Sales Training Success: ILOG increases average revenue per customer and reduces number of losses with CustomerCentric Selling®.
Key Players
VP of Sales, VP of Marketing
Goals
Due to market trends and changes in the software industry, ILOG was required to develop and implement more customer-centric sales, marketing strategies and tactics. CustomerCentric Selling® began working with ILOG’s VP of Sales and VP of Marketing, to mutually identify the potential of achieving several ambitious goals:
- Scale the business by 25%, year-over-year, even in a soft economy.
- Increase the productivity of the average Account Manager.
- Increase Sales Management effectiveness.
- Gain early visibility into forecasted opportunities.
- Develop sales-ready messaging that can be used throughout the entire sales process.
Current Situation
Working with Ben Zoldan, CustomerCentric Selling® Business Partner, ILOG began assessing their current sales and marketing environment to identify the issues and obstacles preventing them from achieving their goals.
They quickly identified that there was a large variance between top performers and the rest of the field sales force; therefore, they were overly dependent on the sales efforts of a small fraction of the field. They also identified new trends in the market: (1) More vendors had entered into the rapidly growing Business Rules Management Systems market, creating greater competition with the majority of their opportunities and (2) that they broadened their selling efforts from selling to highly technical buyers, to include executive level business and IT decision makers, some of whom are ‘non-technical.’
Capabilities Needed
ILOG needed a way to codify its top performers’ behaviors and map those best practices into a repeatable sales process that rest of the sales team could follow.
As part of implementing this process, ILOG needed auditable sales process milestones that would enable management to more accurately forecast the business at the opportunity level. They also needed to develop marketing messages that would yield two critical results: First, messages needed to be delivered that were more than feature/function-oriented and second, these messages needed to better integrate with the new sales process, resulting in greater use by the field and higher effectiveness of marketing investments. Finally, all of this needed to be delivered in a training workshop for their Sales, Pre-Sales, Marketing and Professional Services staff.
CustomerCentric Selling® was able to successfully meet all these needs for ILOG, resulting in many benefits. After working with CustomerCentric Selling® and Ben to deliver these capabilities, ILOG experienced positive results that included the following:
- Significant reduction in discounting due to better understanding of value to prospect.%
- Reduced number of losses due to better understanding of prospect needs and higher level contacts earned.
- Increased average revenue per customer
- Create a common language used by everyone inside ILOG to articulate product attributes and customer uses.
- Improved visibility into sales pipeline earlier in sales cycle due to higher-level contacts and auditable sales process milestones
Customer Closeup
ILOG, Inc. is in the business of helping its customers operate more effectively, improve return on application investments and increase operational efficiencies. They do this by selling, marketing and deploying business rule, optimization and visualization software with associated professional services. ILOG products are used by thousands of software developers and indirectly by millions of end-users in financial, telecommunications, manufacturing, transportation, defense and other industries.
In the late 1980’s, ILOG’s founders realized that software code reuse was a prized, but largely elusive goal and pioneered the first commercially available, highly functional software components. Developers, systems integrators and independent software vendors were then able to reduce development time and costs by constructing large portions of applications with modular code elements. In the early days of implementing these modular, reusable components, ILOG focused upon technology and gained skill in articulating technical benefits to technical customers. As ILOG gained share and product adoption grew, customers began to realize significant benefits–in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars.
More information on ILOG can be found at www.ilog.com
If you have questions about this client, please contact Ben Zoldan at bzoldan@customercentric.com.
Results:
- Increased average revenue per customer
- Reduced number of losses
- Improved visibility into the sales pipeline earlier into the sales cycle
- Creation of a common language that can be used throughout the organization
- Significant reduction in discounting
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 Raython have deployed CCS® worldwide. For more information, vist www.customercentric.com, or call Jill Perez at 800.993.1228, ext.706.