In our last issue, we described how XOsoft cleverly leveraged its product strengths to create highly effective lead generation programs and a put in place a fully-automated, web-based lead generation process.  In this issue, we will see how XOsoft was able to further accelerate its growth with a new sales process and the next level of process automation.
 
Accelerating Growth with the Next Level of Automation
 
With a growing number of leads and active accounts to handle, salespeople were stretched to capacity.   Seating on a fresh stack of cash, conventional wisdom would have XOsoft rush to hire more salespeople.  But XOsoft is nothing but conventional.  “We are indeed hiring more salespeople, but we also have to remember what got us here in the first place.  It wasn’t by having a lot of money and many people, but by working smarter and leveraging the Internet and our product strengths to do more with less,” says Rapaport. 
 
The XOsoft team once again went to the drawing board, and came up with new and improved ways to get more business done with minimal increase in headcount and expenses.  To support these changes, XOsoft upgraded its salesforce.com system to the enterprise version, which enables automating workflows across the organization.  Expanding on the initial rollout to sales, the system was now rolled out to additional company functions, including marketing, product management, customer support, and finance. 
 
The New Sales Process
To handle the large volume of leads, a new sales process has been put in place.  The new process institutes a more structured approach, which in turn makes the salespeople more efficient and provides management with greater level of visibility and predictability. 
 
According to the new process, every new lead has to be followed up with a phone call made by a salesperson within 24 hours.  If no contact is made, a second call is made two days later.  If still no contact is made, the salesperson follows up with an e-mail within the next two days.  A final attempt is made two days prior to the expiration of the 14-day evaluation license.  Automated alerts and reports in salesforce.com help the salespeople stick to the agreed upon timeline. 
 
Once a contact is made, every lead is qualified into one of the following categories: 

A. Current quarter opportunity
B. Next quarter opportunity
C. Qualified (no immediate opportunity but should keep in touch)
D. Unqualified

Using salesforce.com, the salesperson must indicate the reason for a specific categorization based on well-defined and uniform criteria, so the information can be further analyzed for future improvements.  Other important information, such as who is the competition, is also captured in the process.  Some of the qualifying data is captured as soon as a visitor registers to download the evaluation software, reducing the amount of unqualified leads handed over to sales.
 
Salespeople continue to make extensive use of the salesforce.com system throughout the entire sales cycle, from opportunity to closure.  Once a deal is closed, the required information is entered into a single form in salesforce.com., which in turn alerts and transfers the information to other departments that need to take action.  The finance department is notified and issues an invoice directly from salesforce.com within less than 24 hours.  The support department has immediate access to the new customer information – including technical contacts, the product purchased, and the type of support contract signed – so they can start supporting the customer effectively and without any delays. 
 
Marketing and Sales Collaboration
For XOsoft’s marketing department, salesforce.com is a vehicle to facilitate closer working relationships with sales, a topic of contention in many companies.  Marketing is using the system to help sales work more effectively by defining multiple templates salespeople can use at each stage of the sales cycle.  Some of the correspondence is fully automated, such as the generation of evaluation license keys and initial instructions for using the software that are e-mailed in response to every download request. 
 
Using the salesforce.com system, all marketing activities are defined as campaigns, and every lead is automatically tagged based on the campaign it was generated from.  The new system gives XOsoft’s marketing real-time visibility into the results of every campaign, from the initial response to the number of deals closed and revenues generated.  Using this analysis, marketing can easily determine which campaigns are more effective and allocate future resources accordingly.
 
Customer reference management is one of the most critical roles of marketing in the business-to-business world.  Still, most companies treat it as an afterthought, with no defined processes and tools to support this function.  XOsoft’s marketing is leveraging the salesforce.com system to streamline this important process.  If a customer agrees to be a reference, this information is entered by the salesperson into the same single form they already use in salesforce.com.  Marketing then contacts the customer and adds additional details about the type of references they can provide.  It also indicates when a reference is being used.  The result is a real-time reference database with all the required information at the fingertips of the marketing department, with little to no burden placed on sales; something to make many marketing departments envy.
 
Additional Automated Processes
Product Management is also a beneficiary of the salesforce.com system.  While sales is an important conduit of customer input that has great value to product management, this information is all too often relayed in a random fashion.  As a result, much of the information is lost, and the rest is difficult to measure and quantify.  With no systematic approach to capture this input, product management risks making important decision based on the customer who screams the loudest.
 
At XOsoft, sales input to product management, including requested product features and competitive information, is entered into salesforce.com, so it can be saved and analyzed.  Since entering the information is easy for the salesperson, more input is being collected.     
 
Additional automated processes extend beyond the company’s boundaries.  XOsoft’s channel partners and some large strategic partners (IBM is one example) use the salesforce.com system to issue license keys and open support cases.   XOsoft is in the process of building a technical knowledge base that will be maintained by product management and used by the support department as well as partners and customers. 
 
Results
Although many of the processes and tools described here are new to XOsoft, the company can already point to some very impressive results:

• The number of leads that are waiting to be followed up was reduced by 60%.
• The number of qualified leads in the system is up 267%.
• The number of opportunities is up 740%!!!

Another result of the new system is a shorter collection cycle due to the automation of the invoicing process.  Maybe most important, though, is the improvement in customer satisfaction.  In a survey that measured customer satisfaction from the sales process to administration and customer support, XOsoft has scored top marks across the board. 
 
XOsoft management has a lot to be proud of.  Like any other start up, it faces many challenges – new products, hiring, accelerating sales, raising capital – and has few resources.  Many companies at this stage (and even beyond) view processes and systems as “big company frills”.  XOsoft has shown that devoting management attention and investing in the right processes and systems can pay off quickly and accelerate the company’s growth in very concrete terms.