Ovum Salesforce Com Sales Methods (Wp000167 Eap)

WHITE PAPER

Driving business value through collaborative intelligence WWW.OVUM.COM

SSaalleessMMeetthhooddss An integrated sales methodology for Salesforce.com

WWW.OVUM.COM WHITE PAPER

SalesMethods Published 11/2010

© Ovum. This White Paper is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied Page 2

Written by: Martin Gandar Published November 2010

Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................................................ 3

Why is there a need for enhanced sales method support for Salesforce.com users?......................................................... 4

The salesmethods solution.................................................................................................................................................. 6

Functionality .................................................................................................................................................................... 6

SalesMethods Component Applications....................................................................................................................... 6

Plan2Prosper ............................................................................................................................................................... 6

Plan2Close................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Plan2Exel..................................................................................................................................................................... 9

Key Findings ................................................................................................................................................................ 9

Solution Operation........................................................................................................................................................... 9

Plan2Prosper ............................................................................................................................................................... 9

Plan2Close................................................................................................................................................................. 15

Plan2Clo .................................................................................................................................................................... 16

Orgc ........................................................................................................................................................................... 18

Plan2Exel................................................................................................................................................................... 18

Ovum’s view .................................................................................................................................................................. 18

Development ................................................................................................................................................................. 19

Deployment................................................................................................................................................................ 19

Subscription ............................................................................................................................................................... 20

The company and its approach to the market ................................................................................................................... 20

Company background.................................................................................................................................................... 20

Approach ....................................................................................................................................................................... 21

Customer experiences................................................................................................................................................... 22

Conclusions....................................................................................................................................................................... 22




EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

SalesMethods brings to the market a natively integrated sales methodology for Salesforce.com (SFDC).

SFDC is highly regarded and widely adopted because of its cost-effective cloud computing, subscription-

based model and scalability. Despite its leading position, SFDC has not until now offered a fully integrated

sales methodology built on its Force platform that can deliver a truly collaborative and iterative environment in

which to drive the sales process, but SalesMethods now addresses this.

Ovum knows that adhering to a formal sales methodology significantly raises the win rate of an account team.

However, the wide variety of available sales training and support tools on offer makes for a highly fragmented

market often with easily forgotten online or classroom-based training and a lack of rigor and sales support for

adoption. The result is that over 40% of companies don’t use any formal sales methods at all. The difficulty of

adoption and high fall-off rate in the use of formal methodologies contributes to the fact that sales teams often

view SFDC as a management tool for reviewing their performance, using a “what we have done?” approach

rather than an active collaborative environment to assist with the “how to do it” to win business.

SalesMethods has filled this gap with a native extension to SFDC that enshrines the best practices of well-

established sales methodologies into a collaborative environment with easy-to-use yet powerful and

illuminating supporting tools that enable a virtual sales team to be more effective. The SalesMethods

approach leads users through a series of questions that once answered builds and drives them to execute a

successful sales strategy. SalesMethods offers three integrated SFDC applications:

Plan2Prosper offers account-development planning based on the guiding principles of building

reputation, gaining insight, developing shared ambition, and securing the required resources to

effectively execute.

Plan2Close supports the critical elements of successful sales opportunity management, with full

qualification, justification, differentiation, and relationship support.

Plan2Exel is a sales-management toolkit covering management reporting, analytics, continuous process

improvement, and skills development.

Deployment follows the standard SFDC model with an annual subscription of £500 per seat to use all three

modules, with various other options available to take each module separately and pay monthly.

SalesMethods was founded in 2009 with the sole purpose of implementing its existing sales methodology into

a suite of software applications that integrate natively with SFDC, and ultimately bringing the solution to the

market. The SalesMethods team is highly experienced in sales, marketing, and business leadership while

also having important educational and software development expertise. SalesMethods is new to the market

but already has successful trials under its belt, notably with Colt Telecom. The significant support of SFDC

and the fact that it offers a native implementation should offer no barrier to the adoption of the solution.

We see SalesMethods as a very welcome entrant to the market. The current users of SFDC gain a powerful

process to drive sales effectiveness and a platform for continuous improvement to their teams’ skills and

processes. This is the most complete methodology that we have seen in the SFDC context and we believe

that any organization that understands the potential value of adopting a sales methodology should give it

serious consideration




WHY IS THERE A NEED FOR ENHANCED SALES METHOD SUPPORT FOR

SALESFORCE.COM USERS?

Sales are the life-blood of every business and yet in most companies while the sales process is subject to

much discussion and attention, it receives very little formal business process investment. Customer

relationship management (CRM) has been the main growth area of software applications in the B2B market

for the past decade. Software as a service (SaaS) is a “mega trend” that is expanding the options available to

deliver, support, and enhance the core functionality of CRM. Sales methodology and process support is a

prime candidate to enhance the CRM umbrella, and if done properly it can perfectly blend the structured data

of CRM with the less ordered and necessarily transient information required for managing successful sales

campaigns.

A recent report by Research and Markets found that 41% of respondents to a survey said their companies did

not use any sales methodology at all or employed a “style” of selling rather than a formal set of processes.

For example, they encouraged “consultative selling” or “solution selling”. Of the respondents 14% provided

unique names of methodologies that their companies used that no other responder to the survey listed, which

illustrates just how fragmented the approach to sales training and the use of formal methods is. But does this

matter?

The answer to that question is, we believe, an unqualified yes. Companies that have introduced a consistent

and formalized approach based on a sound methodology have in almost all circumstances improved their win

rates and their grip on the market share. It is not enough to just have a good record with your customers. If

you think you know everything about who your customers are and what they are looking to purchase because

your CRM system has records of all your interactions with those clients, then you are missing massive

opportunities to understand the nature of your market and the opportunities presented to you. Worse than

that, you may have no real plan as to how to take advantage of the value of the work you have done with your

customers and the information at your disposal

Ovum is a very strong supporter of the need for a high-quality CRM solution, especially in the B2B

environment where there is a requirement to be totally on top of the relationships with all the customers and

suppliers with which a company interacts.

CRM concentrates on the “what we know” about customers, and sales force automation (SFA) seeks to

provide tools that support the various stages involved in the sales process. These tools tell a company “what

it needs to know” before it can improve sales, but to most sales people it is seen as “sales force accounting”

imposed by management as a means of monitoring and forecasting sales positions rather than being a

proactive environment that focuses on sales opportunities and how to win them. Sales teams need the “how

to make use of what we know” to radically enhance their performance.

Those who adopt a more formal sales methodology tend to fare better on the “how to” front, but sales training

is notoriously expensive and forgettable and it requires a will of iron to put into practice what is learnt on a

course. Furthermore, if the processes and tools to support the learning are not integrated into the fabric of the

working day or don’t provide useful support of the chosen methodology the learning will not be enforced and

the intended improvements will not be realized.

We believe sales methodologies need to be at the heart of the sales environment supported by a rich set of

tools that offer market insight and enshrine best practice, offering effective support rather than being a burden

on the sales team. If this is achieved, forecasting and the management analytics will follow and the sales

performance will undoubtedly improve. What options are available?




There are a great many sales approaches and methodologies on the market. For example, “value-based”

sales methodologies such as “value selling framework” and “solution selling” methodology or more formal

methodologies such as the “Miller Heiman” strategic selling or the “target account selling (TAS)” sales

methodology. So if a company is using SFDC for its basic CRM/SFA capabilities, what can it do to augment it

with an integrated methodology?

SFDC offers integration tools that enable third parties to create fairly close coupling with their SFA

functionality. Suppliers of methodologies such as the TAS Group with its dealmaker solution have taken this

route, largely because its online training environment also needs to integrate with other CRM platforms such

as Siebel, and it therefore it makes sense for TAS to do this rather than build a native Force.com integrated

solution.

There are a number of native Force.com add-ins that enhance aspects of the SFDC solution by offering

partial methodologies or enhanced capabilities. These include Opportunity Optimizer for opportunity

management, Pipeline Manager for graphical pipeline management, and Territory Plan Pro which provides

territory-focused sales strategy planning. These additions are welcome because they are native applications

that are easy to adopt and have the same look and feel as the host application. However, they focus only on

part of the sales process and methodology rather than embracing it as a whole.

Ideally what is required and what we’d like to see is a natively integrated set of add-ins to SFDC that

augments its basic capabilities with a complete methodology and sophisticated set of tools that really drive

the sales process more effectively, and that is what SalesMethods is introducing.




THE SALESMETHODS SOLUTION

FUNCTIONALITY

The SalesMethods solution is a native SFDC integrated set of applications that have been designed to help

SFDC users understand and manage their accounts, and identify new business opportunities and drive them

to successful closure. SalesMethods’ approach offers significant additional capabilities above a standard

implementation of SFDC.

SalesMethods Component Applications

Plan2Prosper offers account development planning based on the guiding principles of building

reputation, gaining insight, developing shared ambition, and securing the required resources to

effectively execute. Plan2Prosper aims to build shared understanding and customer alignment to

develop mutual business value to create a true partnership and deliver the associated business benefits.

Plan2Close supports the critical elements of successful sales opportunity management, with full

qualification, justification, differentiation, and relationship support. Plan2Close is designed to help sales

teams build a winning plan to drive business to a successful close.

Plan2Exel is a sales-management toolkit covering governance, management reporting, continuous

process improvement, and skills development. Plan2Excel provides the analytics and feedback that

enables effective planning.

Plan2Prosper

Plan2Prosper ensures account teams employ strategies to build lasting client relationships and maximize

sales opportunities focusing on sustainable mutual business value.

It creates the environment from which to develop plans to increase awareness of potential business value,

building and maintaining essential relationships while targeting the available space that the sales team can

occupy within the account in order to optimize revenue.

At the heart of Plan2Prosper are four key criteria, each containing four critical questions that shape a

successful account-development plan. These questions are what SalesMethods refers to as the “4x4”.

Reputation

If a company’s reputation is poor, any sales campaign will flounder through a lack of credibility. Looking at

past service history; past value derived, significant wins and losses, and lessons learnt, ensures that the

reputation is intact and the client appreciates the value being offered.

Insight

Understanding the client’s challenges is the first step to understanding what has to be delivered. Considering

the type of organizational structure, its internal operations, and external market drivers and the responses to

these drivers will shape future plans and offerings and subsequent success.

Ambition

Ambition is very important. Will the sales team sit back and manage the status quo or aim to increase

opportunities by striving to build mutual and sustainable business value? Determining what the sales team

has to offer, its strategic goals, strategy, and the relationships it needs to foster will make achieving this

ambition more attainable.




Resources

Does the selling company have the necessary backing to bring its plans to life? Does it have the necessary

permission to commit resources and the necessary support to deliver on its promises, and the products and

the people with the skills required?

Supporting Tools for Plan2Prosper

Helping the account team answer the questions are four tools that are based on well-established best

practice in planning and executing account development plans.

Setting objectives and tasks by answering the 4x4 questions automatically builds the account development

plan, the Plan2Prosper. Actions are assigned to the virtual team and reported on through seamless

integration with SFDC’s diary and email management to continually update and measure progress.

CompetingForces

Based on Michael Porter’s classic work on interpreting industry competition, CompetingForces analyzes

the various influences on the account’s market and industry profitability and helps the account team

uncover the customers’ business drivers.

ValuMatrix

The key to long-term success is to promote sustainable mutual business value. Tried and tested, the

SWOT (or OTSW) remains a key tool in the sales process. Fully knowing and exploiting the benefits of

an account’s opportunities and threats and the account team’s own strengths helps target a customer’s

likely business responses. It also helps to identify areas of “resonating focus” that will form the

foundation of the account development plan.

BlueSpace

To identify the opportunity within accounts that exists beyond current business, BlueSpace creates a

“heatmap” denoting the share of the client spend by geography and product category, and gives detailed

breakdowns of available headroom.

OrgChartPlus

Any account activity that involves more than one person on the client side requires salespeople to know

more than just who people are. They need to understand their influence within the client account, how

they relate to each other, and what their overall opinion of the selling organization is.

OrgChartPlus allows the salesperson to map the client account, showing formal and informal

relationships, the differing levels of influence, and their opinions. These relationships are mapped to the

members of the virtual account team to determine the contact strategy.

Plan2Close

Plan2Close forces early qualification by addressing the four critical elements of successful opportunity

management: qualification, justification, differentiation, and relationship. Plan2Close aims to provide what the

team needs to build a successful closing plan.

Plan2Close is also driven by groups of four questions (the 4x4) where asking and answering the questions

will create a winning sales campaign. The questions asked by SalesMethods are summarized below.




Qualification

The biggest waste of a salesperson’s time is the deal they do not get. As a first step Plan2Close supports

rigorous qualification of the opportunity. Are there genuine business drivers? Has the client committed resources

to respond to these drivers? Is there a budget and is there a time by which a decision has to be made?

Justification

Another critical question for salespeople to ask is “are we committing resources to unprofitable business?” A

simple analysis uncovers the implications of pursuing an opportunity. Is the client able to project-manage the

buying cycle? Is the short-term revenue worth the effort or is there a strategic value to winning the deal? Is

there the time to respond?

Differentiation

Salespeople also need to question whether a bid is robust and competitive, whether it considers the

prospect’s buying criteria, and whether it demonstrates the company’s total worth. Delivering a resonating

value proposition and deciding a competitive strategy will ensure the sales team is focused on what is

important to the client while positioning a bid to maximum effect against the competition.

Influence

The final questions to ask are: “are we selling to the right people and do we have the right relationships to get

the required resonance? Are we visible and credible to the people that matter? Do we know what drives these

people and who will really influence the decision?” and “are we positioned with both the formal and informal

decision makers?”

In answering the 4x4, objectives for each of the 16 criteria are set and tasks put in motion to achieve these

that together build an action plan, the Plan2Close. This ensures that the account team does not waste time

and is positioned to win the business.

Supporting tools for Plan2Close

Plan2Close forces early qualification and by addressing the four critical elements of successful opportunity

management (qualification, justification, differentiation, and relationship) Plan2Close aims to provide what the

team needs to build a successful closing plan.

EnGuarde

EnGuarde is a competitive analysis tool that helps review the known buying criteria, identifies the

competitive offers, and determines how the team’s bid lines up in comparison, guiding how to choose the

strategic option that gives the best chance of success.

The ValuMill

The ValuMill identifies the client’s key business drivers and the benefits the account team’s offer brings

to support them. To do this the ValuMill puts the benefit statements through two different “milling” filters

for the business case and for unique value. The key differentiating elements are highlighted and scripted

to form the essential resonating value proposition.

OrgChartPlus

As with Plan2Prosper, OrgChartPlus allows the salesperson to build a relationship matrix but this time

rather than mapping a formal business structure, the salesperson maps the decision tree relating to the

single sales opportunity and not the overall account plan.




Plan2Exel

Plan2Exel is a sales-management toolkit covering governance, management reporting, continuous process

improvement, and skills development. Plan2Excel provides the analytics and feedback that enables effective

planning.

Kaizen

Kaizen generates reports in areas within the sales process including but not limited to an enhanced SFDC

dashboard, sales and sales team performance, pipeline performance, and win/loss reporting. Kaizen delivers

an action plan to continually improve process performance, using statistical process control and rigorous

action planning.

Analytics

Plan2Excel’s analytics offers root-cause analysis within the account development and opportunity

management sales processes. Analytics provides a tool to mine data held in Plan2Prosper and Plan2Close in

order to establish the true correlations between activities and results.

Sales Competency Assessment (SCA)

SCA is all about skills development and getting the best out of sales people. SCA identifies essential sales

skills and competences that facilitate both a self-assessment and management assessment of how

individuals and teams are performing. This 360° review of sales people’s skills and abilities then forms the

basis of a development plan to achieve improved performance.

Personal Development Plan (PDP)

Combining the output from SCA and Kaizen, PDP forms a personal development plan agreed between

manager and salesperson that supports and monitors the individual on the journey to optimum sales

performance.

Key Findings

Strengths: Provides comprehensive methodology support enshrining best practice

Offers truly valuable supporting tools

Weaknesses: A new entrant to the market requiring customer validation of effectiveness

Key Facts: i Fully integrated with SFDC

SOLUTION OPERATION

This section will start by giving a flavor of how SalesMethods integrates into SFDC and showing examples of

some of the tools, followed by an outline of the other component applications in the suite.

Plan2Prosper

The Plan2 Prosper methodology focuses on the four key criteria of building a solid reputation in accounts and

the market, gaining critical insight, establishing ambition, and ensuring that the appropriate resources are

available to support the plan.


Figure 1: Plan2Prosper Home Page: Traffic Lights

Source: Salesforce.com O V U M

Figure 1 shows the Accounts Page in SFDC. The user can choose to evoke the Plan2Prosper if the account

is felt to be important enough to warrant an account-development plan. The user is then presented with a

traffic-light system to give an instant overview of the status of the account. This view summarizes the current

status in answering the four questions in each category. Black is “we don’t know if we satisfy the criteria for

answering the question positively”, red is “we do not satisfy the criteria”, and green is “we do”. From this page

it is then possible to navigate to wherever in the plan the user needs to go.

As an example, the cornerstone of a successful account plan is the creation of sustainable mutual business

value. Without this the likelihood of a long-term profitable business relationship is diminished. Question 9 in

the “Ambition” quadrant (see Figure 2) ensures this issue is addressed.

Question 9 actually asks: “What is the planned long-term sustainable mutual business value? What is YOUR

overall strategy?” The aim is to be able to mark the question as being answered positively against certain

criteria that are presented in the guidance notes, giving it a green signal. In order to validate the answer

evidence needs to be presented so that the justification for rating the answer can be validated by

management.




Figure 2: Question on mutual business value


Having rated the answer as green, red, or black, an objective in relation to either reaching the criteria or

communicating your positive position to best effect in the account is then set. Once the objective is set,

individual tasks and activities are developed and automatically communicated through the SFDC system that

brings the plan to life.

Figure 3 Plan2Prosper Project Plan





Figure 3 shows how the aggregation of the objectives and activities builds into the documented account-

development plan.

Figure 4 shows a sample of how the “Account Overview” summarizes the current status of Plan2Prosper and

presents information for communication within the sales team and, potentially, to brief management..

Figure 4 Plan2Prosper Project Plan Overview


Plan2prosper incorporates four tools to assist plan development. Figure 5 shows the “Competing Forces” tool

that is based on Michael Porter’s classic work and which aims to highlight the key business drivers for the

customer and helps answer the section of the 16 questions that drive the business plan.




Figure 5 Plan2Prosper: Competing forces


Other tools include the ValuMatrix, which is based on a SWOT or, more correctly, an external-facing

opportunities, threats and internal strengths (OTS) assessment that identifies how you can assist the client to

maximize their longer-term opportunities by applying your major strengths.




Figure 6 shows one of the screens for BlueSpace, which details both the coverage in an account (Heatmap)

and headroom available by geography and business division.

Figure 6 Plan2Prosper: Bluespace


Figure 7 shows an example of the headroom available against the main competition.

Figure 7 Plan2Prosper: Bluespace showing competitive position





The final tool in Plan2Prosper is OrgChartPlus. This is a highly dynamic tool that maps the clients’

organizational structure, the relationships you have with them, and the internal politics, and presents it as an

org-chart and, rather interestingly, an “intimacy” chart. Figure 8 shows the formal organization hierarchy

annotated with information we know about the contacts.

Figure 8 Plan2Prosper: OrgChartPlus


Plan2Close

SalesMethods has kept the structure in each application the same in order to promote familiarity so that users

can orientate themselves quickly. The first screen looks very similar to the opening screen of Plan2Prosper

but its four categories are this time based on well-established principles for opportunity management. These

are qualification, justification, differentiation, and influence. Answering each question again builds in to the

plan itself with objectives per criteria and activities to achieve those objectives.

Again, printable summaries of the plan are available in different formats for inclusion in other business

processes or executive review. Figure 9 shows the printable summary of the plan. This is to aid management

reviews by outlining a summary by category of the status, the evidence available, and the objectives and

activities planned.




Figure 9 Plan2Close: Printable Summary


Plan2Clo

Plan2Close also has a suite of tools available to help answer the questions. Below are some examples of the

tools.

EnGarde, shown in figure 10, is a competitive-analysis tool relating to the bid. This centers on the buying

criteria of the client and how well the offer compares with that of the competition. The end result is presented

in graphical form so that you can compare how well you score in each of the buying criteria against how

important that criteria is to the client. The aim is to establish a winning strategy for presenting the bid.




Figure 10 Plan2Close EnGarde


ValuMill is to establish a differentiated value proposition at a point of resonating focus. It is based on the

feature, advantage, and benefit of a value proposition. An example is shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11 Plan2Close: ValuMill





Orgc

OrgChartPlus is similar to the OrgChartPlus in the Plan2Prosper but this time it relates to a single sales

opportunity and not the organization as a whole. The charts represent a decision tree and not a formal hierarchy.

The purpose is to map out who needs to be influenced and how to go about it. A matrix, an organization chart,

and a political map are available. Figure 12 shows OrgChartPlus as a political map, showing how close the

contact is to a member of the virtual team and the relationships that exist between them.

Figure 12 Plan2Prosper: OrgChartPlus


Plan2Exel

According to SalesMethods, Plan2Excel is the icing on the cake. Built on Six Sigma principles, Plan2Excel is

a continuous-improvement application that enables clients to address the root causes of issues in both

account development and opportunity management.

OVUM’S VIEW

It is Ovum’s view that the depth of the sales methodology described above offers a very significant

enhancement to the SFDC environment, helpfully enforcing the best practices of well-established sales

methods to augment SFDC’s basic strengths.

SalesMethods is also in tune with some of the main findings from our Customer Relationship Management

2010/11 (Technology Evaluation and Comparison Report).

Collaboration and two-way interaction must replace control as the main focus of CRM. SalesMethods

provides a more iterative approach to sales management and a greater degree of collaborative

involvement between account teams and sales management and indeed the client.






Analytics is one of the top investment areas for maximizing value from existing solutions, but it now

needs to be embedded into operational systems. SalesMethods incorporates its analytics within the

operational framework of the sales methodology.

Data and analysis are fundamental to customer intimacy, but enterprises must be sure to include data on

customers’ attitudes as well as their actual transactions, and should also seek out information from non-

customers. SalesMethods’ supporting tools support the development and refinement of understanding of

both the relationships and the intimacy of the relationships.

Enterprises face a temptation to view the various extended facets of CRM, such as mobile, analytics,

and collaboration, as separate initiatives. To gain full value, these facets should be combined with

traditional CRM capabilities within an integrated CRM platform. SalesMethods is certainly following this

route. There is the opportunity to integrate with social media to incorporate insights on customers, but

the capability of SFDC has been extended with improved analytics and collaboration capabilities. The

SFDC SaaS model has all the benefits in terms of cost of deployment, but probably its greatest strength

will prove to be its ability to support Web2 applications such as SFDC’s Chatter. Whole communities can

now be involved in iterative processes such as sales.

SalesMethods offers a truly integrated approach to providing sophisticated yet proven methodology support to

SFDC. The screens are straightforward to use and drive the sale through the response to key questions. The

tools offered to assist answer those questions are easy to use and illuminating. There is more likelihood of full

sales team co-operation if SalesMethods is properly implemented.

DEVELOPMENT

Force.com, SFDC’s generic development environment, is used by SalesMethods as the development

platform. As a first step, developers can design a data model using a wizard-based tool. The underlying

SFDC data model is completely metadata-based, and the objects and custom objects belonging to each

customer are all managed as part of the overarching data model. Security and independence is achieved

through the inherent structure (the extensive use of metadata) of the data model and database-partitioning.

Force.com is a complete development platform and includes a sandbox environment for development and

testing, Force.com APIs, and the Apex programming language. SFDC offers VisualForce for custom UI

development, and widgets are also available on the AppExchange.

Deployment

SFDC offers an expanding portfolio of pre-built but configurable applications called Sales Cloud 2 for sales

automation, which is where SalesMethods’ solution is hosted. Force.com Cloud Apps such as SalesMethods are

enabled via the Force.com platform, which includes the Apex programming language, tools for database

customization, programmable user interface and logic, process management, mobile deployment, custom

websites, analytics, and security. Applications created on Force.com run on SFDC’s proven cloud infrastructure

Cloud computing requires infrastructure optimized for the model that is able to deliver effective availability,

performance, and security. SFDC has invested heavily in its own data centers (two in North America, one in

Asia Pacific), which are ISO 27001-certified, SysTrust-certified, and SAS Type II Audited. A European data

center would be welcome.

SFDC provides a scalable and secure multi-tenant infrastructure. Despite some widely publicized system

outages it has a good reputation for availability, stating 99.9% uptime for the past two years, and publishes

information on the trust Salesforce.com community page. Behind-the-scenes developments, such as the real-

time query optimizer, which includes a query optimization engine and provides massive scalability across

multiple dimensions and fast data access, and “skinny” database tables to speed up trending analysis, are

proof points of the quality of the architecture. The multi-tenant kernel makes a single application based on a

single shared code base and infrastructure available to more than 77,000 customers.




Subscription

SFDC’s services are sold on a subscription basis. There are five Sales Cloud 2 options: Contact Manager,

Group, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited Edition, with per-user, per-month prices ranging from $5 to

$250. SalesMethods adds a further subscription either monthly or annually also on a per-named-user basis.

Table 1 shows the pricing structure of SalesMethods.

Table 1: SalesMethods subscription in pounds

Module Monthly Annual

First module 30 300

Further modules (each) 10 100

Total cost per year 600 500


The subscription fee includes baseline support that is accessible via the Web, email, or online to a support

knowledge base. Premier support is available at extra cost and adds two-hour response time (during

business hours), 24/7 telephone support, assigned customer-service representatives, and health checks.

THE COMPANY AND ITS APPROACH TO THE MARKET

COMPANY BACKGROUND

SalesMethods was founded in 2009 with the sole purpose of implementing its existing sales methodology into

a suite of software applications that integrate natively with SFDC and ultimately bring the solution to the

market. The SalesMethods team is experienced in sales, marketing, and business leadership while also

having important educational and software development expertise.

Having formed a relationship with its development partner Colt Telecom, SalesMethods has focused on

building and delivering the solution while forming the essential relationships with SFDC and preparing itself

for formal market launch in December 2010. SalesMethods is led by a senior-management team of seasoned

industry professionals who see themselves as practical visionaries and contend that most sales advice and

methodologies are far too theoretical. By keeping things simple but focused they believe SalesMethods

delivers everything needed to achieve high-performance selling and lays the foundation for continuous

improvement to be truly successful in selling in the B2B environment:

Steve Bale (Chairman)

Bale is an economist who spent his early years in manufacturing and services organizations. He then

embarked on a successful career in sales, marketing, and general management. Key achievements have

been founding and growing Oracle’s UK application business to £100 million, managing BEA’s most

successful region, Northern Europe, and developing and growing a number of start-ups.

Michael Conner (CEO)

Conner spent his formative years with Xerox where he was schooled in sales, marketing, and general

management. He was heavily involved in driving business performance through strategic change via quality

and business-transformation programs. In recent years he has held board-level responsibility at a number of

UK PLCs for driving sales, business performance, and organizational change on an international basis.




Richard Gilder

Gilder spent his early years at Xerox before moving to Dell Computers where he managed the indirect

channels in the UK before creating a £100m outsourcing business in the retail banking sector. He then moved

to a major UK investment bank as a director of business development. More recently he has been involved in

leading sales operations in open-source database and enterprise business application products at start-up

and early-stage organizations.

Dr John Heaford

Heaford holds a PhD in cognitive psychology and computer-based learning, and a post-graduate diploma in

business research. He pioneered the e-learning concept in the UK, and his book “The Myth of the Learning

Machine” became a standard reference in most British universities. Over the past 30 years he has been

responsible for implementing corporate development programs, with a focus on methodologies and skills for

sales managers and all sales and sales support professionals. He recently led the research and development

for the sales methodologies that form the backbone of SalesMethods applications.

Andy Larter

A first-class honors graduate in computer science, Larter is an IT specialist who understands the meaning of

delivering value through systems. He has worked on some of the most complex security and application

developments and implementations in the world. He has insight into what good IT looks like and what turns

software into a real business tool.

APPROACH

SalesMethods considers itself to be a practical visionary and its approach to the market reflects this,

supporting companies striving for high-performance sales by elevating themselves from the “what to do” of

sales to the “how to do it” and the desire to keep improving on the “how you do it”. SalesMethods’ contention

is that CRM systems support linear business processes but not the iterative process of understanding the

customer and selling. There is often frustration in sales communities at the level of “non-value-adding”

administrative duties demanded by CRM. This in turn leads to push back in terms of CRM adoption.

Ovum would agree that CRM is often weak at capturing unstructured information and extracting value from it

and that account and opportunity planning is often too complex. The result is that many organizations do not

feel they have yet achieved the promised ROI from their CRM solutions. SalesMethods believe it addresses

this frustration and improves the situation.


Figure 13 SalesMethods philosophy

Source: SalesMethods O V U M

Customer Relationship Management Salesforce.com

Sales MethodologySalesMethods

Continuous ImprovementSalesMethods

Impact

How to excel

How to do it

What to do

Time

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

SalesMethods is new to the market and those who are using it are at the early or advanced stages of a trial.

These include several organizations that are currently evaluating and implementing the solution. One client

that has had a highly successful trial involving 250 users is Colt Telecom.

Colt was familiar with the benefits of sales methodologies, and a year after the company had started using

SFDC it was searching for a way of utilizing its SFDC CRM solution to deploy best-practice sales

methodology to add real value to the skills and abilities of the sales team. Colt implemented Plan2Close with

a current sales win rate in line with the industry standard of winning one in every four large deals. Colt is keen

to use Plan2Close to improve these results and to date reports a 5% improvement in win rate in those deals

that are subject to the rigour of Plan2Close.

Colt’s UK sales director, Naz Dossa, said: “With the capability that Plan2Close now gives us we would like to

increase that number to win two in every three deals. It has provided us with more of a structure and focus to

help us move forward in deals. It is also helping us to better identify bids we shouldn’t be investing our time

on. Given the huge increase in productivity we have seen since we started using the software, all helped by

the fact that it is so easy to use, is very intuitive, and gives you hints as to what you should be filling in when

you edit boxes, we are confident this target can be achieved.”

CONCLUSIONS

Implementing a more complete and formal sales methodology within SFDC helps everyone. SFDC is given

another element of “stickability” because SalesMethods is only available through its platform and once

hooked clients will be unwilling to give up on the method. The current users of SFDC gain a powerful process

to drive sales effectiveness, as well as a platform for continuous improvement to their teams’ skills and

processes. This is the most complete methodology that we have seen in the in the SFDC context and we

believe that any organization that understands the potential value of adopting a sales methodology should

give it serious consideration.




Table 2: Contact Details

SalesMethods Ltd

9 Railway Street

London

N1 9EE

Tel: +44 (0)20 7837 0001

Email: [email protected]

www.salesmethods.com

Source: Ovum O V U M



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