1900% Improvement in Key Predictive Metrics
(Yes, we did say 1900%!)
The Challenge
Many companies using Salesforce.com say that it isn’t adapted to the way their sales people, sales managers, and
executives do business. Often times this simply results in companies continuing to get bad information more quickly.
As Alan Facey, Newforma’s Chief Customer officer, put it, “Salesforce looks in the rear view mirror; it does not provide the methods necessary to tell the effectiveness of the sales team.” He went on to say, “Salesforce tells us what closed, but not whether we are doing the right things at the right time, making it difficult for management to draw the appropriate conclusions. This leaves you with a great deal of subjectivity.
The Solution
Here’s a snapshot of some of the capabilities SMS provides Newforma:
- Sales Executives: Through the use of surgical performance metrics, SMS helps executives better drive the sales operation top-down, with the ability to “drill down” into the organization, allowing early detection and proactive resolution of problems that could impact future results.
- Sales Managers: SMS guides managers through opportunity assessment with the objective of early detection and resolution of gaps, determines sellers’ ideal pipelines then identifies gaps and recommends fixes, and automates seller skill assessment and development. It also provides Sales Management with real-time plan Vs. actual leading-sales metrics to better manage their sales operation.
- Sellers: SMS automates the capture of all sales call results and generates key buyer-facing deliverables, and provides effective opportunity management and resource coordination.
We implemented Adventace SMS because native Salesforce only provides a look through the rear view mirror; it does not provide me a way to tell the effectiveness of my sales team. Salesforce tells me what closed and what is in flight, but not whether we are doing the right things at the right time, making it difficult for me and my team to draw the appropriate conclusions. SMS has really helped with taking subjectivity out of pipeline management, forecasting, and sales management more generally.
It has changed the face of my communications with my regional VP’s because we are better able to proactively identify and deal with sales (management) challenges using metrics rather than opinion to guide our thinking.
We have seen significant global improvement in the metrics that deal with prospecting effectiveness, our ability to call high, and pipeline balance, which in turn has helped our top and bottom lines.
Finally, the Adventace team has been super responsive to our requests for help and improvements.
Adventace SMS has been instrumental in helping me better run my sales operation. In particular, the accurate view I get on key performance metrics and pipelines helps me identify potential problems early and then work with my sales managers to get them fixed before they have a significant impact.
As an example, the use of the A/B Ratio performance metric has helped us identify sales people who are calling too low in an account so that we can coach them on prospecting at a higher level or work with them to improve their ability to negotiate for access to power.
Also, by using the Pipeline Balance Algorithm, we identify not only sales people with imbalances, but specifically what those imbalances are and then work with our sellers to quickly fix them.
This app has been an important factor in helping us achieve our objectives, both financial and otherwise.
Adventace SMS was exactly what we needed. One of our biggest issues was adopting a single sales strategy that worked across multiple vertical industries. Adventace SMS has given us just that. It makes it easier for sales managers to understand the strength of the pipeline with measurable metrics.
Implementing SMS has increased our reps’ efficiency by identifying early on in the sales process our prospects CBIs and automatically generating customized letters of understanding and action plans. With the data we are tracking within SMS, we have much better insight into our sales pipeline, A/B ratios, and better understand the NOC (prospecting) requirements needed to ultimately reach our targets.
Newforma Success
%
Improvement in Key Predictive Metrics
Consecutive Quarters of Achieving Objectives
%