Here are some things we’ve learned from working with one of the world’s largest telco and its most innovative sales leader whose data-driven sales performance grew a successful sales performance business by 300%

“We have a trusted strategic partnership and support their ongoing strategic objectives with data driven insights.”

Like most global enterprise corporations, the goal of sales is to build a healthy pipeline, win your competitors market share and to boost the bottom-line, and the only way to achieve this is with the army of sales reps led by the wisdom of a sales leader. But, as with all global enterprise corporations, inside sales are constantly bogged down by administrative work, confusing processes, insufficient training, low quality leads, too much time spent in the wrong meetings… just to name a few.

Of course, sales leaders are tirelessly adapting different training methodologies and morale-boosting strategies and, of course, digital transformation is always inventing new ways to make one feel like they are left behind. Well, here’s a customer success story that will reverse that feeling of despair and lift the hopes of sales leaders in any large enterprise out there.

This well-known telco, prior to collaborating with CloudApps, was performing everything manually, having to pool together 10-15 reports in order to paint a visual picture of sales and pipeline, then reach some kind of consensus about the status quo and plan sales effectiveness strategies from spreadsheets. Not only was it time-consuming, but trying to illustrate a comprehensive picture of the whole sales environment from an individual rep level through to department, or even cross geo, is virtually impossible. The outcome was a low alignment to OKRs.

At the outset, CloudApps value merged and automated multi-source reporting into a single reporting platform aligned to OKRs with a multi-hierarchical view of performance.

Prior to integrating the CloudApps Sales Effectiveness platform, traditional sales KPIs were always linked to lagging indicators focusing on revenue and pipeline. We’re not saying that isn’t important now, but what this sales leader really needed was data-driven insights aligned to the OKR sales methodology to give a full view of the sales performance. 

This data-driven sales leader has a real grasp of the complex changing metrics needed to manage and grow a successful global business and is a big believer in training, up-skilling and experimenting with tools that are the right fit for the job. He pivoted from the traditional KPIs to adopt the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) methodology. OKR boards are a collaborative goal-setting tool used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals and measure performance against overall business objectives. They are more holistic than traditional KPIs allowing this sales leader greater insight into measuring leading and lagging sales performance metrics. 

Integrating any external platform into a large corporation is always a challenge. Even with the number of ‘out of the box vanilla’ tools available on the market, it is still a process that requires heavy lifting. And the dashboards produced are usually bog standard generic score-cards/KPIs, without any meaningful data to pin-point things like leading and lagging OKRs. 

Then there’s the issue of converging all the intertwining data across the whole CRM.

However, the CloudApps Sales Effectiveness platform is native to Salesforce and was easy to install with a simple plugin. Consequently CloudApps custom built and integrated everything within the telco’s existing CRM, resulting in much greater granularity as well as generating bespoke OKR boards to the business at every level from an individual rep, team or department which were then replicated across different geographies.

Since partnering with CloudApps five years ago, digital selling has changed substantially, and this partnership has continuously evolved and adapted to help maintain their competitive advantage in the telco sales landscape. Today it remains a core part of their digital sales strategy. In fact, it has been so successful that the OKR boards and behavioural science data garnered from plugging CloudApps into their CRM has been rolled out across different geographies.

This global organisation has grown from 100 sales reps to over 400 currently, while their margins stayed the same. That’s a huge shift in performance and wouldn’t be possible without careful scrutiny.

With the CloudApps Sales Effectiveness plugged into Salesforce, everything is automated and visualised in real-time.

The ability to measure leading and lagging sales behavioural output, in addition to revenue output, results in a healthier pipeline, and also builds a holistic overview of the sales process.

The ability to dig deeper into metrics than they would have been able to do if it was still manual, ultimately lead to increased productivity as well as sales effectiveness.

Greater understanding of which products our customers were buying from competitors – and when – allows them to intercept competitor renewal dates.

Upon greater use at management level, they successfully introduced and integrated the OKR boards at an individual rep level, enabling them to build internal coaching programmes to train and motivate teams and individuals with the use of gamification and leaderboards, adding the fun factor into motivational coaching modules.

These internal coaching programmes strengthened weaknesses in sales reps’ performances helping them remove ambiguity, and ultimately take home bigger paychecks.