Case
Studies
» How Agilent Technologies' EMG Is Dominating the Info Wars: Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
» A3 Solutions Go from Vendor to Vendor of Choice, Overnight
» Logilent
Learning Systems
» Silverstream Software
» Executone
Information Systems
How Agilent Technologies' EMG Is Dominating the Info Wars:
Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
Summary
EMG’s (Electronic Measurement Group) salespeople love Agilent’s
new competitive training and marketing materials and especially how these
innovations bridge the age-old divide between sales and marketing. EMG’s
competitive materials are now concise, well-organized, fact-based, and
customer value-focused. The new competitive intelligence helps sales
close more deals.
"Great sales messaging increased our products’ win rate by
30% and reduced the time we spent supporting the field by around 50%."
Nigel
Mott, DCA-J Product Sales Manager, DVS
Agilent Technologies
Agilent’s EMG discovered that winning in the fast-moving, highly
competitive, test-and-measurement market requires that you know your
competition better than the competition. The Silver Bullet Group’s
proven sales messaging process enables Agilent to deliver competitive
intelligence that accelerates the sales cycles. Clear, straightforward
messages that are differentiated from the competition and that focus
on customer needs and value make the salespeople better-informed and
more responsive than the competition.
The EMG is now much more competitive — its new messaging process
produces training materials that are exactly what Sales needs.
"[It’s] valuable to hone down to the top things to talk about
and to teach from the 1-pager, instead of showing 50 slides."
Karl
Kachigan, DTD Signal Integrity Program Manager
Agilent Technologies
The Challenge for Agilent
In the fast-moving and highly competitive market for test-and-measurement
instrumentation, knowing your competition and how you stack up against
them frequently mean the difference between making the sale and being
second best.
Agilent knew that its products were extremely competitive, yet the FEs
(Field Engineers, the Agilent Field Sales team) were finding it more
difficult to win in highly competitive sales situations. Agilent needed
to improve in the development, understanding, and dissemination of competitive
information.
FEs and their managers were complaining that the competitive information
was complex, difficult to understand, and didn’t communicate Agilent’s
excellent value propositions. It was taking too much time for the salespeople
to turn this information into messages that were meaningful to customers.
How could the marketing and training departments give the sales force
what they needed to close more deals, accelerate their sales cycles,
and be more responsive in this highly demanding market?
Agilent’s Solution
The Silver Bullet Group’s proven sales messaging process helps
marketing teams describe their product’s advantages and what those
mean to the customer. They can more readily describe how Agilent’s
equipment is better at solving customer problems than the competition
and delivers greater business value. This deeper understanding of the
customer’s needs and the competition’s capabilities also
enables competitive claims to be effectively countered with factual,
meaningful information.
"SBG has made our competitive information much more concise; it is
information that the salespeople now use. It has taught them how to
ask the right questions to steer customers our way. SBG was the “glue” that
attached our field to our factory."
Ed Sullivan, District
Manager, Field Sales, Americas
Agilent Technologies
Today the sales staff is happier. It has the competitive information
needed to win more business — materials that are in alignment with
the buyer’s needs and are used in one-on-one customer meetings.
The Results for Agilent
Agilent’s FEs can now respond quickly in competitive sales situations.
Armed with easy-to-understand, fact-based, concise sales tools, they
are winning against the competition more and more frequently. And, because
the new tools are so much easier to use, the productivity of the field
personnel is better than ever; the entire group has substantially grown
its revenues.
In fact, in the most recent internal poll, 56% of the field sales organization
said that the quality of the recent competitive intelligence enabled
them to close at least one additional deal each during the last quarter.
The FEs are so thrilled with the new competitive materials that the
project team was highly commended with an Agilent 2007 Innovation Merit
Award, and the latest competitive training was given the highest accolades
by the toughest audience of all — Agilent’s own sales force.
Finally, the Electronic Measurement Group is using the lessons learned
as a model for future marketing efforts. EMG is using sales messaging
as a tool to improve its messaging and marketing deliverables, positioning
the company to make even greater gains in marketshare.
"It was clear, both from the feedback from the field and the financials
of that group, that they needed a better way to compete. SBG gave us
two things; competitive marketing that effectively communicated both
to the field personnel and to their customers, and the process for
developing this for future products. From a financial and strategic
perspective, SBG gave us just what we needed."
Roberta Lycette,
WW Field Operations Quality and Training Manager,
Agilent Technologies
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A3 Solutions Go from Vendor to Vendor of Choice, Overnight
The Challenge
Robert Lautt, the CEO of A3 Solutions, a financial software company, was
in a classic David-versus-Goliath struggle: a smaller company with better
technology confronting larger competitors with bigger balance sheets. Over
the last year, the competition had intensified, creating a significant challenge
for the company to hit its growth targets.
The Silver Bullet
Michael introduced A3 to the Silver Bullet Group's proprietary process
for developing
great sales messaging. "Michael facilitated a cross-functional
team from Sales, Engineering, Professional Services and Marketing to
discover the compelling reasons 'why our prospects buy?' and 'why they
buy from us?',"
said Lautt. In addition to interviewing the A3 team, the Silver Bullet
Group conducted informational interviews with customers and prospects
of A3 to validate that the team's results were persuasive. "The solution
just made sense," said A3's
VP of Sales, Stuart Ratner. "If we communicate compelling value better than
our competition, then we should see an immediate improvement, and we
did."
The Results
"In three months, our sales pipeline has doubled in size, and our close rate is up by 150%," said Ratner. "We went from just another vendor communicating features and benefits to the
preferred vendor communicating profound business value. and the shift occurred virtually overnight." Added Lautt: "Our
'Why Buys?' are so strong, we effectively fence off the competition.
Bottom line is we're now a much more market driven company."
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Logilent
Learning Systems
It is my pleasure to write this letter of
reference for Michael Cannon. He was one of the main catalysts and
a key driver behind the company’s
early success. Prior to Michael’s arrival, our sales were at a
plateau, we were looking for a quantum growth spurt. Michael jumped right
in and
convinced me that he could help grow the business using a shared risk
and reward model.
What Michael did for us was extraordinary. He helped us grow sales over
1300% in 12 months, which enabled us to boot strap expenses and attract
top tier Venture Capital investors such as Sigma Partners Novus Ventures.
He was also a key ingredient for increasing the velocity of sales, reducing
the cost of sales and improving the company's operating margins.
During Michael’s tenure with Logilent, some of the following achievements
stand out in my mind:
- Michael developed a
clear and concise articulation of the company’s
value propositions by leading the management team and key employees
through a series of one-on-one meetings and brainstorming sessions.
- Michael
created a great variety of sales tools that helped the team
achieve tremendous sales growth.
- Michael aided in the
development of the company’s marketing
material and was responsible for the core messaging on the company’s
website. He
helped keep our marketing/analyst and investor messaging focused
around explaining the pain we were solving, the value of solving
the pain, why
the prospect should buy network training and why they should
buy it from Logilent.
- Once the sales model
was proven, Michael led the hiring and training
of the company’s sales team and validated that the sales
model was repeatable by others.
- Michael is a natural
leader. He helped keep the management team and the functional departments focused
on growing the business by providing a continuous, high-quality
user experience. Our
referral rates increased
from less than 5% to over 30%.
"We owe a lot to Michael’s
process-oriented sales methodology and tireless work ethic.
He is a big reason why today, after eight
years, we
are still offering world-class e-Learning to the IT industry.
That’s
the best testimonial I can offer and why I urge you to strongly
consider engaging Michael’s services."
David James Clarke IV, Co-Founder
Logilent Learning Systems, Inc.
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Silverstream Software
I hired Michael
when I was Director of Sales for the Western Region of SilverStream
Software. Prior to his efforts, the region was working an incredible
number of hours per week in order to make plan. The typical first sales
appointment was a technical education on the features and functions
of SilverStream’s
Interactive Development Environment (IDE) and Application Server. Most meetings
lasted 3
to 4 hours, covered over 120 PowerPoint slides and required a Sales Engineer
(SE) as well as a Sales Representative.
Michael led the regional team through a few brainstorming sessions, which resulted
in us quickly defining and reorganizing the sales material into three key reasons
why the prospect should buy from SilverStream. For example, one of the value
propositions identified was that SilverStream enabled applications to be built
2-3 times faster than competitive solutions. All the related product features
were then identified and organized to support this point.
The result of Michael’s work was a one-page document that succinctly explained
why a prospect should buy from SilverStream. Michael also revised the PowerPoint
presentation into 40 slides that told the same “Why SilverStream” story. The
initial sales appointment was revised into a 2-hour or less business value-oriented
discussion that the Salesperson could lead without the Sales Engineer’s
involvement. If the initial meeting generated a qualified opportunity,
then the SE was sent onsite to provide a technical demonstration that validated
the presentation’s key value propositions.
The impact on the region was immediate. The first time the new sales
messaging
and strategy was used, we closed a $100k sale to a F500 company in less than 60 days. Sales
in the region increased approximately 35%. The cost of sales was reduced
by eliminating the need for 4-legged sales calls, by allowing the sales teams
to cover more opportunities, and by improving conversion ratios in the sales
funnel. Michael also helped identify and fix a major product positioning issue
that had a positive worldwide impact.
"Michael’s straightforward approach to developing effective
sales strategies
combined with a strong intellect, good communication skills,
and unusual ability
to see patterns of value in a forest of technical trees was exactly
what we needed.
The results speak for themselves. It is for these reasons that
I am pleased to
write this letter of reference and why I would encourage you
to enlist Michael’s
assistance."
Barbara Wehrle, Director, Western Region
SilverStream Software, Inc.
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Executone Information Systems
Michael
and I worked together at Executone’s
Video Conferencing Division, where I was VP and General Manager and
Michael was Western Regional Manager. As a start-up division, much
of the management
team’s time was spent developing sales strategies, tactics and
the supporting sales tools needed to drive revenue. Michael is well
skilled in this area. He was a key driver in supporting this effort,
personally
creating many of the sales tools, as well as working with the marketing
and operations teams.
Unlike most of the telecommunications
industry, there were few pending events where corporations had a budget
established
to buy Video Conferencing
equipment. Michael kept the sales effort focused on developing answers
to the market's two main questions: 1) Why should I buy this?, which
was focused on understanding the business case and ROI for investment
in
the technology and 2) Why should I buy this from you?, which was focused
on understanding Executone’s competitive advantages. Michael
personally created well over 15 sales tools, including a letter of
introduction to
the CFO, a cold calling script, an ROI calculator, a PowerPoint presentation,
a demo script, etc. He also hired, trained and supported a strong
sales team.
His efforts were instrumental
in helping the division get quick traction
in a competitive market. He also led the highest performing sales
region in the US.
Michael and I have maintained
contact over the years and it is evident his successful pattern has
continued.
"In my current capacity
as Vice President of Marketing for Expanets, Inc., I interact with
many people.
Michael has that rare combination
of talents:
excellent strategic thinker, solid technical knowledge, strong sales
and management skills and a get it done drive. He has proven his
value to me and I’m confident that he would be a valuable asset
to
your organization."
John Cosgrove, VP and General
Manager
Executone Information Systems
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