Sales Training Success: CustomerCentric Selling® Helps acrolinx Unify and Standardize the Sales Process
Key Player
VP of Sales and General Manager for North America
Goal
acrolinx develops technology for Information Quality Management. Their flagship product acrolinx IQ is an enterprise system that promotes quality and efficiency during content development and gives writers access to best practice writing standards, terminology and intelligent reuse of existing content. The tools provided by acrolinx IQ improve productivity, decrease localization costs and accelerate time to market. Tony Ehrens, Vice President of Sales and General Manager for North America, was not new to CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS®) when he approached Co-founder Gary Walker for assistance in reaching his business objectives for acrolinx. Tony has extensive entrepreneurial experience and had successfully implemented the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology at Red Dot Solutions prior to joining acrolinx. At Red Dot, Tony was able to achieve record sales performance that helped significantly grow the business using the CCS® sales process. His goal was to improve sales performance and increase revenue.
Current Situation
Some of the difficulties Tony expressed were:
- There was no common sales process that salespeople followed when engaging with prospective clients. Each person brought with them their own idea of what the sales process should be, if one was even followed. This made growing the business a key challenge since sales performance was neither optimal nor efficient.
- Since there was no single sales process in place, each salesperson spoke their own language which made communicating opportunities difficult.
- A need for all teams within the organization to standardize efforts in parallel with one another in order to be jointly successful as a business.
- The salespeople did not know how to accurately forecast opportunities which resulted in poor pipeline management.
- A need for relevant messaging to better communicate with the target audience and be able to effectively have conversations with prospective clients.
Capabilities Needed
After a careful analysis of the sales organization and its current performance, Tony concluded he needed to build the framework for acrolinx’s success by providing his 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) marketing can support with sales ready messaging to better align and remain in sync with sales; 4) represents acrolinx’s best sales practices.
- Bring the entire organization, including the CEO and senior executive team, sales, service, and marketing onto one page using the same vernacular and language, following the single process using the CCS™ methodology.
- Sales tools/templates – messaging – that combines application knowledge by job title that allows salespeople to converse and diagnose the prospect’s business issues with bias toward acrolinx’s offerings and capabilities.
- Arm the sales team with effective sales skills to better manage opportunities for more accurate forecasting.
- A consistent pipeline grading system that allowed sales management to prepare a sales forecast and calculate close probabilities based on progress through acrolinx’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® is providing acrolinx with all of these capabilities to better meet their revenue and business goals and ultimately, drive sales.
“CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS™) is a great foundation for establishing a single language and process that the entire organization can follow, from the executive level to sales and marketing. I strongly believe and stand by the CCS™ methodology which has worked for me before and is why I’ve chosen it again now. Simply put, CCS™ works.”
–Tony Ehrens,
General Manager and VP of Sales for North America, Acrolinx
Results:
- Single, repeatable sales process that can be easily followed by the entire organization
- Set of consistent tools for all teams to use with the same vernacular to speak a common language
- Optimized sales performance to effectively drive sales and grow the business
- Improved pipeline and opportunity management for more accurate forecasting
Customer Closeup
acrolinx develops technology for Information Quality Management. Their flagship product acrolinx IQ is an enterprise system that promotes quality and efficiency during content development. acrolinx IQ gives writers access to best practice writing standards, terminology and intelligent reuse of existing content. The tools provided by acrolinx IQ improve productivity, decrease localization costs and accelerate time to market. Companies including Adobe, Cisco, IBM, Philips, Siemens and many more, rely on acrolinx IQ for managing information quality.For more information, please visit: http://www.acrolinx.com/
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.