How a Sales Enablement Tool Reduced Information Lookup Time by 83% During Sales Conversations at VMware
*Image taken from my blog article on the VMware EUC blog
<2m
Reduced information lookup time from ~5 minutes to
Best Marketer of the Month
First intern to be nominated for
Converted into a web tool and
Adopted by 2 PMM teams
INDUSTRY:
IT, Cloud Infrastructure
COUNTRY:
Transitioning Sales to an Updated Version of Product Packaging
United States
COMPANY SIZE
10,000+ Employees
GROWTH TYPE
Sales-Led
THE TARGET AUDIENCE
-
Enterprise CIOs
-
IT Directors
-
Enterprise CTOs
PRODUCT MARKETING SKILLS:
-
Sales Enablement
-
Cross-functional Collaboration
-
Systems Thinking
VMware's EUC offering (since spun out as an independent company called Omnissa) had multiple products each with their own product marketing team. As part of the WorkspaceONE product team within EUC, one of the challenges I was asked to solve was to create an asset that would ease the transition between the old packaging and new one for the sales team.
The Workspace ONE Pricing and Packaging team updated the old SKUs in accordance with customer requests of having flexible options on features such that they would only pay for what they used. The resulting new SKUs had the basic features depending on different use cases and offered optional features as add-ons.
​​
The task was simple enough: create an excel sheet that lists the old packaging against the new one so that sales can help current customers or prospects in the pipeline understand the changes to their offering. However, having worked with sales before I knew that a complicated Excel Sheet would never be utilized during calls when information needs to be at the reps' fingertips.
My Role
As an MBA intern at the time, my role was to assist with multiple sales enablement projects from creating one-pagers and blog articles for a feature launch in partnership with Intel to the WorkspaceONE repackaging project.
The Goals
-
Simplify the difference between features and add-ons available in previous packaging and the new ones
-
Provide the information in an easy to digest format
-
Suggest an appropriate package along with add-ons for customers to shift to
The Stakeholders
Sales Lead & Reps
Since there were many tiers and the new way of packaging them had significantly changed, sales needed a way to access that information easily during calls till the old packaging was completely phased out and the new one became a habit.
Reporting Manager and Director of Product Marketing
The reporting manager for this specific project was leading this initiative within the company. As an intern, my goal was to prove value and impact within only 3 months to both of him and the Director.
The Discovery
The Thinking + Decisions
Understanding the old and new packaging specifications
-
Collaborated with the Workspace ONE product marketing team to understand the old and new pricing and packaging model
-
Discussed project goal of enabling sales to transition existing customers and prospects in the pipeline from the older tier structure to the new one with the product marketing manager heading the project
-
Analyzed and cross-referenced old SKUs with the new ones using packaging documentation
-
Matched best-fit use cases customers were leveraging older tiers for with relevant new tiers and add ons
Drawing from previous collaborations with sales
Having worked with sales previously, I understood that:
-
being on call meant using a prospect or customer's time judiciously and efficiently. If looking up information took up too much time, a busy prospect could reschedule, a customer might need to attend another meeting, and so on. A needlessly long and confusing excel sheet would come in the way of informing customers of crucial information.
-
If a resource is too difficult to use, sales will usually ignore it and ask for another asset, wasting the product marketing team's precious time. Whereas a resource that is genuinely valuable and easy to use becomes the go-to asset or tool, contributing to more efficient and effective conversations between sales and prospects.
Developing an interactive tool on excel for quicker information filtering
-
Instead of a static excel sheet, I decided to convert it into an interactive tool that would suggest a best-fit tier based on the customer or prospect's criteria in about a minute
-
Using complex excel modeling skills with check boxes for selecting criteria and if-else conditions baked into the cells, the sheet matched the old tiers to the new ones with suggested add-ons based on the mapping done during the discovery phase
-
This way, when sales was on call, they could check from existing information which old tier the customer was on or the prospect was interested in, checkbox that along with common use cases, and the excel sheet would provide a suggestion.
Gathering feedback from sales and re-iterating for ease of use and information accuracy
-
The product marketer leading the initiative and I had meetings with a few sales reps and leaders to guage usability and accuracy of information being shared on the field
-
The usability was appreciated right from the first feedback cycle
-
However, since the pricing was a lot more complicated and had a separate resource, sales preferred using two seperate assets for new tier suggestions and pricing calculations.
-
As a result, I removed the pricing from the tool so it served only as a tier suggestion tool.
-
After two feedback cycles, the excel tool was shared with the sales team.
The Actions
The Impact
Sales spent 83% lesser time looking up information than before, improving customer experience
-
Since finding the information was now as simple as clicking checkboxes and getting a result, it was extremely quick to fill in the requirements as given by the customers and see the best-fit new package.
-
This lookup time went from 5-6 minutes to 2 minutes or less, a result that improved the conversation quality and customer experience.
Recognized for the tool by the larger EUC team
-
As a result of making this tool, I was nominated by my reporting manager and director for 'Best EUC Marketer of the Month'
-
After showing the tool in my final presentation, the Director of the Horizon team found it useful to implement for his product as well
-
Since two product marketing teams were now using the tool, this arbitrary excel sheet was used as a prototype and built into an internal web tool after my internship was over
