The best reason for adopting a new sales technology is to find a solution to your organization’s pain points. That’s exactly what Ron Greer, VP of Worldwide Inside Sales at OpenText, wanted for his team. We met up with him recently at Saleslove on Tour in London to get his take on the top issues his revenue team faced before implementing our revenue workflow platform, as well as learning what was ultimately the tipping point for why OpenText adopted Salesloft.
Let’s get into the pain points first.
Pain point 1: Understanding how campaigns performed
For Ron, the number one issue he and his team had was centered around understanding and analyzing exactly how their campaigns worked. It was a challenge for them to figure out what was really working and what wasn’t. On top of the lack of visibility they had into the process in general, they also couldn’t easily and quickly get to the data points they needed without a really heavy lift across their entire team. It wasn’t practical or feasible for their sales process.
Pain point 2: Measuring customer engagement
The second pain point Ron’s team faced came out of his team’s customer engagement approach. He shared with us that his team was delivering high quality, relevant content to their customers. But something felt off. They weren’t able to deliver that quality content in a structured way that gave them the ability to see if customers interacted with it properly. His team also couldn’t tell what was working and what wasn’t working for the customers they engaged. And, with the high-quality content they were creating, there should have been a way to gauge if customers were finding success with it.
Do either of these pain points sound familiar to you? Running a sales org is hard enough without having technology that leaves you with more questions than answers. Needless to say, your revenue team isn’t alone. And there are solutions designed to work with your team (and your customers), giving you actionable insights and measurable data. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
So what was the tipping point for OpenText moving to Salesloft? The answer might surprise you.
An unexpected tipping point
“We find that we’re able to understand better how we can set up our team to be successful, give them focus, [and] give them accountability and responsibility for the campaign process,” Ron said. He told us that he and his team ultimately moved to Salesloft because it put a lot of the power into the hands of the sellers themselves. With Salesloft as their revenue workflow platform, Ron’s team was able to set their own KPIs and drive those measures themselves, giving them the accountability to achieve their success on their own. “That’s sort of the key — and much more important actually than understanding what they were doing. It was giving them the responsibility of achieving their own success.”
“That’s sort of the key — and much more important actually than understanding what they were doing. It was giving [sellers] the responsibility of achieving their own success.”
We asked him whether the new found autonomy his reps had was an added benefit to how the team operated. He told us that for himself and the other leaders within his org, they were actually pretty taken aback at how much of a hit their reps’ autonomy was. He said:
“The world we live in now, we’ve got so many more early career professionals coming to this type of job. And actually they want to be in charge of their career and their success. They’re used to using applications and tools to help them in their everyday life. So being able to put this into their hands really drove a completely different piece that we didn’t expect to have.”
OpenText wanted to launch a new sales technology in a way that actually made their sellers feel like it was for them — not for tracking them. “With every customer engagement tool, that’s always going to be a priority,” Ron said. So early on, leadership at OpenText set up a strategy of how they were going to deploy Salesloft, bringing in both tenured reps and early career professionals alike to be part of setting up that strategy.
By including the people who would be in the workflow the most, it helped leadership on Ron’s team make sure that they built the right strategy for the team and that everyone was bought into it once it was time to start using it. That technique ended up saving them from experiencing too much pushback, if any at all. They wanted sellers of all levels to join them on the journey into Salesloft. So they invited them to help drive the implementation of the technology at the beginning — and also drive usage of it long term.
The final point
Now that OpenText supports its sales initiatives through Salesloft, Ron admits that without the revenue workflow platform, his team would lose focus. “It’s so important now to make sure we set up the right environment for our people to be able to achieve. And giving them the right focus and the right toolset to drive that focus is really key.”