Sales Training Success: Zend Significantly Grows Transaction Size and Overall Bookings by Leveraging the CustomerCentric Selling® Methodology.
Key Player
VP of Worldwide Field Operations
Goal and Current Situation
Zend partners with businesses to rapidly deliver modern apps across mobile and cloud. Zend helped establish the PHP language, which today powers over 200 million applications and web sites. Zend’s flagship offering, Zend Server, is the leading Application Platform for developing, deploying and managing business-critical applications in PHP.
Siddhartha Argarwal, VP of Worldwide Field Operations for Zend, began working with Pat Dougherty, a CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS®) Business Partner in 2008 to improve performance of Zend’s North American sales organization. Some of their challenges were:
- The salespeople were “order takers” too focused on inbound leads and not enough on the “big picture” with delivering value to prospects.
- Salespeople were not proactive in business development and did not know how to gain access to key players in a prospect organization.
- The sales conversations might tend to become feature/function discussions that didn’t evolve or address the real business problem(s) of the prospect’s pain, needs and goals.
- Salespeople might prefer to perform product demonstrations, which could lead to issuing proposals early, then hoping they would close.
- These sales behaviors resulted in the need to improve sales forecasting, decrease the length of sales cycles, and increase transaction size and bookings.
Capabilities Needed
After a careful analysis of the sales organization, Siddhartha and Pat concluded he needed to provide his team with the following capabilities:
- More aggressive prospecting approach for salespeople to be proactive with business development and identify more opportunities.
- The capability for reps to become solution sellers who understand the sphere of influence and can take a more holistic view of prospects and their needs in order to provide the right solution.
- The ability for salespeople to ask the right questions in order to quickly qualify an opportunity.
- 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 Zend’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 can engage with the individuals who have the business need and the authority to purchase their products and services.
- Sales tools/templates and CustomerCentric (Sales Ready) Messaging® that combines application knowledge by job title that allows salespeople to converse and diagnose an engineering executive’s business issues with bias toward Zend’s offerings capabilities.
- 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 Zend with all of these capabilities, helping provide growth and scale year over year.
Result
Since originally implementing CustomerCentric Selling® in 2008 under Siddhartha’s solid sales leadership, his sales organization has been able to accomplish the desired goals year after year, continuing to grow both transaction size and bookings. In 2013, Siddhartha re-engaged with Pat Dougherty and CustomerCentric Selling® to help his global sales team with prospecting and new business development.
“CustomerCentric Selling® helped us improve sales performance through taking a solution approach to selling by focusing on customers’ needs and developing solutions that fit their needs. More recently, CCS® has also helped us take a more holistic view with our customers by identifying and prospecting into multiple people in the organization who could use and/or benefit from our offering.”
–Siddhartha Agarwal, VP of Worldwide Field Operations, Zend
Results:
- In the first year after CCS® implementation in 2008, the average transaction size increased by 88% and overall bookings grew by 14%.
- By the second full year since CCS® implementation, the transaction size had tripled and bookings had increased by 35%.
Customer Closeup
Zend partners with businesses to rapidly deliver modern apps across mobile and cloud. Zend helped establish the PHP language, which today powers over 200 million applications and web sites. Zend’s flagship offering, Zend Server, is the leading Application Platform for developing, deploying and managing business-critical applications in PHP. Zend solutions are deployed at more than 40,000 companies, including NYSE Euronext, BNP Paribas, Bell Helicopter, France Telecom and other leading brands worldwide. Learn more at www.zend.com.
For any questions about this case study or client, please contact Pat Dougherty from SDK Sales Alliance: pdougherty@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.