Sales Training Success: Knovel sales team achieves over 200% growth over the prior year by successfully utilizing the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology.
Key Player
VP of Global Sales
Goal
Founded in 2000, Knovel is a private company headquartered in New York City. Knovel’s Web-based application integrates technical information with analytical and search tools to drive innovation and deliver answers engineers can trust.
John Dooley, Vice President of Global Sales, approached Gary Walker, Co-founder of CustomerCentric Selling®, and CustomerCentric Selling® Business Partner, Jim Naro, to obtain his assistance in achieving his goal of improving the performance of his sales organization so that he could meet Knovel’s revenue objectives.
Current Situation
Some of the difficulties they identified were:
- There was no common sales process that sales people followed when engaging with prospective clients. This made it very difficult to provide skill and opportunity coaching.
- Sales people spent the majority of their time speaking with contacts who often weren’t empowered to buy Knovel services.
- The conversations were often feature/function discussions.
- Sales people were relying on a ‘demonstration’ of Knovel’s offering to generate interest.
- They were performing product demonstrations, issuing proposals early, and hoping they would close.
- This all resulted in inaccurate sales forecasting, long sales cycles, and many good opportunities being lost to ‘no decision’.
Capabilities Needed
After a careful analysis of the sales organization and its current performance, John concluded he needed to provide 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) represents Knovel’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 an engineering executive’s business issues with bias toward Knovel’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 Knovel’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 Knovel with all of these capabilities.
“CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS™) has helped us to dramatically optimize our sales performance by bringing our salespeople onto the same page with regards to how we sell, the language we use and the process we follow.”
–John Dooley,
VP of Global Sales, Knovel
Customer Closeup
Knovel offers an unmatched depth and breadth of validated engineering content, selected from a network of trusted publishers and societies and delivered to engineers quickly and with extreme precision. Using Knovel, engineers not only easily find relevant data, but they can also analyze, document and incorporate it into their everyday work. Knovel has global recognition as a trusted provider of online technical information. Knovel is used by engineers at more than 600 organizations worldwide including:
- 73 Fortune 500 companies
- 8 of the top 15 Engineering Design companies
- 6 of the top 10 super-majors in the Oil & Gas Industry
- 7 of the top 10 Aerospace and Defense firms
- 12 of the top 15 engineering schools in the US
For more information, please visit: http://www.knovel.com/
Results:
Since implementing CustomerCentric Selling® under John’s solid sales leadership, his organization has been able to accomplish the following:
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- Length of the sales cycle has been reduced by 20%.
- The average transaction size doubled, making it a record year in generating new subscription revenue.
- 50% of their business closed without a trial. Achieved over 200% growth over the prior year sales
- Successful development, implementation and adoption of a single, sales process
- Consistent set of tools and vernacular for sales organization to follow
- Optimized sales performance and significant increase in revenue
- Improved pipeline management and opportunity qualification
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.