Situation
Life science manufacturer serving healthcare settings had successful engagement with individual hospitals and clinics but recognised that inside sales teams were adopting different methods and approaches with a lack of standardised process.
To avoid situations where similar prospects were receiving different treatment depending on the inside sales representative they spoke to, the organisation wanted to identify best practice, champion it, and embed into standard operating procedures.
Challenge
Onboarding new team members had standard training elements, such as instrument features and benefits, but there was a lack of compliance to best sales practices, with some team members finding success through their own efforts and others struggling to gain traction. Tribal knowledge led to pockets of good practice with teams relying upon informal methods to advance their efforts.
Along with informality comes worries about compliance: are commitments made to prospects being followed up at the time promised? Are demonstrations taking place as expected and with the correct decision makers? Are qualification criteria and escalation routes being followed correctly? These challenges led the organisation to implement High Velocity Sales (HVS) from Salesforce.com, across all inside sales teams. As a substantial Salesforce user, the organisation wanted to apply common standards and practices across sales teams to get best practice applied consistently.
Solution
We worked with IT and Salesforce administrators to understand product configuration, the interaction with the core Salesforce installation and the available features of HVS to be released to inside sales.
We also worked with Inside Sales (in both US and EU) to map out sales processes and contact strategies (sales cadences) into a list of detailed business requirements to keep everyone focused and prevent scope creep.
We mapped out cadences using a lightweight process mapping tools such as Whimsical and Figma to explain and illustrate desired features and the way they are intended to work.
Using process flows sparked detailed conversations and went a long way in helping us identify discrete process steps, form branching decision points and build out marketing asset requirements (emails, call scripts, data sheets, cheat sheets, and so on) and ideal time durations for actions and waits. This was socialised and trialled with inside sales and after several iterations, we engaged the development team.
Our team worked with inside sales and planned and optimised cadences for implementation in HVS and briefed developers. We acted as a conduit between developers and inside sales to progressively review, edit and enhance the cadence implementation
As the cadences were being finalised, we started to organise user acceptance testing (UAT) and managed the process of test definition, test team recruitment and test progression and right through to successful conclusion. This involved frequent feedback sessions with developers to adjust cadences and edit content in the communication assets.
As UAT approached conclusion we developed training materials and managed training sessions with inside sales teams, taking them through the basics of HVS, integration with SFDC and trialling cadences with test calls.
We explored how success will be measured from MVP launch onwards. Current reporting already covered a number of metrics indicative of success, and HVS offers a default reporting suite, but we identified and elevated some key metrics to feed continual improvement: time from MQL to SQL, time from SQL to conversion, % leads exiting per cadence step, % of leads converted per cadence per user. These informed and targeted improvement plans.
Finally, we worked with IT and SFDC administrators to deliver a quality assured go-live plan and with sign-off from inside sales, successfully launched High Velocity Sales.
