Digital Sales Transformation Needs the Right Connections

Before adding what Kumar calls “a third layer to drive growth,” determining which sales leads would be the most productive was a guessing game. “We started with outsourced lead generation and created a proper strong internal sales organization, but it wasn’t truly a sales and marketing organization,” Kumar explains. “Spending time on the wrong activities meant the sales reps were missing out on sales and revenue.”

That third layer was InsideSales.com. CA Technologies makes use of InsideSales’ embedded artificial intelligence and predictive recommendations engine, which draws from a data mart of billions of sales transactions across all of its customers.

CA’s digital transformation enabled it to transition to lead management—a whole new concept for CA—and scientific outbound prospecting, using data to predict which customers are most likely to buy so reps spend their time on the right leads.

With this knowledge, CA Technologies’ sales reps can knowledgeably prioritize their time based on who is most likely to buy; who’s the most likely upsell/cross-sell opportunity, and when’s the best time to engage with that person.

“I’d really call it a productivity layer that helps drive growth out of those other two systems [Salesforce and Marketo],” Kumar says.

After starting at zero, CA Technologies built its inside sales organization to more than 300 people in less than two and a half years. Those people are separated into three teams: a carrying quota team; a partner team focused on deal progression through outside entities like resellers and managed services providers; and digital demand generation, relying primarily on Marketo and driving demand through inbound and outbound. The layer underneath all of this, supporting customers along the way, was a digital presales organization, including a solutions engineering team.

Since adding the InsideSales solutions, CA Technologies has seen several benefits, including the following:

• better productivity, with double the average number of opportunities created per sales rep;
• a larger pipeline, with a 38 percent year-over-year increase; and
• larger average size of transactions in the pipeline—a 54 percent increase, on a year-over-year comparison

CA Technologies expects the benefits to continue to mount, particularly as it begins working with InsideSales to develop artificial intelligence models based on CA Technology’s use cases, examining CA Technologies’ data from the past few years to identify patterns across the sales funnel to help drive even better decisions going forward.

THE CONNECTED CHANNEL DATA CONNECTION

Another critical element of digital sales transformation is the interconnection of data from all customer touchpoints, an element that many companies are still lacking, according to Manny Medina, CEO and cofounder of Outreach, a sales enablement platform provider.

But that is not the case at ServiceMax, a provider of field service software. The company, which was acquired by GE Digital in late 2016, knew it needed to offer this element to improve the effectiveness of its digital sales efforts, says Jennifer Brandenburg, vice president of worldwide inside sales at ServiceMax.

“We’re touching prospects in many different ways and wanted to be able to have an effective multi-touch strategy,” Brandenburg says.

So the company sought a solution that would help track all of its customer touchpoints, allowing it to continuously refine its messaging to communicate with customers and prospects via their preferred channels. It also wanted a digital sales tool that would enable it to track the effectiveness of its different digital sales efforts to hone them for even better results.

ServiceMax opted for Outreach’s platform and is now benefiting from the technology’s automation and machine learning capabilities, as well as the analytic and reporting tools to streamline the sales process and increase sales success.

Prior to adding Outreach, ServiceMax didn’t have an effective way of tracking these details, according to Brandenburg.

Now the company is achieving a 22 percent connection rate, meaning its salespeople are in contact with the right person within the customer organization far more often.

As an added benefit, the data provided by Outreach is enabling ServiceMax to more finely tune its messaging through A/B testing of campaigns and emails, according to Brandenberg. “We can find out what is working so that we are doing the right things with the right team. We can also coach teams on their responses, letting them know [which responses] are good and which are less effective. We want to make sure it’s a consistent, effective, repeatable process.”