Sales Training Success: IB Successfully Defines a Unified Sales Process that Results in Improved Qualification, More Efficient Performance and a Customer-Centered Approach to Selling.
Key Players
Sales Manager, Managing Director, Marketing and Communication
Goal
IB, a leader in enterprise asset management systems based in Italy, dealt with the primary issue of expanding the customer portfolio. The goal was to achieve this expansion through a more productive and efficient sales approach and a unified, company-wide sales process.
Current Situation
The IB executive team consisting of Gabriele Romanin, Sales Manager, Stefano Landini, Managing Director, and Caterina Cerrini, Marketing and Communication, began working with Iano Cobianchi, a CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS®) Business Partner in 2012 to improve performance of IB’s sales organization and implement a single sales process. In order to achieve the goal of an expanded customer portfolio, a specific challenge Mr. Romanin identified included:
- IB’s sales approach was neither structured nor harmonized. Some of their salespeople tried to improve their knowledge and skills on their own through reading, monitoring competition, or just learning on the job. Some tried to learn by attending Webinars or lessons on the Web. Others attended different, dedicated workshops held by other trainers or schools. None of these efforts proved successful or sustaining for the sales team, which affected overall performance.
Capabilities Needed
After a careful analysis of the sales organization, Mr. Romanin and Iano concluded he needed to provide his team with the following capabilities:
- A unified and consistent, repeatable sales process, that: 1) IB’s salespeople can be taught to execute with confidence; 2) sales management can be taught to monitor, coach, and inspect; 3) represents IB’s best sales practices.
- Sales tools/templates via CustomerCentric (Sales Ready) Messaging® that allows salespeople to converse/diagnose the prospect’s business issues, allowing the prospect to visualize the solution with a bias towards IB’s offerings and capabilities.
- The ability to better qualify the pipeline with real prospects, which results in greater efficiency of time and financial resources.
After attending the sales training workshop, CustomerCentric Selling® provided IB with all of these capabilities that addressed Mr. Romanin’s goals, helping to significantly improve sales performance and expand the customer portfolio. The key components and tools of the CCS® sales process that have proved especially helpful to IB’s sales organization include:
1) The entire “logical path” of the sales process that CCS® provides to interact with the client. According to IB, this is the most powerful tool, and one they most needed. Being able to organize the job in a new way, while respecting some few basic but clear rules helped salespeople improve their daily work.
2) The five CCS® Qualification Criteria (Key Players, Goal, Solution, Value, Transition) to continually determine if opportunities are worth pursuing.
3) Proposal Withdrawal Strategy
“The very first lesson we learned was: ‘bad news early is good news.’ For us this was the beginning of change.
CCS® helps you look deep inside your way of selling and discover your typical mistakes, like insisting to work on unqualified prospects, that is useless and disheartening. Then you learn to work seriously at your ability to ‘listen’, another CCS® fundamental, and stop doing the typical ‘Spray and Pray’ that so many salespeople have been trained to do!”
–Gabriele Romanin, Sales Manager, IB
Results:
- Defining a homogeneous way of working within the sales unit, with more structure and focus, yet flexible and adaptable to a variety of circumstances.
- Better acceptance by customers when presenting and discussing the IB offering using a customer-centric approach to create their vision of a solution.
- Considerable cut in time and travel expenses due to business trips being restricted to only qualifiedopportunities.
- Improved pipeline quality through the withdrawal of unqualified proposals and the input of more qualified new prospects.
Customer Closeup
For over 30 years, IB has been exclusively dedicated to the development and the implementation of enterprise asset management systems, as well as the complementary, specialist consultancy. IB offers specific solutions and tools to satisfy the widest needs of technical management, in any business area. Learn more at http://www.gruppo-ib.com/
For any questions about this case study or client, please contact CCS® Business Partner, Iano Cobianchi: icobianchi@customercentric.com.
About CustomerCentric Selling® – The Sales Training Company
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.
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 email Jill Perez: jperez@customercentric.com.