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.
