Sales Training Success: Quova increases transaction size by 45%, learns how to better qualify prospects and effectively allocate resources using CCS.

Business Problem
"Our primary goal in implementing a defined sales methodology was to increase revenue by 100%. Unfortunately we did not feel prepared to meet this challenge," says Gary Jackson, SVP of Operations for Quova. Some of Jackson's reasons were:

• Only one sales rep out of eight had exceeded his sales quota in the last year, even though revenue goals had been met.
• Sales reps were focusing on selling projects, not looking at addressing the entire needs of an enterprise.
• Sales people had challenges creating a vision around how the product and services could help prospects address new markets and create new revenue streams. By not being able to identify a need to satisfy, a goal to achieve, a problem to solve early in the sales cycle, the company experienced a significant lengthening of the sales cycle to an average of eight months, while also spending resources on an opportunity that may not close at all. This also put pressure on license fees, and made value-based pricing difficult.
• The management team had limited trust in the ability to accurately predict where the revenue would come from, due to a poorly graded pipeline. The poor grading limited the visibility of where an opportunity resided along the sales process, minimizing the ability to pro-actively intervene and support the sales force. It also forced the company to spend time on poorly qualified opportunities when it could have been spent on more important deals.

"Even though we reached our revenue goal, the inaccuracy of our forecast at the opportunity level - less than 25% of forecasted opportunities - made it difficult to proactively manage both our leading opportunities and our individual sales executives," said Marie Alexander, Quova CEO.

According to Alexander, the company was looking for a more systematic way to:

• Closely monitor the progress of their opportunities along pre-defined stages and milestones to improve their close rate.
• Align their sales people along a sales methodology and common language that would facilitate their internal sales communication.
• Differentiate themselves by how they sold and how they described the benefits their products brought to their prospects.

The CustomerCentric Selling® Solution
Working with Philippe Lavie, CustomerCentric Selling® Business Partner, Quova began redesigning its sales process. Quova implemented the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology and crafted new tools for its sales force, using Sales Ready Messaging® templates and processes. Finally, Quova is well on its way to a successful implementation of all these elements.

To date, Quova has seen these results:

• A more effective way to allocate resources to sales activities.
• A common language, sales and sales management tools have been implemented, reducing the amount of time spent on weekly sales staff meeting and call debrief.
• Better qualification of prospects.
• Average transaction value has increased by 45%.

More information on Quova can be found at www.quova.com

If you have questions about this client, please contact CustomerCentric Selling® Business Partner, Philippe Lavie at plavie@customercentric.com

Benefits to Quova:

• Common language and set of tools to assist sales and sales management
• Improved prospect qualification
• Transaction size increased by 45%
• Better, more effective allocation of resources

Read more sales training success stories in the Customer Showcase.