Landslide Technologies Case Study

These solutions replace a random, cumbersome but time-honored manual process which relied on word-of-mouth, lobbying and protracted phone conversations between hospital personnel to determine bed status and secure a bed for a new patient.

Since each sale requires significant resources due to the number of stakeholders typically involved, it came as no surprise that the TeleTracking sales force must maximize the win rate for new and renewal accounts and produce more accurate forecasting.

TeleTracking, which uses a direct sales force, had employed CRM tools to track opportunities. But the focus was reactive, based on what a representative had done with the account.

CEO Anthony Sanzo saw the need for a sales effectiveness program that would produce optimal strategies and tactics that would in turn be used uniformly by sales personnel to proactively guide them on advancing the deal.

To find a solution, he hired Joseph Gentile as vice president of sales, a senior sales executive with 20 years of proven sales management experience with companies such as Philips Medical and GE Medical Systems.

Because of his process orientation, Gentile and his team decided to work with the Sandler Sales Institute to develop a highly customized sales process for TeleTracking.

Gentile wanted a single application that would manage opportunities, provide insights into the sales process, and leverage the sales support tools available at each step in the process.

The project team determined the existing CRM system would not support this level of integration. So they built their new sales process around the Sales Workstyle Management platform developed by Landslide Technologies, also a Pittsburgh, Pa-based company.

They divided the sales cycle into major stages, identifying specific tasks for both the sales person and the buyer for each selling milestone to ensure the buying process was tracking with the representatives' selling process. Representatives are required to input specific information to demonstrate that the deal can move to the next step. Linked to each of these steps are templates and selling tools representatives needed to complete the task.

The work group involved sales and marketing, plus consulting support from Sandler and Landslide. The result was a detailed definition of the sales process, task time guidelines, and linkage of selling tools and sales knowledge to each sales step.

When loaded into the Landslide Sales Workstyle Management platform, this integration produced an automated sales guide, with a forward-focused sales coaching capability which suggests the right steps at the right phase of the sell cycle, using the right tools and insights to successfully move the opportunity forward.

This paradigm shift in selling was presented at a workshop that required salespeople to become certified in the new process. That ensured they understood the new expectations and were working from a common vocabulary, selling approach and metrics.

Adoption of the new approach has reached 100 percent. At present, sales cycle length remains the same, but representatives are managing more deals simultaneously and closing a significantly higher percentage of those opportunities, up from five of ten to nine of ten.

Forecasting accuracy is also at an all-time high of more than 90 percent, resulting in a management confidence level which has yielded more resource and planning support for sales. Ramp-up times for new salespeople have decreased sharply because the information embedded in Landslide mentors them through the sales learning curve sooner.

Marketing plans to create a feedback system to provide insights about lead generation investments. For example, which tradeshows generate more quality leads that result in closings?

Gentile also believes the analytics capabilities within Landslide will suggest modifications in the sales approach as more opportunities are managed inside the system and the progression of each deal is tracked. Also, if a new sales best practice is emerging, it can be formalized and embedded into the process so that all the representatives can take advantage of this strategy or tactic in their own selling efforts.

Gentile's advice to peers is to get all your stakeholders involved from the beginning. "This is culture change for the sales force, and anyone who has managed a sales group for any length of time knows that salespeople do not automatically embrace change," he said.

Gentile adds that the partnership with Sandler and Landslide is an example of companies really wanting to do innovative things. The parties were clearly focused on leveraging the strengths of each other to achieve the same goal.

Optimizing the integration of process, technology and knowledge has clearly allowed TeleTracking to turn how they sell, as well as what they sell, into a competitive advantage.