Sales Training Success: RedDot sees a 19-day reduction in their sales cycle, a $30,000 increase in an average sale and improved revenue.
Key Player
VP of North America Sales
Goals
Tony Ehrens is VP of RedDot’s North American Sales who began evaluating sales methodologies when finding CCS®. The primary goals defined by the executive team included improving the sales pipeline and revenue performance.
Current Situation
The challenges they faced in reaching their goals were:
- Little or no proactive business development/ prospecting was being initiated. Sales people were spending the majority of their time responding to inbound inquiries rather than developing new leads.
- Because they were responding to inbound inquiries from, in many cases, information gatherers, the company’s sales people spent a great deal of time selling to a single individual who did not have the power to buy
- The majority of sales people were comfortable talking about and showing their product, but often neglected talking about how it can be used across the organization to address differing content management related issues.
- Each sales person had their ‘own’ sales process, making it difficult for management to provide the skill and opportunity coaching necessary to upgrade their selling skills and sales effectiveness.
- The lack of a consistent sales process made it very difficult to prepare an accurate sales forecast.
Capabilities Needed
Upon assessing the existing sales environment, the required capabilities that RedDot defined were:
- New business development strategies and tactics designed to provide multiple points of entry into a single account at an executive level to quickly build the size and quality of their pipeline.
- The ability to leverage any point of entry to obtain access to other executives who will be directly impacted by the selection and use of RedDot’s content management capabilities, in order to create a sense of urgency and create additional value to the organization.
- Sales tools/questioning templates that combine application and product usage knowledge by job title that allow sales people to converse and diagnose an executives business issues with a bias toward RedDot’s products capabilities.
- A consistent, repeatable sales process that: 1) sales people can be taught to execute; 2) management can monitor, coach and inspect; and 3) represents RedDot’s most effective, best sales practices.
- A consistent pipeline grading system that allowed management to prepare a sales forecast and calculate close probabilities based on progress through RedDot’s sales process.
CustomerCentric Selling® provided RedDot Solutions with these capabilities. After conducting a customized CustomerCentric Selling® Workshop with the entire North American and European sales team, Gary Walker (CustomerCentric Selling® co-founder) worked with Ehrens to determine the results of his sales process implementation initiative which are detailed below.
Customer Closeup
RedDot is the Open Text Web Solutions Group with more than a decade of experience in Web Content Management (WCM). RedDot solutions are recognized throughout the industry for their legendary ease of use and feature leading multilingual support, enterprise Web 2.0 capabilities, content integration, and contextual delivery. From mid-market to enterprise, more than 2,600 clients around the world rely on RedDot to create, manage and deliver a personalized Web experience for their Intranets, Extranets and Web sites.
More information on RedDot can be found at www.RedDot.com
If you have questions about this client, please contact Gary Walker at gwalker@customercentric.com.
Results:
- Increase in sales by 88% in one quarter over the same quarter just one year earlier
- Increase in sales staff on target from 20% to 50%
- Reduction in sales cycle from 107 days down to 88 days
- Increase in average sale from $70,000 to $100,000 in two quarters
“Customer Centric Selling® has proven to be the platform on which RedDot Solutions Corporation will continue to grow, innovate and fulfill its corporate strategy.”
-Tony Ehrens, VP of North American Sales RedDot Solutions, Inc.
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.