Sales Training Success: Bonitasoft achieves sales success with CustomerCentric Selling®, improving customer satisfaction, renewal rate and increasing upsell.
Key Player
Vice President of Engineering/COO/Co-founder of Bonitasoft
Goals
To improve overall business success after five years of steady growth, the Bonitasoft team wanted to both increase win rate and ensure that customers stay with them over the long term. That meant not just winning customers, but also ensuring that their projects with Bonita were successful.
Challenges
Prior to implementing CCS®, Bonitasoft’s prior sales process was very much limited to the Sales and Marketing teams.
- They were very successful at pulling a lot of volume into their pipeline, but the consequence was a lot of open opportunities that their Sales team could not possibly all treat appropriately.
- They were also mostly focused on selling on price, rather than on the value of the product. They suspected that they were missing some key opportunities due to too much volume, and that they were onboarding some customers whose internal capabilities may not have been well aligned for their project success.
- Bonitasoft has a highly technical product that fits a very wide variety of organizational needs around the world. They were seeing some of their smaller customers struggling internally to allocate skilled resources to support their projects, either because they didn’t know those resources would be required or because they did not have enough of those resources. As a consequence, now a key dimension of target qualification is assessment of the technical team skills and resources.
It might also be worth noting that Bonitasoft implemented CCS® just after the Key Player, Charles Souillard, moved from a strictly technical position (Chief Technical Officer) to Chief Operations Officer (COO) with responsibility for Sales. CCS® provided an ideal cross-training opportunity to expand his “start-up founder’s” skill set. Successfully taking a company from start-up to grown-up requires both management development and growth.
Capabilities Needed
- The Bonitasoft team felt that they were missing a clearly defined process for targeting, acquiring, and keeping customers. They needed to better define their target and needed the sales team to understand how to really qualify if an opportunity fell within that target.
- Because they saw some of their customers struggling with their projects, they learned that the first key dimension of “target qualification” is the technical team skills and resources available for the project.
- Organizationally, Bonitasoft felt that they needed everyone – not just the Sales team – to align, to work together to keep value in the center of their business, and to do this, required a common language to communicate across the company.
- Ultimately, they determined that they needed a “value-centric approach” and decided that CCS® was the methodology most suitable that they chose to apply.
CCS® provided Bonitasoft with all of these required capabilities.
VP of Engineering/COO/Co-founder
Bonitasoft
Benefits Realized
CCS® provided Bonitasoft with a process that enabled them to better focus on what matters. One result of that is that they have better positioned their product in the market. They are now more appropriately filling their pipeline, and have a clearer vision of what’s in it. They are able to better qualify opportunities appropriately, and as a result their customers buy Bonita because they both better understand what and how can be realized with the technology (value).
CCS® helped articulate a common vision with a common language that enabled Bonitasoft to focus the entire company on the value of Bonita – not just Sales and Marketing, but also Customer Support, Customer Success, Services, and even R&D. Bonitasoft is a technical company, and their product is software – but their developers no longer talk just about developing individual features. The practice of applying User Stories has enabled them to focus now on the benefit they deliver to end-users.
Bonitasoft’s goals are now enforced by the process. As a result, they are seeing both better sales success and increased customer satisfaction with Bonita. Their renewal rate is progressing and upsell is growing.
Tangible Results:
- Six months ago, they nearly lost a customer who decided to move to another vendor rather than upgrade their version of Bonita. Using CCS®, they correctly identified the issue, found the right offer to bring real value, and the internal resources they called on to win the deal were appropriate for all parties.
- When asked for a support extension over the anticipated transition period, the Bonitasoft team carefully explored their situation with them. They were able to make a set of high value recommendations for changes on their platform to enable them to reach their target numbers, and helped them upgrade instead of simply maintaining support. Customer Success & Support teams played a huge role in this deal managed by Sales, as did Professional Services and R&D, with detailed and custom guidance from many perspectives.
- This single deal represents one of the biggest wins they have realized as a unified team with CCS®. This customer said their customer service is of “very high quality.”
- Customer satisfaction and the improved customer buying experience has become a recognized Bonitasoft differentiator, with this particular case and with many others.
Customer Closeup
Bonitasoft builds a BPM-based application platform to create great business applications without the cost and rigidity of long, unpredictable custom development cycles. With the Bonita platform, developers build “living” business applications that can be modified in real-time.
Bonitasoft was founded in Grenoble, France in 2009 by the three creators of the Bonita BPM software project. With its flagship software in laboratory development since 2001, the company’s launch was accelerated by three rounds of investment funding (totaling $22.5M). Bonitasoft released its first version of Bonita (Bonita Open Solution 5) within 6 months and since then has released 2 major versions with at least 2 updates each year.
Bonita BPM is available in open source and subscription editions – subscriptions include extensive support, training, and advanced features to accelerate application development and secure deployments for enterprise-wide and critical projects.
With more than 1000 customers in 75 countries, and its open source community of more than 120,000, Bonitasoft is the fastest-growing provider of process-based application software in the world. It maintains its R&D facility in Grenoble France and its head office in Paris, with offices in New York and San Francisco.
For more information, please visit: http://www.bonitasoft.com/
Charles Souillard
As VP of Engineering, COO, and co-founder of Bonitasoft, Charles leads the Bonitasoft product development, sales, and presales organizations. Prior to launching Bonitasoft, he was head of the Bonita core development team within Bull Information Systems. Charles has significant experience developing mission critical applications with BPM and SOA technologies and serves on a number of European Community projects. Charles holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Polytech de Grenoble.
Questions About This Success Story?
Please contact CCS® Certified Business Partner, Jean-Marc Bellot at jbellot@customercentric.com or +33 (0) 6 80 75 75 02.
About CustomerCentric Selling® – The Sales Training Company
CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS®) specializes in world-class sales training. 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 CustomerCentric Messaging® (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.
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