Sales Training Success: CustomerCentric Selling® Enables QlikTech to Improve Sales Performance with Impressive Results
Key Player
VP of Global Operations
Goal and Current Situation
Prior to working with CustomerCentric Selling® Business Partner, Dan Ahrens, QlikTech’s primary challenge was to evolve their organization to their next level of growth within a soft economy. Their go-to-market strategy was far too product-centric rather than customer-centric, which inhibited their sales organization from partnering with prospects and clients as consultants through meaningful conversations.
By recreating their process to be more customer-centric and value-based, salespeople would be enabled to offer solutions to clients rather than simply selling products, which was not producing the revenue results needed to grow and support their strategic objectives. QlikTech had a specific strategy to “land and expand” within their targeted industries, and yet their internal process and methodology were not enabling that strategy to be executed to its fullest potential, especially when dealing with larger competitors in the marketplace. Their primary goal was to implement a single, repeatable sales process that would help them increase revenue and improve sales performance.
Why CustomerCentric Selling®?
QlikTech chose to invest in CustomerCentric Selling® due in part to what the executive team realized was a need to align their organization around a common process and methodology that would enable them to execute on their existing go-to-market strategy more effectively. Specifically, they wanted to enable their sales and marketing organizations to function in concert with each other, and arm their salespeople with the selling skills and tools needed to increase their average deal size without significantly lengthening their sales cycles. They trusted CustomerCentric Selling® because of its value-based approach that proved to be in perfect alignment with the company culture that the executive team had worked so hard to establish and leverage in running their growing organization.
Capabilities Needed
After a careful analysis of the sales organization and its current performance, QlikTech concluded it needed to provide the sales team with the following capabilities:
- A consistent, repeatable sales process, that: 1) sales people can be taught to execute; 2) management can be taught to monitor, coach, and inspect; 3) represents QlikTech’s best sales practices.
- New business development strategies and tactics designed to provide multiple points of entry into a single account at the executive level so they could engage with the individuals who had the business need and the authority to purchase their products and services.
- Sales tools/templates and messaging that combined application knowledge by job title that allowed sales people to converse and diagnose executive’s business issues with bias toward QlikTech’s offerings capabilities.
- A consistent pipeline grading system that allowed sales management to prepare a sales forecast and calculate close probabilities based on progress through QlikTech’s sales process.
- The ability to define with the prospect, the steps in the evaluation process, what has to happen and when, that would allow the prospect to make an informed purchase decision, shorten the sales cycle, and eliminate no decisions.
CustomerCentric Selling® provided QlikTech with all of these capabilities.
“Implementing CustomerCentric Selling® as a business process has helped us to establish a better measurement system for territory and account planning, and for pipeline health and analysis. As we grow, we are leveraging our sales process to ultimately ensure a more consistent and efficient way of operating.”
–Joe Francis, VP of Global Operations, QlikTech Inc.
“CCS™ has provided us with a common language which we use across the business to discuss our pipeline and sales opportunities. This consistency has allowed us to take stronger control of our pipeline management and our sales cycles. By driving professional execution against a world class sales process, we have been able to improve forecast accuracy, generate a higher quality pipeline, and provide our customers with stronger value propositions that close in clearly defined timescales whilst allowing us to close more revenue.”
–Richard Timperlake,
SVP of Worldwide Sales,
QlikTech Inc.
Customer Close-up
QlikTech was founded on the belief that business intelligence (BI) should be about business users. Traditional BI solutions have become bloated, complex software stacks, leaving users confused and frustrated. For 18 years, QlikTech has focused on simplifying decision making for business users across organizations. We pioneered new approaches to accessing, managing, and interacting with data. Our QlikView Business Discovery platform is recognized as a groundbreaking solution. Combined with a relentless focus on customer success and a vibrant, passionate user community, it’s no wonder more than 18,000 companies in over 100 countries use QlikView, with an industry-leading 96% satisfaction rate. For more information about QlikTech, please see: http://www.qlikview.com/
Results:
- 80% productivity increase year over year
- Successful development, implementation and adoption of a single, sales process
- 50% revenue growth year over year
- Consistent set of tools and vernacular for sales organization to follow
- Three times the growth in pipeline year over year
- Optimized sales performance and significant increase in revenue
- Improved pipeline management and opportunity qualification
- Five times as many deals over $100K
- Ability to have meaningful conversations with key players to address and diagnose goals, problems and needs
About CustomerCentric Selling®
CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS®) is a proven methodology for predictably improving revenue growth and sales performance. Founded in 2002, CCS® helps clients worldwide to implement repeatable, auditable and scalable sales processes that, when combined with Sales Ready Messaging®, guides marketing and sales to have meaningful conversations with customers and prospects. This results in winning high-value deals, retaining and growing client relationships and improving the predictability and accuracy of sales forecasts.
CustomerCentric Selling® is regularly named to the Top Sales Training Companies list. Clients such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Business Objects, Rockwell Automation, EMC and Raytheon have deployed CCS® worldwide. For more information, visit www.customercentric.com or call Jill Perez at +1.800.993.1228, ext 706.