SAVO Group Launches SAVO Teams Application

SAVO Group, a provider of cloud-based sales enablement technology and consulting services, this week launched SAVO Teams for more purposeful social collaboration within the sales organization.

SAVO Teams works by identifying sales opportunities mined from a selling organization's CRM of record that have the potential to be accelerated through collaboration. Next, SAVO Teams conjoins subject matter experts, content, sales assets, and sales process coaching in a "Deal Room," into which the seller is then invited.

Essentially, SAVO Teams creates a collaboration space where a salesperson's "blind spots," such as competitor movement or issues related to product, are triggered.

"It's a completely different approach to say, "We're going to find high-risk situations where the sales guy might have all of the confidence in the world thinking he's got a deal, but it's [an instance] where, historically, win rates in this situation are really low," explains Dan Schleifer, senior director of marketing at SAVO Group.

According to global technology research firm IDC's Sales Advisory Service, companies that carry out best practices in sales enablement generally find "time to revenue" drops from months to weeks for new sales reps. Such practices can also have a direct impact on sales productivity, as well as partner and rep satisfaction.

The emphasis of SAVO Teams is on internal collaboration. A major deterrent to successful sales enablement strategy and usage has as much to do with the company culture as the technology that's used, Schleifer says.

"If you look at IBM…they have about 47,000 people in their extended selling organization," Schleifer explains. "If I'm a sales guy, I might not know who to reach out to or who to collaborate with…on a particular deal. I may not know who the subject matter experts are, let alone how to work with them."

While enterprise social collaboration tools such as Jive or Salesforce.com Chatter create real business benefit across an organization, Schleifer says SAVO Teams differs from these in that its focus is on driving revenue and sales performance through internal collaboration.

SAVO looked also to give C-suite executives "a real-time pulse on field sales execution in order to bridge the gap between what they're trying to accomplish and what the salespeople are actually doing in the field," he adds.