Sales Training Success: ILOG increases average revenue per customer and reduces number of losses with CustomerCentric Selling®.

Business Problem
Due to market trends and changes in the software industry, ILOG was required to develop and implement more customer-centric sales, marketing strategies and tactics. CustomerCentric Selling®, the sales training company, began working with ILOG's VP of Sales and VP of Marketing, to mutually identify the potential of achieving several ambitious goals:

• Scale the business by 25%, year-over-year, even in a soft economy.
• Increase the productivity of the average Account Manager.
• Increase Sales Management effectiveness.
• Gain early visibility into forecasted opportunities.
• Develop sales-ready messaging that can be used throughout the entire sales process.

The CustomerCentric Selling® Solution
Working with CustomerCentric Selling®, ILOG began assessing their current sales and marketing environment to identify the issues and obstacles preventing them from achieving their goals.

They quickly identified that there was a large variance between top performers and the rest of the field sales force; therefore, they were overly dependent on the sales efforts of a small fraction of the field. They also identified new trends in the market: (1) More vendors had entered into the rapidly growing Business Rules Management Systems market, creating greater competition with the majority of their opportunities and (2) that they broadened their selling efforts from selling to highly technical buyers, to include executive level business and IT decision makers, some of whom are 'non-technical.'

ILOG needed a way to codify its top performers' behaviors and map those best practices into a repeatable sales process that rest of the sales team could follow.

As part of implementing this process, ILOG needed auditable sales process milestones that would enable management to more accurately forecast the business at the opportunity level. They also needed to develop marketing messages that would yield two critical results: First, messages needed to be delivered that were more than feature/function-oriented and second, these messages needed to better integrate with the new sales process, resulting in greater use by the field and higher effectiveness of marketing investments. Finally, all of this needed to be delivered in a training workshop for their Sales, Pre-Sales, Marketing and Professional Services staff.

 

CustomerCentric Selling® was able to successfully meet all these needs for ILOG, resulting in many benefits. After working with CustomerCentric Selling® to deliver these capabilities and undergo the necessary sales training, ILOG experienced positive results that included the following:

• Significant reduction in discountingdue to better understanding of value to prospect.%
• Reduced number of lossesdue to better understanding of prospect needs and higher level contacts earned.
• Increased average revenue per customer
• Create a common language used by everyone inside ILOGto articulate product attributes and customer uses.
• Improved visibility into sales pipeline earlier in sales cycle due to higher-level contacts and auditable sales process milestones

More information on ILOG can be found at www.ilog.com

Benefits to ILOG:

• Increased average revenue per customer
• Reduced number of losses
• Improved visibility into the sales pipeline earlier into the sales cycle
• Creation of a common language that can be used throughout the organization
• Significant reduction in discounting