Undisclosed Public Company

Headquartered in the Silicon Valley, California, this company provides enterprise software that helps companies achieve service-oriented architecture and business process management successes. With thousands of customers and offices across the world, this company has given leading organizations around the world better awareness and agility in delivering their respective services to their client base.

In 2007 this company approached KeyRoad Enterprises with the following goals:

• Significantly increase its revenue attainment to maintain its 30% plus revenue growth it had experienced in the previous years.
• Bring its public valuation more in line with other market benchmark.
• Change the product-centric selling approaches common among its sales force to more customer-focus consultative behaviors.
• Bring selling best practices to its worldwide sales organization.

Some of the reasons this company suggested were in its way to achieve its stated goals were:

• 85% of its then revenues came from its existing client base and it was having difficulties securing new clients.
• Prior to 2007, the average missed quota was 25% resulting in a shortfall in revenue of around $100 million.
• The new hire ramp-up time was too long, sitting at 9 months from date of hire to first sale.
• Its sales people were too product-centric and no longer customer-focus or interested in helping their clients solve their most important business challenges.
• The sales force had a wide variety of selling skills that were not being harnessed into best practices
• The sales force was engaging and spending much of their selling time with “lower level” IT professionals who ultimately did not have the authority to buy and implement the company’s offering across the organization.

With significant per-sales-executive revenue contributions already in place, this company felt that, in addition to ensuring that more of its account executives met their assigned quota, the only way it could meet its goals was to double its worldwide sales force. Going on an aggressive recruitment campaign, it also recognized that without an on-boarding program for welcoming, integrating, training, and supporting its existing and newly hired sales executives, it would have difficulties meeting its revenue goals.

One of its operational executives stated: “On-boarding and bringing all our customer-facing professionals to behave and perform at their best is paramount to the success of our company. Providing them with a series of learning and training programs (New Hire training, Company, Products and Competitive Clinics, and Sales Training) that, over time, will help them adopt and assimilate selling best practices is the best way we know how to ensure they perform”.

In addition to its traditional products and technology training, this company wanted to bring in a sales methodology that would implement:

• A common vocabulary for discussing and assessing opportunities across its worldwide operations.
• A sales training program, taught and coached by sales professionals, that provides attendees with the tactical selling skills and practice required to execute the company's defined consultative sales processes.
• A questioning technique and set of prompters (and other tools) that are designed to guide the salesperson’s diagnosis of the buyer’s needs while simultaneously uncovering business metrics and value points to create cost benefit analysis with numbers the prospect owns.
• A process for identifying and documenting all of the necessary steps of the sell cycle, and then converting those steps into a mutually agreed to “sequence of events” to control the sell cycle moving forward.
• A step-by-step process to navigate through the prospect’s buying phases and all critical steps in the selling cycle, from call introduction, through diagnosis and discovery (buyer qualification) to closing.

Over 12 months, KeyRoad Enterprises and its president, Philippe Lavie, trained over 200 of its sales executives and related sales support professionals using the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology as its building block. The trained groups include the Inside Sales prospecting team, most of US and European Account Executives and some of its domestic and international Sales Engineers professionals.

To-date, the company has been able to achieve the following results:

• Reduce its new hire ramp-up time from 9 months down to 7 months
• Increase its prospecting ratio from first call to opportunity identification by over 200% while having the Inside Sales group contribute over $6 million in incremental revenue directly attributable to the training received
• Generated over $20 million of revenue directly or significantly related to the training its Account Executives received

One of its Global Field Operations executive was pleased with the results: “We have moved away from selling on features to paying more attention to the customers’ needs we can identify through more intelligent conversations. I am very happy with the results achieved by this training program and how the team has adopted these processes. CustomerCentric Selling® is the fourth methodology we have implemented in the past three years and is the only one that has stuck with our people for longer than a year. I think we have found a winner.”