Supernova Award Category
The Problem
Close to 2,000 geographically dispersed sales reps, managers, leaders, and marketing teams need to connect to get immediate answers and collaborate more effectively for sales and customer service. Previously, the company had three different CRM platforms, over 30 different sales processes, and relied on an ad hoc collaboration system consisting of email and personal networks. “It wasn’t consistent, and people were often engaging the wrong resources, or they weren’t finding the right people they should have been talking to,” says Ian Matthews, Director of Global Sales Effectiveness.
The Solution
The company manually scrubbed and migrated sales data to Salesforce CRM using Informatica and internal data warehouse resources, creating a single governed sales process. In addition to extensive training around infrastructure and CRM, leaders encouraged Chatter adoption and engagement by using it as their core communication tool for the sales process.
The results
From Ian Matthews, Director of Global Sales Effectiveness at National Instruments:
“The change with Chatter has been dramatic because we got both inside sellers and field teams talking around accounts and opportunities, and they’re also able to quickly—literally within minutes—bring in other resources like technical people or product marketing to collaborate on challenges,” says Matthews. “We never thought we’d see that happen so quickly.” The result was a that we were able to work more effectively and win more large deals than National Instruments had in it’s history.
Metrics
The results were that National Instruments achieved a deeper level of collaboration between inside sellers and field teams resulted in each sales rep saving 40-45 minutes a day and increasing productivity per rep by over 10% company-wide.
The Technology
Salesforce Sales Cloud, Community Cloud and Chatter.
Disruptive Factor
National Instruments reinvented team selling through collaboration on Chatter. The challenge was to get the entire company using Chatter over email to cultivate collaboration. This was accomplished by having a top down adoption and engagement strategy where C-Suite and Sales Leaders adopted the new technology first and pushed it down on the rest of the organization. Fully committing to open collaboration disrupts the traditional sales model in National Instrument’s industry.
Shining Moment
The moment when National Instruments regional sales teams suddenly realized they could get to a mass of experts on a particular topic or product area and engage them and ask questions.