HIGHLIGHTS
- Traction Complete was able to automate territory assignment that used to take three weeks worth of planning
- Thomsons Online Benefits was able to identify account overlap in different regions
- Reduced sales rep conflict over accounts
OVERVIEW
Thomsons Online Benefits is a global benefits management and employee engagement software company based in London, UK.
Their main SaaS product, Darwin, is deployed in 22 languages in over 70 countries worldwide. Some of their clients include Microsoft, Cisco, and Samsung. With a team of just over 400, Thomsons has won countless Client, Technology, Business and Consulting awards for their work.
THE CHALLENGE
Thomsons’ sales team is relatively small – just 30 people, geographically dispersed between Asia, Western US, with their core in the UK.
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They primarily target multinational companies with a global reach outside of the US. To accomplish this, they searched for data lists to purchase and have evaluated multiple software solutions, but nothing has helped them target these specific accounts.
On top of this, Thomsons has experienced numerous issues with territory management. Globally dispersed sales teams targeted organizations with similar profiles, at the same level of contact. Often, this happened within a single business.
In one instance, they had four sales reps selling into the same account in four different regions without knowing about it until the client notified them. This type of territory overlap hurt Thomsons image, and they needed to find a way to prevent this type of situation from occurring in the future.
Multiple sales reps working under related accounts led to conflicting behavior between sales reps, who often felt like they were competing with each other for business. Rules of engagement were often ignored by sales reps, and Thomsons needed a tool to help drive proactive conversations about territories before it reps were deep into overlapping sales cycles.
With a sales cycle averaging 9-18 months, and sales reps having 30-40 open opportunities at any given time, having 4 sales reps with territory overlap was not an ideal situation.
To identify and alleviate overlap, Thomsons’ sales management would spend a morning every week to review each open opportunity in their pipeline individually and address overlap after it had already occurred. On top of this, they would spend 3 weeks a year to reassign their territories based on industry. This process was time consuming due to the fact that many large multinational companies have subsidiaries for each vertical.
SOLUTION
To solve these pains, Thomsons Online Benefits purchased Traction Hierarchies, which utilizes Data.com Premium Clean and the D&B Database. Hierarchies can be deployed to an org in 30 minutes or less, making the implementation of this tool very easy for Thomsons to manage.
Traction Hierarchies utilizes Data.com Clean and the D&B Database to provide accurate information on individual companies down to a granular level, down to the individual branches and locations.
D&B provides the Parent and Global Ultimate Parent accounts of every individual company in a hierarchy, allowing us to visually represent the hierarchical structure in Salesforce and identify Whitespace accounts that don’t currently exist in the org. The D&B database identifies each legal entity by a unique DUNS number and provides firmographic data such as annual revenue, number of employees, and location, allowing Thomsons to identify new prospects within their target market.
Hierarchies’ ability to visually render the hierarchy along with display fields such as Account Owner and Open/Closed Opportunities gave Thomsons the ability to quickly identify account overlap. This greatly reduces the odds a sales rep would unaware of existing sales activity in related accounts – a huge win for their Sales Operations Management team, who now have an easy way to enforce and coach based on Thomsons rules of engagement.
In cases where there are multiple sales reps assigned to a parent, they can now collaborate instead of compete against each other. Weekly pipeline audits are no longer necessary thanks to Hierarchies. Using the same visual territory representation, Thomsons’ annual territory assignment processes has been streamlined down from 3 weeks to a mere 3 days.
With Hierarchies, they can easily identify the parent account by industry and assign it (and its subsidiaries) to a single sales rep.
THE FINAL WORD
Being a SaaS based Enterprise HCM software business, the geographical breakdown of headcount is an important factor in determining the potential business value of our prospects. We also have regional sales teams targeting the same businesses across four continents so it’s important to that the right hand is talking to the left. Otherwise we look like idiots in front of our prospects and idiots don’t win deals. Traction Hierarchies is the only tool I have seen that solves these two challenges. The solution is reasonably priced, takes very little time to implement and the service is good. If you are a data.com customer with similar challenges to the above then Hierarchies is a must.
-David Healy, Commercial Operations Manager, Thompson Online Benefits
