DocuWare Harnesses ConnectAndSell’s Lightning to Increase Conversations with Prospects
Los Gatos, California (PRWEB) November 29, 2016 -- Silicon Valley–based ConnectAndSell, Inc. announces results of a successful pilot of next-generation sales acceleration technology conducted in partnership with DocuWare, a global leader in document management software, headquartered in Germering, Germany.
DocuWare is one of the world’s leading document management software companies, offering its solutions in 70 countries and 16 languages, with over 125,000 users in approximately 14,000 installations. Founded in 1988, the company operates worldwide from Germering (near Munich, Germany), New Windsor (New York), and Wallingford (Connecticut), with subsidiaries in the U.K., Spain, and France. As both a cloud and an on-premise solution, DocuWare provides the world's leading technology for digital archiving, as well as Enterprise Content Management services that protect critical documents from loss, damage, and prying eyes.
When DocuWare’s Global Chief Operating Officer Timothy Sutter was asked which dialing system his sales team had used before ConnectAndSell, he jokingly replied, “The finger. Yes, we were as old school as you can get.”
With a goal of 14 conversations per week per rep, Tim saw his team members struggling to get eight to ten conversations each. “We could have moved up to a system that just provided automatic dialing,” Tim explained, “but I decided to take the better step up, to ConnectAndSell®. They offer a cloud-based service and technology called Lightning™ that uses a global network of trained agents to deliver prospects on the phone to my sales team within minutes after a rep hits the ‘Go’ button on the ConnectAndSell screen. My reps now spend their time having conversations with prospective customers instead of circumventing gatekeepers, interacting with voice response systems, navigating phone trees, or leaving voicemail messages.”
To pilot the ConnectAndSell integration with DocuWare’s sales strategy, Tim selected a team of eight of his field sales reps (20% of DocuWare’s sales force). Leading the team is Brian Hager, Vice President of Major Accounts at DocuWare. Brian’s career spans 25 years and focused on delivering high-value, high-return enterprise software solutions to global organizations. His team’s goal at DocuWare is to have discovery conversations and set meetings with decision makers at businesses of 500+ employees.
“We define a conversation as one in which the prospect acknowledges they have pain about document management and storage,” Tim explained. “Using ConnectAndSell, we’ve had weeks now where one of our reps has done 63 conversations in a week, where the goal is 14. So it’s really filled up the top of the funnel.”
“That’s a 4.5x improvement,” noted Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. “We don’t often see that big a jump in the short time [four months] that the pilot had been running at DocuWare.”
Chris warns his customers that ConnectAndSell amplifies “suck,” the parts of the sales process — and the reps — that aren’t working effectively or efficiently. Brian admitted, “We’ve come across various types of suck. When we have our sales teams engage and try to sell on that [initial] phone call, it’s a disaster. We had to teach them to build a relationship rather than sell. And we discovered that some people can’t adopt this new practice. It’s just not in that person’s skill set. In a second round of hiring now, I’m using a profile that fits better with the ConnectAndSell strategy, meaning you’ve got to be intellectually curious, you’ve got to enjoy learning about organizations, you’ve got to enjoy talking to people, you have to be natural at leading a conversation and extracting information. And,” he added with another laugh, “you need to enjoy doing that 100 times a week.”
Both Tim and Brian acknowledged the excellent assistance their team has received from ConnectAndSell and the one-on-one coaching from Customer Success Manager, Mike McAra. Brian commented, “We get really good help and support, good turnaround time, good ideas, good experience, cross references to other clients that they have. It’s all been extremely valuable.”
“What’s also been really valuable to us is the reporting,” Tim stated. Reporting is a feature of Lightning that provides up-to-the-minute statistics on dialing and conversation outcomes. Tim continued, “Our ability to go in and listen to conversations any time that Brian or I have free time, and being able to report on what exactly the outcomes are, is so important at the top of the funnel.” In addition, Mike has a weekly meeting with Tim to go over the reports, which have been customized to meet Tim’s management and coaching needs.
Chris commented on how quickly Docuware is achieving solid results: “Their reps were struggling to get 14 conversations per week; now 63 conversations per week – a 4.5x improvement – are routine. And in the first 90 days they have improved their conversion of conversations to meetings by 1.8x. Docuware is a leader among all our customers in using the ConnectAndSell solution to drive measurable, sustainable improvement in combined efficiency and effectiveness.”
Chris continued, “One of the most effective uses of ConnectAndSell’s sales acceleration technology is to expand efficiently into the SMB market segment. DocuWare is a leader among ConnectAndSell customers in using our technology effectively for SMB market expansion, mostly because their senior leadership has taken a true hands-on approach to getting the most out of each conversation we deliver.”
Mike agreed with Chris. “I think the one key to success that separates DocuWare from the other ConnectAndSell accounts I have is Tim’s engagement. It’s a pretty rare thing to be able to call the COO on his cell phone and really talk shop on sales. It’s leading from in front.”
Summing up DocuWare’s experience with ConnectAndSell, Brian said, “At the end of the day, the goal is pipeline development. ConnectAndSell gives us a way to consistently solve the hard challenge of engaging with the marketplace when the marketplace isn’t engaging with us first. It’s awesome in that aspect.”
ConnectAndSell has been featured in Forbes’ “Top 10 Innovative Companies to Watch in 2016” and Inc. Magazine’s online list, “18 Tech Companies to Get Excited About” (3-31-16).
Jonti McLaren, ConnectAndSell, Inc., http://www.connectandsell.com, +1 (415) 265-2121, [email protected]
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