Quova

Founded in January, 2000, privately-held Quova, Inc. is a provider and developer of Web geography services and technologies for the online enterprise. Its flagship GeoPoint service instantly determines the real-world geographic locations of Web site visitors — a science known as geolocation — down to the country, region, state, or city level. Quova’s 170+ customers — industry leaders in financial services, retail, digital content, media, advertising and online gaming — leverage GeoPoint geolocation data to execute targeted marketing initiatives, prevent online fraud, ensure regulatory compliance, manage digital rights and enhance network security. Quova’s unique combination of patented, cutting-edge technology and expert human analysis provides unsurpassed data quality and global coverage.

“When KeyRoad Enterprises™-CustomerCentric Selling® first approached us in early January 2004, our primary goal was to increase revenue in 2004 by 100%. Unfortunately we did not feel prepared to meet this challenge” says Gary Jackson, SVP operations. “Some of our reasons were:

• Only one sales rep out of 8 had exceeded his sales quota in 2003, even though we had met our revenue goals.
• Sales reps were focusing on selling projects, not looking at addressing the entire needs of an enterprise.
• Sales people had challenges creating a vision around how our product and services could help our prospects address new markets and create new revenue streams. By not being able to identify a need to satisfy, a goal to achieve, a problem to solve early in the sales cycle, we experienced a significant lengthening of the sales cycle to an average of 8 months, while also spending resources on an opportunity that may not close at all. This also put pressure on our license fees, and made “value based” pricing difficult.
• As a management team, we had limited trust in our ability to accurately predict where the revenue would come from, due to a poorly graded pipeline. The poor grading limited our visibility of where an opportunity resided along the sales process, minimizing our ability to pro-actively intervene and support our sales force. It also forced us to spend time on poorly qualified opportunities when it could have been spent on more important deals.”

“Even though we reached our revenue goal in 2003, the inaccuracy of our forecast at the opportunity level – less than 25% of forecasted opportunities – made it difficult to pro-actively manage both our leading opportunities and our individual sales executives.” Marie Alexander, Quova CEO, continues: “We were looking for a more systematic way to closely monitor the progress of our opportunities along pre-defined stages and milestones to improve our close rate. We were also looking to align our sales people along a sales methodology and common language that would facilitate our internal sales communication. Finally we wanted to differentiate ourselves by how we sold and how we described the benefits our products brought to our prospects.”

Working with Philippe Lavie, president of KeyRoad Enterprises™ and a CustomerCentric Selling® affiliate, the company began redesigning its sales process. Quova implemented the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology and crafted new tools for its sales force, using Sales Ready Messaging™ templates and processes. Finally, with advisory services provided by Lavie, Quova is now well on its way to a successful implementation of all these elements.

To-date, this has resulted in:

• A more effective way to allocate resources to sales activities.
• A common language, sales, and sales management tools have been implemented, reducing the amount of time spent on weekly sales staff meeting and call debrief.
• Better qualification of our prospects
• Average transaction value has increased by 45%

For more information on Quova, please visit their web site at:www.quova.com. Reach Philippe Lavie by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .