated travel and expense tool. “It was a little daunting in the time period. So we made a lot of changes to get the team ready to sell that,” Mirkovich explains.

Like many industry executives, Mirkovich knew it was easier to talk about field adoption than to actually achieve it. To do so, he’d need to be focused, transparent and determined.

“Adoption is just something that has to be worked on every week, every month, every quarter. The challenge some companies have with rolling out new processes or procedures is they will roll it out and not continue to reinforce and make people accountable to it,” he says.

Fast-forward to September 18, 2014. By now, Concur was on track to bring in $700 million in revenue that fiscal year, and it had become a leader in cloud-based expense and travel reporting software, with more than 25,000 customers and

25 million users in over 150 countries. The company was so successful that the German technology giant SAP SE offered to buy it that day for $8.3 billion. The deal closed in December, and Mirkovich left Concur in February to pursue opportunities in earlier-stage ventures.

Looking back on his seven years at Concur, Mirkovich shared his strategies for successful field adoption, revolving around four key elements: Hiring, framework, alignment and accountability.

HIRING:

“It sounds super simple, but I think a lot of companies struggle when it comes to hiring. You’ve got to have a process to hire the right people and make sure you have the correct people on the bus,” he says.

When Mirkovich arrived at Concur, they had lost some employees as a result of the acquisition. “We had a frontline management team that was in flux, to some degree. We had to hire some people, we had to promote some people from within, and, obviously, we had to start to put together the organizational structure we needed to be successful.”

featuring > Brad Mirkovich General Manager, Concur

written by John Staples


continued

Many companies mistakenly assume that all hires should fit a single profile. Not so, says Mirkovich. “You don’t want to hire everyone with the same profile. My wife is not exactly like me, and I’m sure my kids are very happy about that,” he jokes. “You make a better team at times, if you don’t have a bunch of people that are thinking about things the same way.”

FRAMEWORK:

Once you’ve assembled your sales team, it’s time to set up a sound framework. “When I first arrived at Concur, there were a lot of different people doing things different ways. There wasn’t a lot of consistency,” Mirkovich recalls.

“A lot of times, people are just focused on sales competence. That’s part of it, but the real question is how are you going to run the business? What is your operational team going to look like, and what are the things that are really important to you?”

Frameworks don’t have to be set in stone: at Concur the framework has evolved over time, adapting to the people and the culture, Mirkovich says, “It’s really important for team members, especially the go-to-market team, to know what’s expected of them, so you can set expectations and set that vision of what you’re trying to do.”

It’s also not just about the numbers. “One of the challenges people have is they’re always focused on the forecast. Here’s the number for the year; here’s what we have to do. That’s important, but people typically need more strategy around a vision to drive more strategic outcomes.”

That’s particularly true of high-growth companies, Mirkovich says. “Things are breaking as you’re scaling the business, and you’ve got to adapt and change processes. It’s important to have that vision and framework which includes numbers, but it also should drive a vision of where you’re going as a company, or for a particular business unit.”

Concur’s mission pivoted several times during Mirkovich’s seven years. “Once we got the team comfortable selling an integrated product, we then started really moving them to try and sell a platform, because we were now building products and services around our core travel and expense product,” he explains.

“Five years ago, revenue outside of our core travel and expense products was very small. Last year, this ancillary revenue represented 40 percent of the total revenue for our Americas business. One of the trickiest parts of establishing a framework and building a sales process is achieving the proper balance,”

says Mirkovich. “You want to be able to have a level of predict-ability in what people are doing, which is why you’re building sales processes and other leading indicators to understand the business. But you also want to give people the ability to express their own individuality in how they manage their people, and in how they want to run their particular business. Creating a cookie-cutter process takes away the creativity of the team and doesn’t drive the desired results.”

“When you hire strong sales executives and managers, you need to provide them with enough autonomy to make decisions and help ‘drive their own destiny,’” Mirkovich adds.

ALIGNMENT:

While it’s important to align goals and procedures within the sales organization, increasingly companies seek cross- functional alignment.

“A great example is marketing,” says Mirkovich. “If you look today at a lot of successful companies, sales and marketing have to be well aligned to drive the appropriate pipeline numbers and quality to achieve the closure percentages needed to meet our desired goals.”

For example, Concur wanted to adopt the sales methodology espoused in the book The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. His team started evaluating the program, securing the necessary licenses for online training and talking to other companies that had adopted it.

“We realized that you really couldn’t implement the Challenger Sale without marketing being fully aligned with what you’re doing,” he says. Companies that tried to do “a big bang rollout” didn’t do so well because they hadn’t developed the necessary marketing collateral or customized pitches.

It took Mirkovich about 13 months to successfully phase in the Challenger program, assuring that marketing was fully engaged in the process and had prepared customized pitches, messaging and marketing materials for the sales team. “We slowly rolled it out, and that really helped out with adoption. It gave people a comfort level with what we were trying to do.”

The secret to driving adoption on any new initiative is to get the frontline managers on board and to help them understand its importance to the organization. In every case, Mirkovich sought feedback and input from the VPs and frontline managers to make certain that any new program they rolled out was something they felt would benefit them.


continued

ACCOUNTABILITY:

Accountability ties all the elements of adoption together. “You can hire the right people, put the right systems into place, and you can work to create alignment. But people have to be accountable to what the strategy is and what the numbers are,” says Mirkovich. “You need key performance indicators (KPI) aligned to the framework you developed, and you need both leading and lagging indicators.”

From an accountability perspective, Concur has developed a robust account planning process. “We have a client executive team, and it has a revenue component. We’re selling a good chunk of new business as well as to existing customers.”

There’s a complex KPI you want to have around your business so you can really look around the corner and make sure you understand where the challenges are so you can address them before they happen.

Each sales team typically does two account plans per quarter, while the client executive team has similar account plans that focus on customer success and adoption, which drive revenue.

The company puts as much of its reporting as it can into its sales force, says Mirkovich, “so that our team is really leveraging that to the best of their ability.”

“We have an item called Last-Next Step. Every week in the first two months of the quarter, we have our sales team updating what’s going on with any deals they are forecasting to close that quarter.” That’s updated once a week in a specific field.

During the last month of the quarter, that field is updated once a day until the deal closes.

All of the different KPIs are very important to that account-ability mechanism to make sure the teams are driving toward their goals and understand where the challenges may lie in the next quarter and nine months out, he says.

CULTURE AND FOCUS:

Focus is closely tied to the culture you create in your go-to-market organization, says Mirkovich. “When you’re with a company that’s growing significantly, and there’s a lot of change going on, it’s really important to have that vision of where the company is going.”

Goal setting involves far more than mere sales quotas. The bigger vision helps people stay focused and fosters an environment that encourages success, he says.

“We have been driving very high rates of achievement and people feel good about themselves, with achievable compensation plans,” says Mirkovich. “That productivity has paid huge dividends for us over the years and really provided an environment where people can be very successful and move into other roles at Concur.”

The result? A much lower turnover rate than that of other companies in its field. When reps are satisfied and stay in their positions for longer periods of time, they know their customers better and can be much more effective and successful in their territories. “We’ve really tried to minimize the amount of change that we have to do the best we can in a growing company,” he says.

“What we’ve tried to create is a teamwork type of culture,” says Mirkovich. When he trained new employees, he would often hear them express how surprised they were at the assistance offered by other sales reps. “They’d say, ‘I’d never been anywhere before where other salespeople are helping me be successful.’”

Mirkovich attributes that open, sharing culture to his success in “hiring the right people, who are looking not only for their own personal success but driving the company’s larger success.”

“The company has always been tremendously transparent. That transparent culture, along with the fact that we’re growing and creating opportunity for people, has really created a great culture,” he says.

Holding on to focus in a fast-moving, high-growth company is tough. Mirkovich’s advice? Concentrate on the initiatives that are the most important to your success, then manage them very well. That means communicating effectively, and often, to make sure all your people understand the value of the initiatives and how they relate to each person’s role in the organization.

“Sometimes, things are rolled out, and I don’t think the executive team spends enough time on explaining what the benefits are to the larger organization,” he says. “It’s just like selling anything — you’ve got to make sure they understand why it’s important to the company and how it’s going to help with our mission. If people don’t see the bigger picture, then they focus on the smaller picture,” says Mirkovich, who clearly knows what mission and focus are all about.


Nothing enrages a CEO like a quarter that completely misses forecast. One VP of sales summed

it up nicely: “It’s worse to not know the number than it is to miss it.” But many sales leaders

don’t know they are going to miss the number until the final day. The quarterly revenue number

is critical for the CEO. He must report on it every three months to the board and shareholders.

Today’s firms live and die by hitting revenue expectations; a few surprises and the CEO is gone.

Given this short-term perspective, forecasting’s importance has dramatically increased.

A VERY ACCURATE ASSESSMENT OF

FORECAST/PIPELINE

MANAGEMENT written by Christina Dieckmeyer

Director of Marketing, SBI


continued

Despite this urgency, though, forecast accuracy is at an all-time low. Sales leaders have to rely on poor, or no, information to predict sales performance. Many sales forecasts SBI sees consist of three categories. They may have different names, but they typically look like this:

1 COMMIT: We have a verbal or signature. The deal is “done.”

2 UPSIDE: We “feel” this deal is going to close this quarter.

3 LONG SHOT: This deal “could” close, if A, B and C happen

When the quarter ends, you find deals pushed from all three categories. The forecast process doesn’t work properly. When deals push, it puts strain on you and the organization. This is further complicated by lack of an explanation. Deals worth millions suddenly vanish from your forecast. Nobody can definitively answer why this happens. Reps and sales ops alike throw their hands up in frustration. So what is the answer? How can you fix your broken forecast?

“ It’s worse to not know THE NUMBER than it is to miss it. ”

PIPELINE MANAGEMENT PROCESS:

A pipeline is different from a forecast. Consider pipeline as the inputs that go into your forecast. It should not just be active or open sales opportunities. It should represent your entire funnel. Without a complete view, how can you accurately forecast sales? Each pipeline phase should have a conversion rate assigned to it.

> What percent of inquiries become leads?

> What percent of leads become opportunities?

> What percent of opportunities close?

If these inputs are wrong, or missing entirely, your forecast will not be correct. Using “plug data” or “estimates” will not fix this. How can your forecast be accurate if the inputs

into it are guesses? Instead, use either your own historical conversion rates, or benchmark conversion rates.

This may be a new concept for your sales organization. But using accurate information here will create better inputs into your forecast.

FORECAST MANAGEMENT PROCESS:

The forecast often represents committed deals. The review process is typically conducted via a forecast review call. The sales leader and the reps jump on a call. They review and report on the open deals. Will deal A close this quarter? How about deal B? The pipeline calls are painful. Sales managers try to push deals into the forecast that shouldn’t be there.

“Why do you have your close probability at 30 percent? Put that at 75 percent.” Of course, this doesn’t make the opportunity more likely to close. If you tell your managers they need to have a certain pipeline, you’ll get it.

This process is a cover-your-behind exercise. “Gut feel” answers are given and deals are sandbagged to avoid persecution. Time is spent out of the field reporting information that proves useless.

The reason these calls exist is to provide leadership with information on the health of the business. And there is so much more that can be done.


continued

An alternate, better approach should include:

> Producing Your Dashboard: Each week, Sales operations furnishes sales leadership with an updated dashboard. This dashboard is automated and comes directly from your data sources. Your sales operations team ensures that you have all the data you need.

> Studying Your Dashboard: The dashboard is the weekly deliverable produced as part of executing your analytics strategy. Simply put, analytics is providing sales leadership with the right data to glean insight on the business.

> Drawing Insight From Your Dashboard: You should have three types of data that are reviewed. First is behavioral indicators. This is defined as time with customers and sales process adherence. Next is leading indicators. This is defined as new opportunities created, forecast and pipeline. Last is lagging indicators such as deal size, win rate and quota attainment.

> Taking Action From Your Dashboard: The key with the dashboard is the alert system. You should focus on both positive and negative metrics. Sales operations should be sharing the positive behaviors in the moment with the organization. Broadcast why these sales leaders are performing so well in real time (Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, Jive, etc.). Those who are trending poorly discuss corrective actions. Sales ops is again sharing with the organization in real time the actions for improvement. The goal is to drive change that impacts the business.

Sales operations is the Big Data portal for revenue growth. The slow-moving, antiquated forecast call has to be replaced. It is now about the execution of true sales operations strategy. The sales ops leaders who have done this accomplish the objective of a forecast with more accuracy. Simultaneously, they allow executive leadership a platform to make decisions that drive outcomes.

DEFINE BUYER BEHAVIORS AND CRITERIA:

Many organizations tie their forecast to a poorly designed sales process. In these instances, the “Sales Process” is a list of stages and steps based on rep activity. These processes are easy to recognize — they have stage names like “Negotiation” and “Proposal.” Each time an activity is completed, the stage is advanced. Each stage is tied to a specific close probability. This leads to wildly inaccurate forecasts. Why? Sales stages aren’t tied to buyer investment. Presenting a prospect with a proposal does not mean they are ready to buy.

Instead, forecasting should be tied to a tightly defined series of buyer behaviors and criteria. These factors should be benchmarked and analyzed to determine close probability.

For example, what close probability would you assign to each deal below?

1. The buyer has issued an RFP to the top five solution providers. You are submitting a response to procurement.

2. The buyer is a current but frustrated customer of yours looking for an upgrade. You have been engaged early and often with their executive team. They have asked for a proposal.

Using the rep activity-based stage forecasting method, both would have equal close rates. If you understand buyer behaviors and criteria, you’d get very different close probabilities.

CRM ADOPTION:

Most companies that have forecasting problems have a CRM adoption problem as well. Reps enter deals when they are close to the finish line. They think that anything in the system will be hyper-scrutinized. And they see no value in the CRM as a sales and forecasting tool.

This is a problem that starts at the top of the organization. The VP doesn’t understand the value CRM provides. The result? CRM becomes a massive reporting mechanism filled with lagging indicators.

A properly enabled CRM system eliminates almost all the effort associated with forecasting. Dashboards are created to show deals near closure. Buyer indications provide the forecast — not a rep. The sales manager walks through a simple report. They coach each rep on their individual opportunities. There is no “I haven’t updated it in the system yet” from reps.

An accurate forecast is one the most important tools to manage your day-to-day business. It is also one of the most important things to the company’s leadership. Do it correctly by incorporating your CRM.

These may seem simple, but they are often overlooked or cobbled together. It causes 11th hour thrashing and forecast issues. Well-defined processes will help improve your forecast accuracy.

It’s impossible to have a sales forecast that is 100 percent accurate. There will always be things outside of your control. However, you can immediately take steps to improve your forecasting process.


In many businesses, sales ops still functions as a tactical department whose sole role is to support

the sales leadership team. That’s certainly not the case at Rackspace, a managed cloud company

based in San Antonio, Texas. There, Scott White, Vice President of Sales Operations, defines

his team’s mission more expansively. White has transformed his group into sales leadership’s

strategic partner, offering the team insights they may never have arrived at on their own. His

secret weapon? Standardized sales and marketing reports.

SCOTT WHITE DISCOVERS

STRATEGIC

GOLDIN SALES REPORTS

featuring > Scott White VP of Sales Operations

Rackspacewritten by Mike Drapeau


continued

“I’ve earned myself a seat at the table in our sales and marketing leadership team, and for operations that can be sometimes unique,” White says, who joined Rackspace in 2002, right after graduation from the University of Texas at San Antonio and rose to his current post in January 2014. “And that’s really because of the functions that we’ve built in the team. The fact that we’re not just report runners is very purposeful because we’ve built a team to do lots more.”

Sales operations means different things to different people, concedes White. “At Rackspace, we’ve defined sales operations as a full-service team to not only identify what we’re doing well and what we could do better, but to take that and go improve sales and marketing operations on a daily basis.”

Done right, standard reports measure exactly what the executive team wants sales to measure, when they want it measured — month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter. Not just that: they can tell the executives what they need to know even before they know they need to know it.

“One thing that we try to do is we try not to report the news; we try to make the news,” says White. “If we report the news, it’s already happened and it’s old, and the reality is, in our markets, things change very, very fast.”

White says that effectively using the data gleaned from standardized reporting has helped Rackspace increase its productivity by 20 percent over the past 18 months.

For example, lead volume is a critical number, but sometimes the sales leaders don’t give it sufficient attention. The sales ops team can trend that volume over time and spot potential revenue shortfalls before they happen and forecast their impact down the road, based on insufficient opportunities in the pipeline, White explains.

Sales op’s strategic role becomes most evident in the monthly operating review process, which involves a series of meetings, starting at the very top. First, the CEO and the head of sales meet to go over the standard sales metrics, provided by White’s team. Then the head of sales meets with his direct reports in various market segments to look at standardized metrics. Then the sales VPs meet with their sales directors, and they look at a different set of metrics that are more activity-based, such as number of sales calls made or emails sent. Lastly, the directors call a monthly operating meeting with their managers to review the metrics that matter most to them. No one gets bogged down in data, because each group reviews the metrics that are most relevant to them.

One reason the monthly operating meetings work so well is that they are entirely nonjudgmental, says White. His sales op analysts show up with the answers to “what is happening,” based on key metrics, and then they work with the sales leadership group to understand “why” it’s happening. Once they have the answer to both questions, they can decide jointly on a direction. “That results in sales ops team being strategic rather than just tactical,” White says.

“We’re analyzing what they’ve accomplished and analyzing a lot of leading indicators that tell us, ‘In three months, what are the things we need to concentrate on and what should we do now to adjust?”

For example, the sales reporting team might see that in the third quarter of this year, there’s a very low pipeline for a certain team or even a segment of Rackspace’s business. Having that information in hand allows White’s team to interact with marketing to boost the production of leads and opportunities for that segment. “If we were ‘reporting the news,’ we would wait until Q3 to say, ‘We don’t have enough pipeline,’ and we probably wouldn’t be successful,” White notes.

Rackspace focuses on 10 key metrics, such as the number of sales opportunities created and how much pipeline each rep is generating, as well as the conversion rate of leads to opportunities and bookings attainment.

Sales reporting content needs are always evolving, and it’s critical to keep that content relevant. “I see many companies try to focus on too many. We’re always working to uncover new metrics that really matter in our business. Our business changes, and our team has to evolve with that,” he adds.

Standardized reporting can also help with reaching internal training goals. In 2014, Rackspace introduced new messaging and a new strategy and vision for its 300,000 customers. White had to get his 400 frontline sales reps up to speed fast. “We needed to retrain all of our sales and marketing ‘Rackers’ how to speak this language really effectively,” White says.


So, White devised a sales-certification reporting program — with 100, 200 and 300 certification levels, much like college courses, which not only helped fulfill Rackspace’s “Fanatical Support” pledge to customers but kept executives abreast of the reps’ progress.

“One of our important metrics for the quarter was to measure certification of our ‘Rackers,’” White says, using the company’s internal term for Rackspace employees. “So one of the standard reports we built at the manager level showed what reps were certified and what reps were yet to be certified. As a team, we worked through, week by week, progress on certification to make sure we hit our targets.” Eventually, 100 percent of the reps received training.

The reports filed by White and his seven sales reporting team members reflect a strategic quality: the ability to stay dynamic. “One of the things that makes standard reporting relevant is frequent updating,” White says. “Sometimes things will drop off and sometimes we add new things. When we finished the managed-cloud certification in the second quarter of the year, that metric fell off our dashboard.”

The dashboard helps Rackspace organize its sales reporting content and make it accessible across all levels of employees and leadership. “There’s still a lot of ad hoc reporting — just to be transparent — but the sales op team has gained wide agreement on the things we want to measure and are able to deliver it on a daily basis to the people who need to review the content,” White says.

Scott and his team distinguish themselves from other sales ops teams in that they start with questioning the strategic value of the measurement,” says Greg Alexander, CEO of SBI. “Every sales force has dashboards, but are the dashboards measuring what matters?”

In addition, Scott understands that the standard reports required by the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) are different than the ones that are needed by VPs, directors, managers and reps, in both the sales and marketing team. That’s how

Scott went from being just an employee to a true strategist, the right hand of the Chief Revenue Officer, Alexander says.

Most sales teams struggle with the “garbage in, garbage out” syndrome. If sales reps don’t know what metrics matter, they are bound to collect bad, and useless, data. White has eliminated that problem by tailoring the metrics to define success for each individual salesperson. That way, the salesperson is entering high-quality data that can really make a difference.

“My peers and our senior leadership team have a high level of confidence in my ability to measure and manage the business,” White says. “So that was definitely a contributing factor in my ability to standardize the reports.”

His ability to standardize, and do it well, produced those selected metrics that assess what makes a sales rep suc-cessful. “We got agreement with my peers on the sales and marketing leadership team that these things drove the strongest correlation to success, and we limited what we were going to measure,” White says.

Rackspace’s net revenue grew 15.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014 to $472 million, compared with the year-ago quarter, while net income surged 77 percent to $36.9 million. White is proving that standardized reporting can make a big difference at the company, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

A case in point: When White’s team found that “Rackers” couldn’t find content fast enough to answer customers’ online questions about products and services, White utilized a content management resource called KnowledgeTree, which lets reps log in specific information about customers — what they’re buying and where they are in the sales process, and receive back proactive, customized content.

“We reduced the time that it takes to find content for our reps dramatically,” White says. “So that’s an example of how we took data, implemented that in a very regular cadence, and discovered a deficiency in the business, then went and not only told somebody ‘there’s a problem,’ but recommended solutions.”

Delivering and helping to drive results is White’s goal for his team. “It’s not to generate reports, it’s not to train people. We measure ourselves on how efficient and how effective our sales reps are, and that means many things. We have lots of missions to accomplish, and we have a large contribution to the business — that’s what separates us from being just report runners.”


When a company is losing money and seeing much younger rivals surpassing them in sales, the temptation of a lot of CEOs might be to hunker down and avoid all risks. Not Perry Offer.

RISKY BUSINESS WHEN PROFITS ARE DOWN,

INVEST IN SALES.

featuring > Perry Offer CEO, Dialogue Group

written by George de los Reyes


continued

“Within the less-than-positive overall sales outlook forDialogue, there were one or two obvious growth stories,” Offer recalls.

“We decided to focus on one of them.”

For Offer, that narrowing of focus was a prerequisite for the decision to invest in sales and, ultimately, for the company’s success. “We could leverage the effect of every dollar spent in sales, rather than spreading it thinly over the mixed bag of products the company had developed over 20 years,” he notes.

Founded in 1994, Dialogue was the oldest SMS, or text message, aggregator in the telecommunications industry, but it was not the leader.

“Competitors managed to get far, far bigger, even though they started far, far later in the game,” Offer says. “That tells you Dialogue has probably looked a couple of big opportunities in the face over the past 10 years and chosen not to pursue them.

The reason, says Offer, is that the company was run by “risk-averse techies, who instead of concentrating energies into one or two potential growth products, had the development team chasing after every new twist and turn in technology. So the product offering became diverse and scattered, and the sales effort unfocused.”

The surviving founder of the company wanted to scale the business he had built, but the privately held enterprise was unprofitable. Offer needed to unlock the potential growth area among its many product offerings, and then have his sales team concentrate exclusively on that.

In corporate overhauls, Offer’s motto is to keep the solution simple. To Offer, success often is generated by doing fewer things better and understanding where a company can best add value for the customer. That means looking for the “patch of blue sky” and going for it.

“The industry today is what it is,” Perry says. “Over the next three or four years, you’ve got a cloudy sky—some big black clouds in one corner, maybe some white clouds over here, and in between some little patches of blue sky. If you look into those blue patches, what you’ll find almost always is an entirely unexplored dimension of value within the current industry structure that can be tapped with incremental investment.”

To accomplish Offer’s goal, Dialogue would have to move quickly, boldly and with unswerving focus. “The fault of the human race in general is that we constantly overestimate our ability to execute,” Offer says. “If there are five things we need to focus on to be successful, then don’t talk to me about number six.”

Offer pushed the company to concentrate on just one type of text message—mission-critical, mobile-terminated texting. It’s a market that, Offer says, is projected to grow from $40 billion in 2013 to $80 billion by 2018. Dialogue is one of three providers handling messages like these.

When Offer, who specializes in turning around stagnating enterprises, took the helm at

Sheffield, England-based Dialogue Group in 2013, he boldly expanded the sales force by

50 percent and trained it to sell to a different customer base. The key message of the new

CEO to his struggling company: Don’t concentrate on the many uncertainties—converge

around the market opportunity.


Dialogue also would need to change its customer base. For most of its existence, the company had made money selling its services to other aggregators based on highly fluid spot contracts where everything turned on price. At times, this produced a healthy volume of traffic, but if customers could get the same service for a fraction of a cent cheaper somewhere else, they’d leave.

That meant redirecting Dialogue’s traditional focus on product development to a concentration on sales to mobile operators and beefing up the highly decentralized efforts. One of the first goals was to add four more full-time salespeople, increasing the team to an even dozen, but he also had to make sure his current eight were up to the task.

The new Dialogue sales team would have a whole new script that focused less on what each service did and more on the outcome the mobile operators wanted—to increase revenue.

Dialogue’s new strategy hinged on optimizing the moneti-zation of each and every mobile-terminated message. The company would do it for no upfront fee, opting instead for a cut of the future revenues generated by finding revenue on tens of millions of messages per month that were slipping through the operator with no charge.

“That meant salespeople were going to be having a lot more sophisticated conversations with customers,” Offer says.

“Our revenue would be tied to theirs, which is an interesting and attractive sales pitch.”

Relying on this market, Offer sees huge potential to double the size of the company over the next three to five years. He estimates that of more than 800 mobile phone operators in the world, maybe 220 have some solution in place to capture all the revenue they should be capturing but fewer than 100 have actually locked their networks tightly enough to solve the problem consistently.

“It’s a huge problem, but a huge opportunity at the same time,” Offer says. While the company had previously shied away from selling directly to larger enterprises, Offer realized that it was the only avenue that would lead to a sustainable, long-term business model.

“If you can convince large enterprises that you have sufficient reliable connectivity around the world to offer one-stop shopping, it becomes less likely that they will move traffic away,” Offer says, “You become more deeply embedded in their business, so they’re inclined to be more loyal.”

Offer had restructured sales before, but never starting from a clean slate. At this point, given the total overhaul he envi-sioned, Offer turned to sales and marketing consultants, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI), which he valued for theiroutside perspective and firsthand business expertise.

“They’ve seen a lot of these kinds of challenges and had to grapple with them in their own working lives,” Offer says.

“It’s not just a consulting exercise. They’ve been responsible for cracking these kinds of problems. They’ve had to solve these kinds of problems in reality, not just on a bloody spreadsheet.”

SBI and Offer worked with the sales force to develop a much more sophisticated value proposition to present to mobileoperators, with Dialogue offering a service that goes farbeyond the simple price and reliability information the team used to use to present to customers.

“ If there are 5 things we need to focus on to be successful, then don’t talk to me about number six. ”

“From beginning to end, it was going to be a much more complex process, and you needed folks with the intelligence to process the new approach,” he says.

The sales operation had also become highly decentralized because previously there had been so many products to sell. Until recently, there was literally no global head of sales. SBI helped the company move from being an enterprise driven by engineers and tech people to one propelled by market opportunity, finance and sales.


continued

“We’ve stopped distracting ourselves by going to trade shows and trying to innovate on something someone else has done or asking ourselves, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to build that?’” Offer says. “The fact that there was zero monetization to be had on the back end of it was neither here nor there.”

Today, both Offer and Dialogue are starting to see the payoff from this newfound business discipline. Over the past 18 months, the company has doubled in value, according to the CEO.

“We went from making essentially no money at all to making the best part of $320,000 a month. So the transformation has been significant. While many would call it radical, I would say the more you hedge your bets, the more compromised the results you will be able to achieve.”

In fiscal 2014, Offer met his goal to make a profit: Dialogue earned almost $2 million. This year, he’s looking to hit $3.5 million. Ultimately, Offer and the founder are hoping to sell the company in the next 18 months or so, probably to another business process outsourcing company, which is how he now sees Dialogue.

“Dialogue is staring a global opportunity in the face,” Offer concludes. “How on earth can it turn its back on that simply because of being scared of screwing things up along the way or that things may not happen as quickly as everyone would like? Well, you simply can’t.”

Anatomy of a Makeover:

> SOUGHT a more focused growth opportunity that could last for several years.

> REWROTE the sales script and changed the business model to reflect new opportunities.

> EXPANDED Dialogue’s sales force, hiring new employees who were comfortable selling to mobile operators, the new target market.

> REVIEWED current sales staff for its ability to handle a more sophisticated sales methodology.

> TRAINED the existing sales staff to understand the new business model in order to achieve profitability and define the business value to customers.


“Most sales organizations don’t trust CFOs as far as they can throw them,” says Tate, who is now president of Bristol, Pennsylvania-based Cummins Power Systems. “But having sales and finance on opposite sides of the table almost always works against the best interest of the company. That’s why it should be a CFO’s first job to get rid of that mutual distrust.”

The tension between sales and finance makes sense. Sales is looking to close as many deals as possible and increase revenue as much as possible, sometimes even at the expense of profits. Finance, by contrast, doesn’t necessarily view every sale as a good thing unless it meets certain benchmarks of profitability—standards on minimum margins that at times can seem unreasonably demanding to the sales executive just trying to close a deal. The result: Sales and finance can spend more time pushing against each other than pushing toward what should be the common goal of making a sale.

“Finance people need to recognize that it’s in their interest, in the company’s interest, to make deals work,” Tate says.

“It’s not so much about setting different standards for sales; it’s about seeing the importance of what they do differently. At the end of the day, if you don’t have sales, it’s game over—no matter how great your audit process is, or how superior your training program, or how innovative your manufacturing process.”

To bring both sides together, Tate decided to put them literally on the same bench. He embedded a finance person in each

sales team. That person went to sales meetings, visited customers and participated in negotiations. At the end of the process, Tate wanted the finance person to be pulling for a deal to close as much as the sales rep.

“The job of finance is not to be the Department of No,” Tate says. “It’s to figure out clever ways to make the deal protect both the interests of the customer and Cummins.”

He likens the relationship to players and coaches. “You never want to hold back your players, but if they get penalties all the time, then in the long run it’s going to hurt the team,” he says. “It’s up to the coaches to help them with the plays that will avoid penalties but also score as many points as possible.”

“Players do make more money than the coach because they’re making the win happen,” he adds. “I’m okay with that because it is, after all, the players scoring the points.”

Tate’s approach is about breaking down silos, making finance understand the perspective of other departments and making them see themselves as facilitators, not obstacles. He wants every P&L operation to work as a team, pulling for the same victory, rather than using functional designations as barriers.

“In finance we do what a deal requires to make it close,” Tate says. “Don’t ever tell me something a customer needs is too hard. We’ll do it manually if we have to. When sales knows you’re putting the deal first, then you start to build that trust you need to function well.”

featuring > Kelley Tate | President, Cummins Power Systems | written by Mark Synek

The day the head of a sales unit at Cummins Power Systems came to Kelley Tate to ask if he could

hire away a member of his finance team was the day Tate declared victory. Since Tate became

Chief Financial Officer in 2011 at the exclusive distributor of Cummins products for the mid-Atlantic,

Connecticut and Bermuda territory, he had made it his mission to tear down the walls separating

sales and finance. Now, finally, sales was embracing a finance person as one of their own.

TEARING DOWN WALLS:How Kelley Tate Built An Era Of Trust Between Finance And Sales


Much of what Tate espouses he learned in his decade with Fairfield, Connecticut-based General Electric Co., where he held a variety of positions with the energy services business and GE Capital. In one of his last jobs there, Tate served as GE’s head of commercial finance for the Southern region. It was during the recession, and the first instinct of the company was to cut off credit to floundering customers, reducing GE’s risk exposure.

“That would have been the exactly wrong thing to do,” Tate explains. “If customers were already having trouble buying stuff, cutting off their credit would most certainly contribute to them shutting down.”

Finance and sales worked together to devise a different model for customers in bankruptcy or facing bankruptcy—one that would help them survive but protect GE at the same time. Eventually, other regions adopted the new credit risk model.

“This is a great example of how finance and sales can work together to keep a customer viable,” Tate says. “A lot of com-panies would have let all those customers go under. But that not only would have been wrong, it would have been bad business.”

Tate believes that working on the commercial finance team gave him a much better appreciation of what makes sales tick. “Salespeople are definitely out to make a nice living for themselves, and rightfully so, but they can’t do that without having some really serious skills and the ability to really take care of the customer,” he says. “They’re fighting to create a long-term customer for the company. And I admire that.”

“ The job of finance is NOT TO BE the Department of No. ”

When he came to Cummins, Tate was determined to create a similar working environment to the one he left at GE. That meant tearing down the silos, but also making sure compensation was effectively reinforcing the sales goals.

Besides embedding finance representatives in sales teams, Tate addressed an even touchier subject—commissions. One of the things senior management did at Cummins was to tie the size of the commission to the gross margin of the sales contract.

Tate agreed with this structure, but he tweaked it to give sales cash up front on commissions. “Even though the equipment hasn’t left the building, I am going to pay them as if the company has already been paid,” Tate notes. “Helping them earn what they need to earn and make what they need to make goes a long way to building that trust, so when you do have to have a difficult conversation about a deal, it makes it easier.”

Currently, Tate is working with SBI on a new commission system that will provide a bigger base and reduce the commission variable, particularly for those salespeople who are playing more of a support role and not driving the sale. The program will be implemented in April.

One problem Tate faced when he arrived was the inability of the sales team to project revenue moving forward. “When I first got here, we could not predict the power generation business to save our lives,” he recalled. “Even the monthly forecast would be off.”

Once he embedded a finance person with the sales team, those projections began to become useful. “Today that business has become very accurate,” he says. And it’s doing really well on top of that.”

As Tate explains, it’s not only about getting finance to fight for the deal; it’s also about getting sales to recognize the realities of a balance sheet. “It’s really about bringing the two worlds together, letting them see they’re both working for the same goal,” he explained.

“When I first got here, I told finance that my job was to kill finance,” Tate says. “That got their attention. But they know now that what I mean is I want to kill those attitudes that make finance and sales think somehow they aren’t on the same team working for the same goals.”


In sales, the distinction between lucky and good is not always as clear as we would like. When

our private equity clients are evaluating a potential acquisition, they want to know why a sales

team is making its numbers: Are they a top-flight organization, or are they the beneficiaries of

happy accidents? Often, the investment thesis converts to a successful outcome, or it does not,

based on the capability of the sales team.

At SBI, there are six specific things we look for when evaluating a sales team’s impact on an

investment thesis. Each should be governed by a hierarchy of strategic alignment. That means

there should be a documented corporate strategy that leads to a product strategy, which, in turn,

leads to a marketing strategy and a sales strategy. Often, we find a well-articulated corporate

and product strategy but a marketing and sales strategy that is underdeveloped. This results in

a growth forecast that lacks credibility, which elevated investment risk.

INQUIRE BEFORE YOU

ACQUIREA SIX-STEP PROCESS FOR PRIVATE EQUITY INVESTORS

written by Matt SharrersPartner, SBI


continued

A sales strategy is required but it is not enough. There also needs to be an operating plan

that details how the sales team is going to execute the strategy. Our work over dozens of

PE-sponsored projects has produced six elements that should be in any such plan. Careful

probing of each will tell you how likely the growth forecast is going to be met inside of the

investment time horizon.

SEGMENTATION:

Segmentation comes in three forms: market, account and buyer. At the market level, a sales team needs to understand the addressable market and how its competitors go to market. At the account level, a sales leader need to know which accounts will generate the most revenue in the least time. Among buyers, the team should understand how different individuals make purchase decisions.

Too often segmentation stops at the market level. This is a problem because it is very difficult to allocate sales resources at the market level. Sales resources need to be assigned to accounts, not markets, and need to target buyers in those accounts. Investors would be wise to ask management for a list of accounts ranked by potential, top to bottom, richest to poorest. This list should be cross-referenced with the sales rep stack ranking report, listing the reps best to worst, top to bottom, based on revenue production. The top sales reps should be on the top accounts. If not, a reallocation of resources could unlock trapped potential.

PLANNING:

Sales teams need to be doing three types of planning: revenue, budget and data.

The revenue plan explains how a sales team is going to make its number. A sales leader should be able to explain how many leads the team needs to convert into opportunities, how many of those will become proposals, how many of those will be signed, their average deal size, and the length of the sales cycle.

The budget plan simply says how much money sales needs to meet its goals, and how those funds will be allocated. Sales expense is largely impacted by headcount; however, items such as training, technology, travel and others need to be estimated as well.

The data plan consists of three types of data, which allow a sales leader to connect behavior to results. If a team doesn’t show the right behavior, a leader can’t drive the right outcomes. Activity leads to results and behavior drives activity levels. The data elements are:

> Behavioral indicators. This information will tell you how much time reps are spending with clients, how many calls they’re making, how many inquiries they’re responding to, etc. A board member should work with management to identify which behaviors lead to the desired outcomes. This is harder than it seems and is highly situational.

> Leading indicators. These include the size, shape and velocity of the pipeline; the yield on each demand generation dollar; and the speed upon which management replaces underperformers with new recruits. This is an improvement opportunity for private equity investor-led boards, most of which don’t focus enough on leading indicators and spend too much time looking backwards.

> Backward-looking indicators. These are metrics such as how many deals a team is winning vs. the competitors, pricing elasticity, the length of a sales cycle, the average deal size, the number of new products sold, etc.


ENGAGEMENT:

There are two processes that dictate how a sales team engages with its target market: the prospecting process and the sales process.

Until the sales team closes 100 percent of their deals, they will need to generate new opportunities. Top quartile sales teams reject ad hoc prospecting and embrace a formal, constantly inspected prospecting process. The outcome this drives is a reduction in end-of-quarter revenue surprises. If a few deals push, and a few always do, the sales team has plenty of pipeline and can substitute revenue easily.

Sales process refers to how a sales team manages its opportu-nities. Many resources are expended to get a lead, and convert it to a sales opportunity, and, therefore, each sales opportunity should be managed as if it the team’s personal reputation was at stake. Private equity investors have an opportunity to spot upside where others don’t see it by inspecting the degree of customization in the sales process. Too often, the process isn’t customized to the individual prospect’s buying process. Instead, a generic sales process, such as solution selling, is being used. These old, legacy sales models don’t work as well as they once did. Switching to a custom-built sales process results in three outcomes: 1. improved win rates, 2. shorter sales cycles, 3. increases in average deal sizes.

ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN:

These four areas can reveal the strength of the sales organization’s talent program.

> The interview process? Often hiring managers don’t have a profile of an A player. They can’t hire A players if they don’t know what they look like.

> A documented hiring process that looks into the past, present and future. Take the guesswork out of the hiring decision.

> Case study-based selection. Move away from theoretical selection and embrace job simulation. Place the candidate in the job and ask them to perform.

> References. Tell your candidates you want them to arrange for interviews with their former bosses. As a sales leader, you should conduct these interviews against the scorecard of an A player. The reference should rate the candidate from one to five on each of the competencies, and should be quizzed on the answers.

EXECUTION:

There are four things that separate above-average execution from average execution:

> Enablement. Sales enablement means getting the right content into the hands of the right buyers at the right time in the right channels. A board member would be wise to engage in a buying process and have the sales team sell directly to them. Witnessing the sales process firsthand often reveals hidden opportunities for quick wins.

> Adoption. We have witnessed sales leaders who look and sound great in the boardroom but nothing is happening in the field. Board members should practice skip-level management and engage directly with the sales team and determine if the processes and tools are being used.

> Forecast/Pipeline Management. Garbage in/garbage out plagues many sales teams. Ask if there is one system of record, who owns it, and what are the data sources?

> Reporting. Which tools and data are being used to manage reporting?

SUPPORT:

When we are engaged by a private equity investor, one of our first meetings is with the sales operations director. The reason we prioritize this is because sales art needs to be replaced with sales science and this happens in the sales ops department.

The biggest mistake we see is a lack of a sales operations strategy. The head of sales operations should be proactive and predictive, not reactive and backward-looking. Too often, we see sales ops as a dumping ground for the work no one else wants to do. This represents an opportunity for the savvy private equity investor. The sales operations director is to the head of sales what the CFO is to the CEO.

To our private equity clients, these gaps aren’t necessarily red flags. To the contrary, they create opportunity. If a potential acquisition is completely mature in terms of its sales and sales processes, there may not be much a private equity firm can do to create value. But companies that are missing some of this infrastructure have the potential to become dramatically more valuable after it is put in place.


“BEFORE” AND “AFTER”SHIFTING A STARTUP INTO HIGH GEAR

In 2009, Alex Shootman, a senior VP of Sales at Austin-based software company Vignette

Corp., said goodbye to a job with a comfortable base salary to take a chance on Eloqua, a

startup with less than a fifth of its revenue.

His challenge: to help build the $33 million maker of marketing automation software into

a major player in the space and make it so successful, he’d someday be able to reap the

rewards of his gamble.

featuring > Alex Shootman President, Apptio

written by Ryan Tognazzini


continued

Like many others who have moved to a tech startup, Shootman took a big pay cut, in his case about a 30–35 percent reduction in his base pay, in exchange for a generous equity package. If the company succeeded in going public or getting acquired by a bigger company down the road, Shootman stood to profit mightily.

For every executive who moves to a startup with dreams of a big future payday, those who end up disappointed far outnumber those who walk away smiling. But Shootman can count himself among the minority of big winners: In August 2012, Eloqua went public, raising $92 million in an Initial Public Offering on the NASDAQ stock market. Four months later, in December, Oracle agreed to buy the company for $871 million. By then, Eloqua’s sales had grown to almost $100 million.

Startups, by their very nature, are often risky propositions, but Shootman evaluated Eloqua’s management team, product and target market — all of which he found to be excep-tional — and then he looked at how the job could augment his own professional experience and move him toward his ultimate career goal of becoming the General Manager or Chief Executive Officer of a technology company. “If I want an experience, I’m willing to take a job that doesn’t make sense to other people to get that experience,” he says. “The decision I had to make was whether I was willing to take a step back to move forward.”

Shootman has no complaints about the outcome. “It turned out fantastic,” he says. The sales exec, who started out his career with a dozen years at IBM, followed by stints at BMC Software and TeleTech, is now president of worldwide field operations for Apptio, a company in suburban Seattle that sells a cloud-based platform to help CIOs manage their business.

Speaking of his Eloqua days, Shootman says: “I’m the luckiest guy on the planet. It was an amazing life experience and a great team to work with.”

Of course, luck didn’t have all that much to do with it. Shootman, who got promoted along the way from head of sales to president of Eloqua by CEO Joe Payne, played an active role in the company’s growth and success through his hard work and the concerted steps he took to increase revenue.

“ The decision I had to make was whether I was

WILLING to take a step back to move forward. ”

“If somebody wants you to grow the business, they’re mea-suring you on how fast can you grow the revenue given the money they’re willing to spend,” says Shootman. To do that, it’s necessary to focus on five principles, he says: the people you have in your organization, the processes you run, the structure you design, the compensation plan you establish and the tools you provide to the team. Even simpler than that, it’s mostly about building a pipeline and making sure your team members have the skills they need to accomplish their goals. “If every individual on your team has enough opportunity and they are prepared for their moments of truth, it will cover up most every sin in a sales force,” he says.

“As we grew, Joe asked me to take on more and more respon-sibility,” recalls Shootman. “I had the sales team for the entire time. We consolidated all the customer-facing functions into one organization, which I ended up running. Whether it was sales, account management or customer support, anything touching the customer, I ended up managing it.”


Shootman was responsible for $100 million in revenue, and he managed over $50 million in world-

wide expenses. Managing about 200 people, his direct reports included a slew of VPs — including

those responsible for new logo acquisition, account management, professional services, customer

experience, field operations and more. The motto he lives by: Get it done and do it right.

Numbers help tell the story of Eloqua’s rapid growth. When Shootman joined Eloqua, the privately held company was valued at $1.43 a share. By the time of the IPO, its value had soared to $11.50 a share. And when Oracle completed its acquisition, that value had more than doubled to $23.50 a share. From 2009 to 2012, Shootman helped triple quarterly GAAP revenue to $27 million.

Along the way, Shootman worked with SBI’s CEO Greg Alexander. Greg provided knowledge, skills and experience in four areas that were critical to accelerating growth. First, SBI built the skills profile of the next generation of sales reps, which was needed as Eloqua ramped up their sales hiring. SBI also created a territory planning process at the company level. This allowed them to execute the segmentation and coverage model efforts, and understand where to place reps to drive rapid growth. Next, they were able to take the territory work down to the individual rep level. They used account scoring to build territory plans, and opportunity scoring to make sure that the reps’ time was used productively.

Eloqua also developed a certification program, at three levels, for all its sales reps, with six fundamental sales plays every employee needed to master. “It is the job of leadership to make sure the individual is exceptionally prepared, to be awesome at their moment of truth,” says Shootman. “That’s our job.”

“When you’re in a brand-new market, you need people with high verbal agility,” Shootman says. In fact, he found one of the top predictors of success of their salespeople over time was their ability to do a whiteboard presentation. So, during the hiring process, every prospective employee had to complete a whiteboard exercise. It was one of several critical steps Shootman took in the recruiting process to align with the profile SBI had created. Ultimately he needed to figure out three things — can they do the job, do they want to do the job, and do we want to work with them.

During his tenure at Eloqua, Shootman says he learned these six important lessons in building a successful sales organization and achieving high growth.

1 > Spend time working on the values of the organization because culture eats strategy for breakfast.

2 > You can’t run faster than your customers, and you’ve got to put the right infrastructure in place to make sure customers are using your software and are getting success from it.

3 > When you’re creating a whole new category, you must have a successful sales strategy, which needs to be grounded in sales methodology and messaging.

4 > Accept that there will be countless disasters on your way to success. You may not get through all of them successfully, but you will know which ones to focus on.

5 > Always focus on the company’s pipeline and the sales team’s skills. They’ll never let you down.

6 > When prospective sales execs say, “You should hire me because I’ve never missed a number,” don’t hire them. “I want people who have screwed stuff up. If you’re creating a brand-new market, that’s high growth; risks might cause you to screw up,” Shootman says.


continued

Shootman says the importance of culture can’t be over-emphasized. “The payday was awesome but the culture is what I take away most from the Eloqua experience,” Shootman reflects. “I think the thing we were most excited about at Eloqua was the culture we built. Culture allowed us to be successful.”

That culture was customer-centric at its core. For example, Eloqua created their own version of the Emmy Awards, a splashy event in a packed ballroom designed to honor its own customers for their achievements. And when the company announced its IPO, rather than putting employees onstage, they put their customers up there — to drive home the central role they played in Eloqua’s success.

Shootman increased customer retention rates to 85 percent from 71 percent and net dollar renewal rates to $1.10 from $0.95 by restructuring the customer experience around the customer life cycle and upgrading the account management function.

During that same period, Eloqua ramped up the number of sales reps by over 300 percent. Typically, as companies scale up, sales teams face new challenges. “You go through different stages as an organization,” Shootman explains. “In the early days you’re really hiring Special Ops salespeople, Delta Force salespeople. These are people that are exceptionally aware with high mental agility and great verbal acuity. Their ability to articulate the sales message is amazing.”

But those exceptional salespeople are rare indeed. After you’ve hired your first 15–20 salespeople, Shootman says, it’s time to bring in the infantry to hold the territory you’ve won and build up the sales structure.

“That can alienate the first tier,” he concedes. “When you really change into growth mode and move from $20–30 million to $100 million, you have to realize that your go-to-market strategy is going to change, and that when you change your go-to-market strategy, you’re going to lose some of your sales force. You just have to recognize you might lose 25 to 30 percent of the sales team.”

After Oracle completed its acquisition of Eloqua in early 2013, Shootman planned on staying around through the transition. He and his wife had recently adopted two girls from Ethiopia, and so he decided to leave Oracle to spend more time getting to know them.

Then, fate knocked yet again: Shootman was offered the position at Apptio, and he couldn’t pass up the opportunity, he says. He left Oracle in October 2013.

So, once more, Shootman evaluated the opportunity and what he could gain from the experience. He studied both the market potential and the company’s leadership, and again, this company passed his test with flying colors. He says that Apptio’s CEO, Sunny Gupta, puts his company’s success before his own ego. Shootman was also impressed with Apptio’s leadership team. “I emotionally connected really well,” he says. Shootman still lives in Austin and spends a lot of time in the air.

Of course, most sales execs don’t make career bets that are nearly as calculated, or as lucky, as Shootman’s have been so far. His advice to others faced with a choice like his at Eloqua: “I tell them, ‘You have to be willing to give up something, and you’re kind of fooling yourself if you’re not.’”


WHAT CEOs

NEED TO KNOWABOUT THEIR

MARKETING STRATEGIES

Some Chief Executive Officers consider getting involved in marketing strategy to be beneath their

pay grade. That’s a big mistake, according to Rashid Skaf, the CEO of AMX LLC, the Richardson,

Texas-based audiovisual tech giant.

To Skaf, marketing strategy demands a CEO’s attention and participation because it is, in essence, “a time-specific plan to deliver on a company’s mission.” A company’s marketing strategy brackets a successful product and services development program: On the front end, the marketing strategy identifies key market trends and customer needs that are critical inputs to the product development process.

On the back end, that strategy defines the plan to effectively communicate the company’s story and value proposition, framed in the language of its customers.

“Failure or poor execution in any part of this can seriously jeopardize the company’s success,” Skaf says. “That’s why it’s essential for the CEO to be very involved, and I certainly have been so myself.”

AMX specializes in hardware and software that automate the audiovisual experience of conference rooms, homes, classrooms, network operation/command centers, hotels, entertainment venues and broadcast facilities. A subsidiary of Harman International Industries, Inc. since June 2014, AMX serves the business, education and government markets.

Skaf was promoted to CEO in 2005, after serving as AMX’s President and Chief Operating Officer for four years. Imme-diately, he set out to shake things up: first, by better assessing the outcomes AMX customers were seeking, and then, by aligning the company’s marketing strategy to deliver them. To that end, AMX has discarded 60 percent of the 1,300 or so products in its catalogue over the last several years and went on an acquisition spree to buy up other enterprises in its space that dramatically increased both its size and its capabilities.

“It’s about anticipating and aligning ourselves to marketplace trends, not getting buried by them,” Skaf says. “Eighty percent of our revenue last year came from products that didn’t exist three years prior. That gives you an idea of how far we look ahead. Those products came out of strategies from seven years before. That’s how we stay on top of the wave and not under it.”

In 2007, the Metroplex Technology Business Council, the leading technology organization in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, named Skaf its “Corporate CEO of the Year” for his outstanding leadership in the technology and communications industry. Since the fourth quarter of 2006, Skaf has led the acquisitions of eight industry-leading companies.

featuring > Rashid Skaf | CEO, AMX LLC | written by Greg Alexander


Skaf is the first to admit that acquisitions are “big, risky commitments of time, money and attention.” However, it sometimes makes more sense for a company to acquire an existing business, rather than build one from the ground up, when it is a question of faster time-to-market, access to unique technology, or strong market position or brand equity, he says.

“Any acquisition has to be measured against developing the same product and market position organically,” he says. Skaf admits he has purchased a couple of companies in the network media space where he didn’t expect to see real growth immediately but rather served as a foundation for the future.

To assess where the market is headed, Skaf starts with the drivers of his business: For all AMX markets, that revolves around the ways people will communicate, collaborate, educate and entertain five years from now.

“We are looking to understand how to provide the perfect experience for each market,” he says. “We play in a lot of different verticals, and each one will have different questions and answers—what is the perfect business meeting, the perfect classroom, the perfect government facility. Those represent our three major verticals.”

Traditionally, AMX had sold to integrators—intermediaries who would take the AMX technology, package it up with other products and then sell the packages to the end users. The integrators controlled the information on what the end users needed and why. To get the market insights on the outcomes customers were seeking, Skaf realized that AMX needed to talk directly to the end user.

While the company uses social media to collect feedback on current problems and products, AMX collects the bulk of its intelligence through roundtables with end users from its principal vertical markets, talking to them about what keeps them up at night. It conducts similar sessions with partners who help bring AMX products to market and the technology consultant community.

Skaf’s own experience has made it easier for him to lead AMX’s transformation, giving him the credibility he needs to gain support for his changes. He was once, as he puts it, “a bag-carrying sales guy,” who also holds 19 patents in his name. Before joining AMX in 2001, he previously lead the broadband wireless market for Nortel Networks Broadband Wireless Access as their VP and GM, which had acquired Broadband Networks, Inc., where he served as Executive Director.

He also held technical and management positions within several divisions of Ericsson, including its Network Systems and Point-to-Multipoint Microwave Communications Network divisions, as well as Ericsson Radio’s NMT and GSM divisions.

“ Failure or poor execution in any part of this can

SERIOUSLY jeopardize the company’s success. ”

To Skaf, success, such as AMX has enjoyed, can only come about when a company’s leadership is able to go above and beyond what people expect or realize they need, and then create marketing strategies to deliver upon those promises.

“The company’s mission is a broad and enduring statement of a company’s commitment to address the fundamental needs of its customers,” Skaf says. “But it is the marketing strategy, a level below, that translates that to the market. That’s why it’s so essential for the CEO to not just be involved but to be at the center of the action.”


Pete Hayes, Chief Sales Officer at Redwood City, California-based Equinix, knows more than a thing or two about tightening up the sales process.

He joined the giant data center operator and Internet exchange company a little over a year ago from Stamford, Connecticut-based Frontier Communications, where, as Executive Vice President, Commercial Sales and Support, he started three new business units and developed numerous products generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

What Hayes saw in his first months at Equinix, and had seen at other employers, were a lot of meetings, reports and processes that were not in sync, making it nearly impossible to get a consolidated, global view of the business.

“Every region, and in some cases, every country, had their own process,” notes Hayes. Some would forecast bookings that came from portal orders, others would forecast price increases. Still others would leave out both elements altogether. “You couldn’t roll it all up and make sense of it,” he says.

TAKE A CLOSER LOOKINSPECTING BIG DEALS IS PART OF THE PROCESS

featuring > Pete Hayes Chief Sales Officer, Equinixwritten by Aaron Bartels


continued

FIRST THINGS FIRST: IMPLEMENTING A NEW END-TO-END SALES PROCESS

As a first order of business at Equinix, Hayes implemented an end-to-end sales process customized to the business with proper levels of inspection at key stages along the way. “That was critical. We had to establish a standard language, cadence and process to get everyone on the exact same page,” he says. Hayes has always valued a detailed end-to-end process that allows the entire team to examine each stage of the sales process.

In large companies like Equinix, everything needs to roll up in an automated way. It took six months to bolt down the process he initiated last year. “And now our system just hums,” Hayes says. “We standardized all the dashboards, definitions, processes and cadence. We also collaborated with all the primary stakeholders incorporating their key suggestions to ensure proper buy-in.”

Every quarter, Hayes meets with the Equinix Board to review the forecast for the current and coming quarters. To be on his game, he relies on very specific steps in the Equinix Sales Process, a series of checks and balances, and a team of people that drill into the veracity and forecast details along the way.

It starts with requiring all salespeople to use salesforce.com to track all of their deals. “We hammer it home: ‘If it’s not in salesforce.com, it doesn’t exist,’” he says.

THE EQUINIX SALES PROCESS: FOUR KEY COMPONENTS

1 > Sales Review: Once a week, salespeople review their deals with their manager.

2 > CSO Review: Every two weeks, the Regional VP of Sales reviews the forecast with Hayes, including the big deals in every region around the world.

3 > Executive Review: Two days after that, Hayes reviews that forecast with the executive team.

4 > Board Review: Finally, once a quarter, Hayes presents the forecast to the board.

COMPONENT 1: WEEKLY PIPELINE REVIEW

During the Sales Review at Equinix, asking the right questions at each deal stage leads to greater success in hitting end-of-quarter numbers. For example:

Why does the customer need the product?

Do they have the funds committed?

Who is Equinix’s competition and what are they offering?

What is Equinix’s competitive advantage?

COMPONENT 2: BIWEEKLY VP OF SALES REVIEW

“In our two-week reviews, we focus on quarter-to-date performance and committed deals. Next we look at the upside…the big deals that can have a significant impact on the quarter…and determine if they’re on track,” says Hayes.

“If the team needs any help, we escalate to any part of the company to improve the odds of closure.”

Deal review represents a critical part of the forecasting process. As deals move through the funnel, regional sales managers and the regional presidents look at the deals to make sure they’re sound and priced right.

“Essentially, Equinix runs the forecasting and deal reviews in parallel,” Hayes explains. At various points they intersect, because the deals go from the approved deal review into the forecasting process.


COMPONENT 3: EXECUTIVE TEAMFORECAST REVIEWS

Hayes says the executive team review used to take more than 30 minutes, but because they’ve tightened up the process and put reporting systems in place, the conversation now takes 10 to 15 minutes tops. “We send the report in advance so the team can study it. During the meeting we discuss regional and global plans, show the ‘banana chart’ to view the trend, and we’re done.” The banana chart, a graphical representation, compares their real-time performance to the best and worst performance of the previous eight quarters.

On top of everything else, thoroughness is paramount. A lot of times, says Hayes, people move through the process too fast. “People will get the forecast in, take a look at it, say it looks okay, and then it’s ‘let’s move on,’” he says. “It’s a big mistake not to question deeply.”

To manage the unexpected during the final two weeks of the quarter, the Sales VPs do a tactical Quarterly Business Review (QBR) with sales and sales management, assuring a greater likelihood of meeting their numbers. “It gives us belt-and-suspenders coverage on our deals,” Hayes says.

During those final two weeks, the regions do a bit of a straddle: they micromanage the deals coming in over the next two weeks, while looking ahead to the first two weeks of the next quarter to see if they can pull something in.

COMPONENT 4: CSO PRESENTS FORECAST TO THE EQUINIX BOARD

Riding this strong foundation of reviews, checks and bal-ances, and drill-down analysis, Hayes presents the forecast to the Equinix Board toward the latter half of the quarter. This comprehensive end-to-end sales process makes for a smooth Board discussion with a high level of assurance and, importantly, with no end-of-quarter surprises.

NEXT ON THE HORIZON: ESTABLISHING A NEW EQUINIX CHANNEL PROGRAM

According to a leading business performance advisory company Corporate Executive Board, 57 percent of the purchase decision process gets completed before the customer’s first engagement with the sales organization. And consulting firm Forrester Research says that 65 percent of corporate customers are influenced by consultants whom they’re talking to while they’re making their decision. Factoring all of this in, Equinix astutely invested “very heavily” in the channel program over the last year.

“ And now our system just

HUMS. ”“When I came on board, we primarily focused on direct selling,” says Hayes. “Now we have also become a channel organization in very rapid order.”

By building a channel program, you get into the decision-making process earlier in the selling cycle. Plus it gives you visibility into the deals that you might not have on your own.

“We’ve set up an org structure where each region has channel leads and program managers focused on each of the major channel segments,” Hayes says. “When everything’s in place, it all just flows as part of the DNA of the company.”

“Of course sales leaders still need to drive channel just like they drive the direct business with a standard language, cadence and process.” You have to build a process that becomes part of the fabric of the company and lives on,” Hayes says.


As a marketing leader, are you limiting the value you provide by executing your marketing strategy

in a vacuum? Alignment of your strategy with corporate, product and sales strategies is where

value is unlocked. It is alignment that enables CMOs to drive the greatest contribution.

Alignment requires understanding the full strategy “stack” if you will. Your alignment to the corporate

strategy is the bedrock. A solid corporate strategy provides clear direction for allocating people,

money and time to generate goals. This goes well beyond mission, vision and value statements.

written by Vince KoehlerManaging Consultant, SBI

MARKETING STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

EXPERTINSIGHT


continued

The corporate strategy provides clear objectives in terms of revenue and growth. This always exists. What doesn’t always exist is the scope of the strategy. Which markets are targeted? Which industries and market segments do you compete in and which do you not? Finally, what product/service segments will you participate in?

The corporate strategy informs the product strategy. The product strategy is built to enable the corporate strategy to be successful by equipping the corporation with a product road map.

The product road map is built based on customer pain points and needs to be mapped to the corporate strategy targets, and results in producing products that target customers want to buy. It is from this foundation the marketing strategy is built upon.

The first step to aligning to the corporate strategy is gath-ering the written plan and background research. Often the strategies are multiyear plans. Seek out the strategic plan that launched the multiyear strategy. Devour the plan and supporting research. Schedule a time to sit down and review with the CEO, planning stakeholders and/or consulting firm.

Many times the corporate strategy will be written for a broad audience and may lack the depth you need. This requires in-depth meetings to understand the details behind strategy. Document what you capture and validate it with the CEO. Don’t forget to involve the head of product strategy. You want to be in lockstep with your peer in product management.

The target markets and segments of the corporate strategy should be aligned with the go-to-market plans. Campaigns should be cross-referenced to ensure they map up to the

targeted markets and segments. The campaign materials should be examined to validate they highlight the needs that are most prominent in the product strategy.

Marketing resources should be qualified against the targets in the corporate strategy. Marketing spend should be shifted to match the prioritized scheme from top to bottom.

Marketing tactics that can’t be aligned to the corporate strategy should be eliminated. Take caution to clearly communicate within the corporation why the tactics are being eliminated. This helps others in the company to align around the areas of focus.

Your peer in sales relies on the marketing strategy to build his/her own strategy. Just as the corporate and product strategies were an input to your strategy, so too is marketing’s strategy an input for the sales team.

The marketing strategy provides sales with key market segmentation necessary for field assignments. Work closely with your peer in sales to leverage your understanding of the market. Align efforts around campaigns and product launches. The marketing campaigns will be directed by the corporate strategy to focus on specific markets and segments. Campaign plans should be aligned with sales resource assignments and sales campaigns.

Be careful not to be a one-man hero. When facing a poor corporate and product strategy, your marketing team is exposed. Marketing leaders worth their salt are strategic thinkers. Therefore, you’ll reject the concept that marketing could be exposed to a poor corporate strategy. If you think you can bridge the gap of poor corporate and product strategy, then you are incurring a high degree of risk.

Reset your thinking. Your marketing strategy is vulnerable if it is not aligned with the product and corporate strategy. Furthermore, the corporate and product strategies must be solid or you are building your marketing strategy on a house of cards.

In summary, the strategic value chain includes Corporate > Product > Marketing > Sales > Operations strategies. Align your marketing strategy through a step approach by looking up and down to unlock the full value of your strategy.

CUSTOMER

SALES

OPERATIONS

CORPORATE

PRODUCT

MARKETING

REVENUE GROWTH STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT


Taking your car to the body shop isn’t something anybody looks forward to doing.

Yet Greg Clark knew it was his job to make Lewisville, Texas-based Caliber Collision Centers, one of the country’s largest collision repair companies, exactly the kind of place where you’d want to bring your business after an accident.

Clark, who joined Caliber in 2010 as Senior Vice President of Marketing, faced a rather unique problem for someone in that role. While Caliber is a large company — currently with 248 locations and 5,400 employees — it had no branding to speak of.

There were no posters on the walls of the Caliber’s collision repair shops, no brochures for the customers, no codified procedures for the customer service staff. Nothing.

“We were well behind the industry,” says Clark. “It was a fascinating opportunity to take the brand to a whole new level.”

Caliber and Clark did have a few things working in their favor. The management team understood that they were in the service business, and that they just happened to repair cars. They understood that the customer was as important as the car, and had worked out a unique way to express this purpose as “restoring the rhythm of your life.”

“This is a powerful and unique brand positioning statement,” says Clark.

Unfortunately, without a substantial marketing effort, no one outside the organization was likely to ever hear that phrase or read it. To bring the statement to life, Clark had to

ensure that Caliber fulfilled its mission in every interaction with its customers. Clark conducted a detailed touch-point analysis to figure out what happened when customers came into contact with Caliber, and to compare those interactions to those of their competitors.

There was lots of room for improvement, he learned. At the very beginning of a potential customer relationship, when a driver called Caliber, the call center staff needed to be consistent with their empathetic messaging.

“When someone calls you after they’ve been in an accident, the first thing you should ask them is, ‘Are you okay?’” says Clark. In retrospect, this sounds obvious, but the call center staff needed to consistently start each conversation this way.

Then, Clark made sure the call center staff asked them about their needs: What did the vehicle owner want to do in terms of getting the car repaired? When would they like to come in? If a suitable appointment time was not available at the preferred location, the call center employee was told to direct the customer to another convenient location.

“Some people want a location near their home, and others near work,” says Clark.

CRASH COURSEHow Caliber Collision Scored Big byRepairing the Customer Experience

featuring > Greg Clark Sr. VP of Marketing, Caliber Collisionwritten by Vince Koehler


Caliber’s physical facilities didn’t always make a good impression, either. “We took down signage that had been up for years,” says Clark. “There were no real plants or flowers. There’d be a couple of landscape paintings on the wall. We took all that stuff down.”

Caliber’s locations had been acquired over a number of years, so it wasn’t as if they all were stamped out in exactly the same way. Clark took photos of one location that looked good, and asked everyone else to copy it. Clark told them where to put the popcorn machine, where the television and seating should be, and which way the television should be facing.

Then Clark produced a series of eight different Caliber-branded posters, with themes such as “Restoring the rhythm of your life,” or “Your car’s road to recovery.” “It’s a simple thing, but every competitor or paint company had signs with 68 steps to how your car is going to get repaired. It needs to be 10 steps for the customer to truly understand how we get their vehicle back to pre-accident condition,” says Clark.

“ We are never satisfied when it comes to

CUSTOMER satisfaction. ”

He also had warranty posters made up and counter cards communicating Caliber’s satisfaction guarantee, payment options, and a request for a favorable review on Yelp or Google. He also produced estimate and delivery brochures for customer paperwork and receipts while reminding customers of Caliber’s unique differences as they restore them to the rhythm of their lives.

Staff uniforms got upgraded as well. Employees had been wearing long-sleeved blue shirts that could be uncomfortable in the summer; now they wear blue or black polo shirts with blue or black trousers.

Importantly, Greg made sure Caliber continued to stay in touch with customers while their car was being worked on. After all, for a customer, dropping off the car is just the beginning of a long, anxious process.

Caliber was one of the first collision repair companies to test and adopt a text or email messaging system to keep customers informed throughout the repair process along with collecting customer satisfaction surveys vs. phone calls in the not-too-distant past.

Caliber also reaches out to promoters through social media, filling its Facebook page with accolades about its staff or news about its charity work. Caliber has 22 videos on YouTube and counting, and the marketing team posts to Twitter three to four times a day.

Clark sends out a monthly email newsletter to customers, even though his repeat purchase cycle is a whopping 6.5 years. Still, Clark says, his email open rates are better than the industry average.

To measure his and Caliber’s progress, Clark uses the Net Promoter Score, which asks how likely customers are to recommend a product or service to friends and/or family. The percentage of customers who indicate a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale are then reduced by the percentage of customers who indicate a 1 to 6. Hence, a “net” promoter score.

Today, Clark says Caliber Collision has a Net Promoter Score in the mid 80s. That’s pretty impressive considering that it compares to Net Promoter Scores of 78 percent for Costco, 76 percent for Apple and 75 percent for Nordstrom.

Not that Clark is satisfied. “We are shooting to be in the top 25 percent of Net Promoter Scores in the industry across every market we serve,” he says. “We measure every location every month, month in and month out. We are never satisfied when it comes to customer satisfaction.”


How does sales operations work to improve sales productivity and effectiveness without becoming the dumping ground for any task that sits outside of the core selling roles? At Thomson Reuters—a company that employs 57,000 people and generates $12.5 billion in annual revenue—sales operations is far from a function that’s merely cobbled together.

“We have a very structured organizational model and a strategic and collaborative approach to sales ops,” says Lee Wood, Senior Vice President of Global Sales Operations, Planning and Strategy for the company’s Intellectual Property and Science business unit.

With 30 years of experience developing and executing sales strategies in the business information industry, Wood knows the value of deliberate design.

It all starts with team structure. At Reuters, the sales effectiveness and development group provides all sales manager training, and creates online content for the learning management system. While training of the sales force is a classic sales enablement function, Reuters has a certain sales methodology and is focused on sales manager development.

“Our trainers are very close to the sales organization, and as a group we are well coordinated with the sales organization and report to the head of sales and service for our unit.”

Then there’s the “catch-all” team, which includes contract administration; sales performance analysis and reporting; incentives, compensation, design, management and administration; and customer relationship management.

“We support all our users on the CRM, and manage all the demand for CRM improvements,” says Wood.

The Program Management Capability team focuses on overseeing annual planning and the quarterly reports. It also handles special projects, such as acclimating new clients to company procedures. “We aim to make sure everyone knows the project management basics, so we’re putting everyone — in whatever capacity — through project management 101,” Wood says.

Next, Wood emphasizes sound strategic planning with four goals in mind:

> Deliver on internal and external customer requirements > Enable growth, retention and scale > Achieve operational excellence> Enhance organizational effectiveness

“With our leadership team, we have a view about the things we need to continue to do to drive improvements in all of those areas,” Wood says. This year, in addition to “our top-down perspective on what we need to do and drive, we’ve gathered all of the inputs — bottom up — from all of the people who work in our respective teams within sales ops,” Wood says.

Once input is collected and projects are sized up against strategic imperatives, each project is prioritized.

“At any given year, we’ll have more than 50 projects,” Wood says. In order to stick to a well-coordinated strategy, they put projects into three buckets: Must, High and Plus. “Then we try to achieve 90 percent of the projects in ‘Must,’ 75 percent in ‘High,’ and 50 percent in ‘Plus.’” Lastly, the team leaves room to accommodate the inevitable project nobody forecasted.

“We’ve got to create capacity to create other things,” Wood says. “It’s the other things that throw the curveball. It’s having the capacity to deal with the unknown projects that will come our way, and they will.”

REPORTING:

Reporting provides the executive leadership team with the necessary information to make critical decisions going forward. “We work closely with sales leadership, forming mutual respect and trust,” Wood says. To develop a standard template for reporting their performance, both year-to-date and year-to-go with forecast projections, they did a lot of huddling over best practices.

A standard monthly report and a standard monthly business review satisfy the needs of sales leadership without creating too much administrative overhead.

“It’s about keeping the format succinct and clear,” he says. “And it’s about continual improvement.”

KEEP SALES OPS FROM BECOMING

SALES OOPS WITH A SOUND STRATEGY

written by Mike Drapeau


Sales enablement is happening in every organization today, in some form or another. At Cambridge,

Massachusetts-based Pegasystems, a global enterprise software company that created the Pega

platform, a Business Process Management (BPM) tool, Rick Balkind, Senior Manager of Sales

Enablement and Methodology, is turning the function into a higher-order imperative.

HOW PEGASYSTEMS IS TAKING SALES ENABLEMENT TO THE

NEXT LEVEL

“We’re figuring out how to move from random acts of enablement to a more coordinated effort,” he says.

Ten years ago, Pegasystems’s sales enablement function consisted of one member of the sales operations team responsible for on-board training. Since then, the company has grown from a budding star in BPM employing less than 500 people to a market leader for strategic applications in marketing, sales, customer service and back-office operations with more than 2,500 employees and an estimated $500 million in revenue. And the sales enablement team has grown, too, evolving into a team of seven that includes a director, a logistics person and instructors.

Moreover, Pegasystems has established ways for the entire organization—not just those employees with the word “sales” in their titles—to support enablement. The company has a cross-functional leadership team, with leaders from product management, marketing, sales and customer service that meets quarterly to review the company’s objectives and to figure out how to support them, contributing to the overall enablement effort while staying in alignment with one another.

“Essentially, we’re looking to row in the same direction,” Balkind says. That direction, for now, is toward pipeline growth. The aim is to accelerate the 20 percent growth the company has witnessed for the last six to seven years.

“Our pipeline is not growing at the same pace as our revenue,” he points out. “In order to meet our long-term revenue growth plan, we need to have the pipe at the right size. We want to turn up the dial.” written by Mike Drapeau

“ We’re figuring out how to move from random acts of enablement to a more coordinated effort. ”


continued

So, going into a new quarter, how does the enablement team know it’s having an impact across the sales force? At Pegasystems, Balkind is driving their number one initiative — pipeline development — by scoring individual rep account plans every six months.

“We like to think if it’s not measured, it’s not managed,” Balkind says. He describes a 1–5 scale, 25-point grading system across five key areas — sales and on-boarding, customer service, operations, the Pega platform and marketing — aimed at productively using white space.

“We want to see that white space get filled in over time with active opportunities, and we’re measuring that,” he says.

“We let six months go by, look at the AE, and if the scores aren’t great? We actively partner with the account teams to find white-space opportunities.”

Pegasystems’s approach to getting the right training and content into the hands of the right reps at the right time and place begins with ensuring adoption of its programs. But getting consistent rep performance, or even overcoming resistance to adoption, can be challenging.

“ Essentially, we’re looking to row in the

SAME direction. ”

The solution? “Know your audience,” Balkind says. “We customized our programs to align with the particular expectations and needs of what we identified as three manager personas: the very savvy, seasoned managers who are new to our organization; managers promoted from within, with lots of experience with the company; and new hires or salespeople newly promoted into managers.” This way, seasoned managers have more freedom to apply all their knowledge experience within a designed framework, while new hires benefit from more prescriptive programs providing all the structure needed for success.

“We’ve come a long way,” Balkind says. “Where I see sales enablement going from here is morphing from a ‘some point in time’ type of exercise to ‘enablement surrounds the rep.’” In other words, that means proactively pushing content, making suggestions and adding the intelligence “so that reps don’t have to hunt and peck and search for anything they need but everything is dynamically pushed to them in the context of the sales opportunity in which they’re working.”

“Our challenge,” Balkind says, “is to help build the systems and infrastructure to support that.”


THE NEW INFLUENCERS www.SalesBenchmarkIndex.com/MattSharrers

MATT

SHARRERS

ADVISOR TO PRIVATE

EQUITY INVESTORS.

Documents

CIO, Cigna · the Chief Information Officer at Cigna, one of the world’s largest health care companies with $32 billion in annual sales, Dr. Boxer buys approximately $1 billion