Sales Beacon | Sales Enablement Launch for SaaS Offer
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Sales Enablement Launch for SaaS Offer

An IT OEM needed a quick roll-out of a new Software as a Service (SaaS) offer. Two years post launch, there continued to be a high level of frustration among the company’s salespeople, business partners and customers. Given the complexity of the offer, challenges emerged with understanding how to navigate the quote-to-order process, which meant that otherwise-simple issues were causing delays. Questions, support requests and complaints were piling up on our client’s desk.

Sales Beacon sent in a team of four professionals, each with their own skill-set, to provide that support. This included trouble-shooting, educating and resolving issues on a one-to-one basis as well as providing large-scale training. Within a month there was a noticeable improvement, as salespeople, partners and customers felt that someone had heard them and taken effective action. To date, there have been over 800 individual consultations, with a perfect satisfaction score. The benefit for our client has been the ability to focus on the bigger issues and make strategic plans for improving the service.

“The way that you do business, and the way that you train your people and interact with your people, is superior to the other vendors I’ve worked with.”

The following is an interview between Sales Beacon and the client team leader, about the process. It has been lightly edited for clarity and to preserve our client’s confidentiality.

What were the problems you needed to solve?

The problem we were facing is that although we had the offer, nothing was in place. We had to go to market super-fast, so we threw a lot of Band-Aids at it, to be honest. For the first two years of the offer, partners and customers were saying, “This offer’s great, and I want to do this, but I don’t even know how to transact it, I don’t know how to sell it.” And so they were getting really frustrated, and I was the person they were escalating to. So I put together a business case and convinced Leadership that for this offer to be successful, given that it’s a partner-led offer, we need to be sure that our partners and our own sellers are educated on the quote-to-order process.

What would have happened without the Sales Beacon team’s involvement?

We’ve done over 800 consultations to date, and that’s not even counting all the large-scale trainings. If my team did not exist, there is no other team established that understands the entire end-to-end process to the depth that we do. We do a fantastic job identifying the problem and educating our partners and sales teams on how to resolve it quickly. We may not always be the team who can fix the issue ourselves, but we can certainly reduce time to resolution by directing the field who to go to for support.

How did you use our services?

I only had budget for four people, so I had to be strategic in what skillset each would need to bring to the table. I needed people strong in creating repeatable content (i.e. video on demand), a solid background in customer relations, understanding of the sales cycle and how to transact, ability to work independently and the tenacity to seek out answers.

How soon do you think it made a difference?

The team launched June 1, 2017 and within the first month we had positively impacted bookings and improved the sales and partner experience. Feedback from the field was outstanding as they felt leadership had listened to their needs and pulled a team together to support them. It was that relief — “OMG somebody heard us! Finally, somebody put a team together that we can go to for help.“

Do you have any hard numbers to report?

We have achieved a perfect satisfaction score of 5.0 and a 100% SLA for over 12 consecutive months.

What words would you use to describe working with Sales Beacon?

Positive, skilled, great communication, business alignment and continuity with our goals. Also, Sales Beacon has always been extremely responsive to any of our needs.

How has this improved your own life?

Having this team in place has allowed me to step out of the day-to-day and focus more on strategy so we can determine the best way to scale and continue to improve our sales enablement efforts. I have full confidence the team is handling escalations, consultations and large scale trainings as the feedback from the field has been outstanding!

How has it been to work with Sales Beacon?

You are by far my preferred vendor. The way that you do business, and the way that you train your people and interact with your people, is superior to the other vendors I’ve worked with, and I think that has made a huge difference, not only in the quality of the people that you bring to the table, but just their satisfaction in being a Sales Beacon employee.

What’s been the comparison with other vendors you’ve worked with?

Working with Sales Beacon versus other vendors has been a night and day experience. Sales Beacon understands what it means to have a managed service project and takes ownership to ensure its success. Sales Beacon has provided highly skilled resources who are resourceful, proactive, eager and professional, not to mention a joy to work with. This is a team that truly cares about people and doesn’t look at this as just another contract, instead they invest their heart and solid work ethic into ensuring people have what they need to be successful.