How Hexagon improved sales efficiency, customer experience, and ABM with Complete Hierarchies
Overview
Hexagon is the global leader in digital reality solutions that combine sensor, software, and autonomous technologies. Hexagon’s Asset Lifecycle Intelligence division helps clients design, construct, and operate more profitable, safe, and sustainable industrial facilities. It empowers customers to unlock data, accelerate industrial project modernization and digital maturity, increase productivity, and move the sustainability needle.
The Challenge
Hexagon’s Sales Operations and Enablement team is responsible for providing sellers with the tools, methodology, and processes needed to expand into new markets. The team faced significant challenges with creating, maintaining, and ensuring the accuracy, consistency, and completeness of the organization’s master data in Salesforce.
Bad Data Created Inefficiencies
Hexagon sells to mega companies and large corporations such as Shell that have hundreds of subsidiaries and sites underneath them. However, due to the lack of master data management, it had thousands of duplicate accounts in Salesforce and no way to determine which ones were right or wrong. In many cases, subsidiaries had different names from the global parent company, making fuzzy matching impossible.
“When our sellers were looking for an account to associate an opportunity to, they would either spend time Googling or they would just create a duplicate – and that was our big problem. We had folks creating duplicate accounts, thousands of them a month, around the world.”
– Eric Chapman, Vice President of Sales Operations and Enablement
Negative Customer Experience
Another challenge that stemmed from lack of master data management was trying to identify net new accounts within a hierarchy. It was difficult for Marketing and Sales to know whether parts of a hierarchy had already been penetrated. Hexagon was also in the process of acquiring companies, and it acquired different sales teams with specialized sales reps.
“We had many disparate selling approaches. There were different types of negotiations happening in the same account structure and we were setting up multiple contracts instead of applying one MSA to all the subsidiaries.”
With many different selling approaches, Hexagon ran into challenges with existing customers not being recognized, resulting in a poor customer experience and difficulty around support cases and invoice collections.
Solution
For starters, Hexagon turned to Dun & Bradstreet to establish a trusted data foundation. Next, it needed a way to visualize and maintain its master data in Salesforce. That’s where Complete Hierarchies comes in.
“Before, I was frustrated with the fact that we couldn’t see the account hierarchy in Salesforce. Complete Hierarchies is great in terms of being able to take DUNS numbers on a page and turn it into something that the business can understand and use.”
360° View of Accounts
Complete Hierarchies gives Hexagon visibility into complex accounts so that users could see the structure of multi-level account hierarchies without having to search through Salesforce or make multiple clicks. This visibility has dramatically reduced the instance of sales reps creating duplicates because they can instantly access the context needed.
“We’ve slowed duplicate creation down considerably by using Complete Hierarchies.”
Enhanced Collaboration
Hexagon needed account teams to steward an account. The individuals on that team could come and go based on acquisitions or movement but the account needed to be stable. Complete Hierarchies allows Hexagon to add the different roles to an account including primary sellers, speciality sellers, presales, solution architects, ADRs, CSMs, and renewal specialists. Being able to understand who’s associated with an account at the account and opportunity level has done wonders for Hexagon’s collaboration.
“Now that they have all this enriched information about the account, the account team, and a full view of the account and its subsidiaries, they can go do whitespace-hunting and start to land and expand.”
The sales team can quickly find accounts that they’re looking to get into and validate if anybody is already working there. Plus, renewal specialists can see how they can help sales reps and where they can penetrate the next inside of the account.
Levelling up account-based marketing
Complete Hierarchies also allows users to see which accounts are tagged for account-based marketing, giving different teams awareness of which accounts sales and marketing leaders are trying to penetrate. Now, sales and marketing teams are on the same page with the accounts that they’re focusing on, where they’re trying to penetrate them, and with what part of their portfolio.
“In the past, that was all just done through PowerPoints and offline files. Now they can see all that ABM information together in Salesforce, which is well beyond what we originally intended Traction Complete and D&B to solve. It’s an added benefit.”
The Final Word
Complete Hierarchies allowed Hexagon to take their master data and turn it into visual, actionable account hierarchies in Salesforce. It could finally understand where different subsidiaries belonged and what kind of land and expansion opportunities existed in its accounts.
