Marjorie Toucas leads a team of about 150 sales reps focused on inside sales, lead generation, and small business. As vice president of global corporate sales at SuccessFactors, an SAP company, her mandate is to build a high-velocity sales model that drives profitability for the company. Unlike traditional field sales teams that engage in face-to-face conversations, her team builds most of its business over the phone. Sales reps in her organization work in locations all around the word, including North America, South America, Asia, and Europe.
The corporate sales landscape
As a global organization with a focus on speed, Marjorie’s team needs a quick, effective way to exchange best practices. To save time and costs, it needs to limit the number of on-site customer visits required and spend less time training new employees. To create a strong culture within the team, it needs to build bridges across countries and set up consistent processes. While Marjorie’s team has always documented processes, they didn’t previously have a central, convenient place to store and access that information. It was difficult for the reps to find information, which made them less efficient and reduced their productivity. To address these needs and establish a channel for effective collaboration, Marjorie and her team turned to SAP Jam. Here are four ways in which Marjorie’s team is using SAP Jam to speed the sales cycle and increase efficiency.
- New rep onboarding: Reduce time to productivity
- Deal rooms: Boost win rates with collaborative customer engagement
- Project-focused collaboration: Drive results with internal and external participants
- Consistent methodology: Establish a repeatable sales process
New rep onboarding: Reduce time to productivity
It can be challenging to bring even a single a new hire up to speed at the best of times. On one occasion, however, Marjorie needed to ramp up a large number of new sales reps very quickly, all at the same time. To reduce their time to productivity, she used SAP Jam to create a central place with structured content where the new reps could walk through the onboarding steps and find the information they needed. First, new reps were automatically connected within Jam to reps with longer tenures. Next, Marjorie used Jam to guide the reps to learn things in a scheduled way – weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Jam listed those learning items in an organized way and linked the to-do list of each rep to content already available in Jam. Videos were – and still are – a central part of the onboarding process: Reps were required to use Jam’s screen-capture system to record themselves narrating a demo as a part of the certification process. Jam also helped communicate the team’s culture to the new hires via comments, pictures, polls, and videos that other team members shared.
Deal rooms: Boost win rates with collaborative customer engagement
With complex opportunities, sales reps sometimes have to initiate a process to evaluate the needs of the prospect. With Jam, the rep can create a so-called deal room – a group that includes the rep, the prospect, and any other experts involved in the deal. In the deal room, the prospect gets access to all of the relevant information and can ask the sales team questions. The sales team can even use Jam to record and publish an on-demand demo video that’s customized for the prospect’s organization. Reps don’t need to pick up the phone to see what’s going on – instead, they can keep a finger on the pulse of the customer by reviewing and responding to questions and comments, creating a closer relationship.
Project-focused collaboration: Drive results with internal and external participants
Marjorie’s team takes advantage of SAP Jam to foster collaboration among diverse teams working together on projects. In one project involving the rollout of new product packaging, the team included members from product management, development, and sales. Outside help was also recruited from an agency to help build the marketing story. The platform allowed everyone to easily share their ideas on what the product packaging should be and exchange edits on proposals multiple times. In the end, the cross-functional team met its tight deadline successfully.
Consistent methodology: Establish a repeatable sales process
Every sales organization faces the challenge of establishing a consistent, repeatable sales methodology that’s applied across the board – both in the field and within inside sales. In 2012, the entire SuccessFactors sales organization, including Marjorie’s team, embarked on a project to build a sales playbook. The goal of the playbook was to drive all sales reps to adopt a common set of processes. Built in SAP Jam, the playbook is now the central place where reps at every stage of the deal can find information to help move opportunities forward. Reps can also provide comments and feedback to help improve the playbook, allowing teams to quickly adapt to their fast-changing environment.
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