DEALMAKER FOR TAS OPPORTUNITY AND ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

DEALMAKER FOR TAS OPPORTUNITY AND ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

The TAS Group Inc. 2010

DEALMAKER FOR TAS OPPORTUNITY AND ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT DEALMAKER FROM THE TAS GROUP (www.thetasgroup.com) The TAS Group is a Sales Performance Automation company that helps you sell smarter, and manage your business better. Our industry-leading TAS methodology has helped more than 750,000 sales professionals find and close more deals, and our proven sales process shows you what you need to do to move opportunities through the pipeline. The result is increased revenue, accurate sales forecast and pipelines, and timely information to make better decisions. It all gets delivered through our on-demand Dealmaker technology that integrates with your existing CRM system to produce sustained, measurable results. And to ensure that your sales teams get the full benefit, Dealmaker virtual learning delivers on-the-job training worldwide reinforced by expert coaching. Dealmaker solves these problems: We have a revenue problem. Is your pipeline weak? Do you find yourself saying, I don t have enough deals in the pipeline, and I m not sure about the quality of what I do have? Or maybe it s We re losing too many deals, or Our sales cycle is too long. Companies like Xerox, Bluecoat and Kodak use proven sales methodologies and process from The TAS Group to improve pipeline quality and size, increase win rates, and shorten sales cycles. And with Dealmaker reinforcing and measuring best practices across the sales team every day, you get a revenue boost that lasts and actually improves over time. I need to improve the effectiveness of my sales team - consistently. Are all of your sales people working on the right deals? Are they customer-focused and can they identify and build relationships with the real buyer? Our proven TAS sales methodologies solve those problems, and show your team how to gain control of the sale and build an opportunity plan to win. TAS workshops are supplemented by Dealmaker virtual learning for pre-workshop knowledge transfer, and post-workshop reinforcement. This eliminates the average 87% drop in retention typical within 30 days of learning in traditional classroom sales training. Post-training, our Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform integrates with your CRM system so that the sales person applies what they learned where they need it on every deal. Forecasting is time-consuming and isn t accurate. Sales people spend on average 2.5 hours per week on sales forecasting and in most cases deals do not close as forecasted. The sales process science in our Dealmaker software takes the guesswork out of forecasting by removing sales people s subjectivity and guides them to truly understand when a deal will close. Accurate sales forecasts result because of Dealmaker s objective in-depth analysis of the team s actual performance and knowledge of what it takes to close deals based on your business. The TAS Group hosts a range of free resources, including Dealmaker Genius, which generates a customized sales process in under 15 minutes, the Success Charter, which helps companies identify the revenue and behavioral objectives of their sales effectiveness initiative, and the Sales 2.0 Network, a global, virtual thought leadership forum to discuss issues relevant to sales professionals in a Web 2.0 world. The only sales effectiveness organization with continuous multi-million dollar investment in its own methodology and technology R&D center, The TAS Group is headquartered in Seattle, with international headquarters in Reading, England and Dublin, Ireland. 1

SALES PERFORMANCE AUTOMATION THE DIFFERENCE IS INTELLIGENCE Although the writing had been on the wall for the best part of a decade, the Sales Training industry changed forever in 2008/2009. The global financial turmoil in late 2008 precipitated the serious economic downturn, thereby putting return on investment, cost reduction, and travel and expenses firmly under the microscope. At the same time, it has long felt that a purely classroom-based approach to sales improvement was flawed. Research has shown that people overwhelmingly favor an on-the-job learning process over a time-consuming one or multiday workshop, while technological advances like web 2.0 have the ability to make people more productive than ever before. Fortunately, The TAS Group anticipated this. Creators of Sales Performance Automation, The TAS Group has been developing a more efficient sales learning and applying system for selling organization since 2005. This system is the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform, which integrates transparently into your CRM system. When sales people are provided with a system with integrated science-based methodology and process that provides them with valuable resources and tools for each lead at each step of the sales cycle, they will consistently use their CRM because it makes them more successful. Dealmaker Intelligence for the Sales Professional: Uses the world s leading sales process and methodology to standardize best practice, guiding you through which opportunities to work on, what to do next and how to maximize your chance of winning Is fully configurable to your business and uses intelligent automation to provide coaching and deliver insight on your deals, your sales cycle and your sales velocity Eliminates the need to manually update forecasts Dealmaker calculates them automatically Provides graphical opportunity and account management maps that allow you to explore business problems and uncover solutions as a team and together with your customers Dealmaker Intelligence for the Sales Leader and Sales Operations Leader: Integrates deeply with your CRM system to provide end-to-end analytics based on accurate, objective data, and synchronizes in real time Provides accurate forecasts at all levels of the sales organization, based on proven sales process rather than laborious, subjective judgments Supports sales learning, assessment and certification, to teach and reinforce key concepts and make selling the right way an everyday thing Incorporates social media leverages the knowledge of your community and alerts you to problem areas so you can coach proactively Supports the addition of sales methodology and process of other leading sales performance providers 2

CHANGE EXECUTION FOR SUSTAINED SALES SUCCESS Any successful sales initiative has at its heart a plan for the new sales behavior that sales people must adopt. Technological advances like web 2.0 have the ability to make people more productive and self-managing than ever before. Furthermore, knowledge or skills acquisition and application will only be successful if they are treated as a process rather than an event. This involves treating the classroom as one of many mediums that make up the modern blended approach. Sales training is a continual process. When a sales initiative is deployed, you should be concerned with 2 broad areas, typically occurring sequentially in a never-ending wheel. The focus should be on sales people and sales leaders learning, applying and coaching to the new ways of working. Then, to make sure the new ways of working are being sustained, the adoption phase kicks in, where you need to measure and coach according to the new ways of doing things. The Dealmaker Change Execution process breaks down the post-deployment areas into 4 stages: Learn Acquire the concepts in small segments, delivered virtually at your convenience through Dealmaker Virtual Learning. Apply Critical to learning is the application of new skills and insights directly to your real-world situations. This is most effective with the help of expert coaching, either virtually in webinar workshops or face-to-face in workshops, or taking a blend of delivery mediums. Measure With Dealmaker, you can measure how well your sales people are implementing the process and the improved ways of working, through intelligent analysis and reporting. Coach Identify where problems exist and where additional coaching is required. Dealmaker is on hand 24/7/365 to continually guide the sales person and refresh their knowledge and skills. Organizations need to test the effectiveness of any sales initiative as soon as possible, since reviewing, adjusting and iterating should be done regularly. You must make sure not to ignore the vital behavioral aspects of human salespeople that come with any change management exercise. The TAS Group has developed the Success Charter, a template to help you focus on both the leading indicator behavioral objectives and the lagging indicator revenue-based objectives for a given project, while identifying measurable benefits you plan to gain as a result of your sales effectiveness initiative. 3

DEALMAKER IN DETAIL The Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform is built to make the sales professional as productive as possible, the sales leader as confident as they can be, and both more successful. The Dealmaker platform works equally well within your CRM system and in a standalone capacity. It encapsulates sales learning, sales methodology, sales process, sales forecast and sales performance reporting in an easy-to-use on-demand application. Dealmaker is also intelligent. As the selling teams develop their accounts, following the sales process and methodology and collaborating on their opportunities, Dealmaker captures the information objectively and provides detailed guidance and coaching to improve the chances of success all automatically. The Dealmaker platform provides one place for learning, selling, informing, and working deals. Insight for sales leaders into sales learning, account and deal progress, notifications, forecasting and pipeline performance across the organization is always on. Dealmaker automates and optimizes these selling and leadership activities: TARGET ACCOUNT SELLING (TAS ) SALES METHODOLOGY WIN MORE, WIN BIGGER DEALS Opportunity Management methodology is the how of sales How am I doing in this opportunity compared to the competition? Target Account Selling (TAS ) methodology has been developed over a 20-plus-year history, and is the world s leading sales methodology for organizations and enterprises with demanding selling processes and sales cycles. In use by more than 750,000 sales professionals worldwide, TAS continues to be improved by The TAS Group, and benefits from feedback provided by some of the world s most admired selling organizations. Dealmaker automates TAS opportunity management to optimize the main four main levers that determine your sales success: the number of qualified opportunities you re working on; the average deal size of your qualified opportunities: the win rate or close percentage of your qualified opportunities; and the average sales cycle of your successful opportunities. TAS in Dealmaker provides a structured, repeatable methodology that enables sales organizations to: Improve bid-to-win ratios Shorten selling cycles Minimize discounts and negotiated concessions Establish clear, unique business value with customers Reduce selling costs through more efficient resource allocation Increase sales per employee Build successful sales organizations quickly by getting new employees more productive sooner Decrease risk of unprofitable, resourceintensive contracts Enhance account control and forecast accuracy Eliminate departmental barriers with a common sales language 4

ENTERPRISE SELLING PROCESS AND PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT PROCESS MAXIMIZE ACCOUNT PENETRATION The TAS Group s Account Management methodologies have been developed over a 20-year history, and are the world s leading sales methodologies for organizations and enterprises with demanding selling processes who take a role-based approach to Account Management. Enterprise Selling Process ( ESP ) in Dealmaker is a structured methodology for sales, sales support, and marketing teams responsible for penetrating, covering, and growing large accounts, enabling them to: Prioritize and focus their efforts on the best short- and long-term opportunities based on the customer s business needs Increase their coverage and penetration of the organization and its multiple business units Coordinate account team activities Analyze, develop and leverage key executive and partner relationships Create an account marketing strategy Build a detailed Account Map that matches appropriate solutions to specific customer needs and helps identify total, account-wide revenue potential Build and implement a comprehensive Account Plan Portfolio Management Process ( PMP ) in Dealmaker is a structured methodology for sales professionals responsible for covering, penetrating, retaining, and growing a portfolio of accounts. A typical portfolio contains a selected set of named accounts (organized by industry vertical, geographic region, etc.) for which a sales history may or may not exist. PMP shows sales professionals how to assess their accounts and apply the right strategies to each, resulting in an optimal mix of resource allocation and revenue achievement. PMP enables unique insight into their most strategically important customers business drivers and business initiatives, which leads them to identify new revenue opportunities and understand the full revenue potential of these accounts. PMP brings these important benefits to the selling organization: A clear view of the portfolio s potential A plan that helps prioritize investments in, and returns from, the portfolio A process for managing portfolios of accounts that can be regularly applied Improved collaboration among the members of the virtual team 5

COACH ME SELL AND COACH SMARTER Imagine if your CRM system knew everything about the deal you were working on and proactively coached you on what you had to do to win the deal. Dealmaker Coach Me does just that, and provides intelligent automated deal coaching for you, for every deal, every day. We know that a good sales team can be a great sales team with effective sales coaching. But we don t always have as much time to spend on sales coaching as we would like, and even if we do have the time, unless everybody is well prepared, the coaching experience is not always the most productive, and sometimes it might not be the most pleasant. The end result is that not enough coaching happens and revenue performance suffers. Dealmaker Coach Me helps the sales person and the sales manager solve this problem. If you re a sales person working on an important deal, and you re preparing for a deal review with your manager, you want to be sure that you ve thought through as many of the issues on this deal before the call. Dealmaker Coach Me has seen lots of situations like this, and when you click on the Coach Me link in Dealmaker, you re presented with some coaching advice about how you should approach the situation. If you re sales manager and coach, you know how important relationships are in competitive deals and you can use Dealmaker Coach Me to uncover areas where there is risk. Now you re prepared, and your deal reviews with your team will be really productive and focused on how you can help them overcome the challenges. Dealmaker Coach Me helps sales people self-coach up to the point where they benefit from manager input. For managers, they can spend their time with John on the areas where they can really add value. Dealmaker Coach Me provides real-time, deal-specific coaching, enabling sales professionals to sell smarter, and managers to coach smarter. Coach Me enables you to benefit from intelligent and specific coaching on your opportunities. SALES PROCESS WIN FASTER BY MAPPING SALES PROCESS TO BUYING PROCESS Sales Process is the where of sales Where am I in this opportunity and what do I need to do next in order to progress it? Sales Process in Dealmaker delivers an optimized set of sales activities that unlocks your customer s buying process to help you create value for your customer and win more sales. When your sales process is aligned with customer s buying process it accelerates the sales and helps you take control. Sales Process guides each sales person through the right steps for each stage in the pipeline. Based on our business rules, these activities can be mapped to your customer s buying activities, so that you take more control of the sale. 6

As each activity is completed by the sales person, they simply click to update, and add comments as appropriate. Dealmaker then calculates the probability of closure and the close date, based on your typical configured sales cycle. Closure probability assessment is no longer a subjective exercise; it is consistent across the sales team. Following a standardized sales process, with appropriate guidelines, customized to your business, and to how your customer buys, helps you achieve more sustained and predictable revenue. Dealmaker is easy to use, and opportunity progression can be recorded in just a few seconds. The sales person is then guided to the correct next steps. Sales managers are able to independently review the progress of their team s opportunities in real time and can focus their attention on those opportunities where they can help the sales person win. FORECAST ANALYSIS PLAN WITH CONFIDENCE FROM ACCURATE FORECASTING A sales forecast is the probabilistically determined revenue that a company will achieve in a given time period. What is the selling organization likely to close within a specified time period, typically by month-, quarter- or yearend? Forecast Analysis in Dealmaker delivers accurate sales forecasts by predicting sale closure probability objectively based on rulesbased measurement. The sales process science in Dealmaker takes the guesswork out of forecasting. Dealmaker removes salesperson subjectivity, replacing it with objective in-depth analysis of your team s actual performance and knowledge of what it takes to close deals. The result is a more accurate forecast with early warnings about problem areas for better coaching sooner. At a summary level, you can view Quota, Closed, Pipeline and Weighted Pipeline value. Dealmaker then selects the actual opportunities that it calculates should close in 7

the reporting period, based on your business rules, and your sales cycle. Dealmaker also analyzes distribution of deals across the sales stages, as well as the mix of deals in the forecast, identifying where a forecast is dependent on a small number of very large deals, or comprises too many small deals which might present additional risk to you making your number. The detail on each opportunity can easily be accessed, so that you can see the status at a glance. Managers can also ensure they focus immediately on those opportunities where their coaching help is needed. They can drill straight through to the opportunity to determine what needs to happen to get the deal over the line, and how to help the sales person. Dealmaker frees up sales professionals and management, so they spend less time chasing details and calculating forecasts and more time focusing on selling and coaching. When a sales team uses Dealmaker to follow a standard process, sustained and predictable revenue growth is achieved, and with Forecast Analysis, you get accurate on demand sales forecasts. PULSE INTELLIGENT SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR SALES, WITH INSTANT OBJECTIVE DEAL ALERTS By following sales opportunities, accounts, and users as well as integrating feeds from Twitter and LinkedIn, Pulse lets you keep your finger on the pulse of critical sales events and customer sentiment. Pulse is the answer to the problem of instant information flow within the sales organization. In Dealmaker Pulse, messages and activity from your social networks, and opportunities, accounts and users you follow, are displayed in the Pulse bar. Pulses are generated when someone updates information on any of the entities you re following. Pulse is intuitive and also flexible to manage. You can see a record of your follow requests, and you can also manage who s following you. In your publishing settings you can decide general rules about when you want your messages published, and you set up exceptions to the rules. If you re a sales person working an opportunity, you can collaborate with your colleagues and immediately send them messages for advice. When you re part of a team working on an account together, you can just follow the account, and receive Pulse updates. As a sales manager, you might want to follow some of your teams major deals. When any update happens Pulse will tell you. And of course you can follow your customers, or industry influencers in your Twitter feed, or on LinkedIn. In a selling organization, knowledge is everything knowledge about your opportunities and your accounts but also about your customers in the social 8

network landscape. Dealmaker Pulse harnesses social network technology to make this a reality, so that you can make good decisions based on total and instant knowledge. The Dealmaker platform applies objective and scientific standards to sales methodology and sales performance activities. This makes Dealmaker Pulse different to other social media formats because the built-in intelligence means pulses are based on objective, scientific and reliable information. PERFORMANCE COACH ACCELERATE SALES THROUGH INTELLIGENT COACHING Pipeline is the totals of potential revenue against target revenue at each stage of a defined sales process, depending on the selling organization s typical sales cycle. Dealmaker Performance Coach accelerates your pipeline velocity by providing metrics on what is working and what needs to be changed. It helps you learn from the past, identify present risks and positively impact your future. Performance Coach presents data collected in Dealmaker as your sales teams follow best practice sales methodology and sales process in their opportunities, without making any demands on their productive selling time. Performance Coach Snapshot tells you how much you need to have in each stage of the pipeline to make your sales targets, and it provides a snapshot today that identifies shortfalls, weaknesses, or risks to your target achievement in the future. Performance Coach HealthCheck helps you understand the true value of your pipeline, by presenting to you which deals are being worked on, and which are not. Within your total pipeline value, you will see deals that we classify as inactive, deals that are stalled, as well as deals that are being actively worked. This gives you the focus to take early action, especially with those opportunities which are nearest to closing. Performance Coach What s Changed gives a complete picture of what s happened during any period of time that you want to look at. The past is really a great predictor of the future, and the What s Changed module of Performance Coach gives you the necessary insight to learn from the past so you can predict and impact the future. Performance Coach Velocity tracks the progress of each deal through each sales stage for each individual or team. One of the key things that determine the revenue you can achieve is the speed at which you can move deals through the pipeline, through each stage in the cycle. Understanding the velocity for each sales person, for each team, for each region, gives you greater opportunity to get insight into how you can move deals through the pipeline faster. 9

VIRTUAL LEARNING LEARN, CERTIFY, APPLY, COACH, AND SUSTAIN SALES SUCCESS Dealmaker Virtual Learning enables assessment, learning and certification for sales professionals. The configurable curriculum management system enables sales professionals and managers maximize productivity through on-demand learning and reinforcement in order to accelerate sustained sales improvement. Virtual Learning takes care of the initial knowledge transfer, in an easily accessible and consumable way and can be aided by remote coaching or classroom training.. As an integral part of the Dealmaker platform, the knowledge is always available to the sales person when they are working their deals. You can also access the latest educational features and news. The curriculum can be configured or appended to, so that all of the knowledge the sales person needs to complete their deal is readily at hand. After acquiring the key knowledge concepts, the sales person can become certified by successfully completing a test. Sales leaders can also track and measure the progress of their teams on an ongoing basis via the certification reporting interface in Virtual Learning. Dealmaker virtual learning and sales performance automation work together in one learning-by-doing platform. In this way you learn and apply knowledge more successfully, and enhance your sales productivity. 10

DEPLOYMENT AND INTEGRATION WITH YOUR CRM SYSTEM Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation delivers the most advanced technology infrastructure for sales effectiveness. Dealmaker integrates sales methodologies for a customizable, enterprise-wide sales effectiveness solution to increase the ROI on your sales training and can be integrated with your CRM system to maximize the ROI on your CRM investments. Dealmaker integrates with salesforce.com, Oracle CRM On Demand, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Siebel. Dealmaker will also integrate with any other CRM system, through the Dealmaker API, which is built using RESTful web services for maximum flexibility and ease of integration. Dealmaker is specifically geared to encourage your salespeople to continue to use methodology, process and best practices in the months and years following adoption. Dealmaker uses intelligence to leverage your CRM system beyond simple data capture into a strategic revenue growth engine. CRM deployment can be problematic. As enterprise-wide systems, CRM systems serve more than one master including among others: sales, sales operations, marketing, customer service, product management, and finance. The specific needs and motivations for use of CRM systems by sales people can become buried under competing departmental concerns, resulting in the system and tools not being used. The secret to increasing sales use of CRM systems is to help sales people sell more. This is done by installing and integrating sales process and sales methodology directly into their CRM system. The TAS Group has designed its Dealmaker solution with its multi-million dollar R&D center to fundamentally improve how companies approach and adopt sales performance solutions. Its globally proven Change Execution process correctly aligns all customer stakeholder teams for smooth integration. The TAS Group advises and guides the process, while leveraging your specific business expertise together with our experience delivering sales acceleration programs. A dedicated Project Manager runs your implementation. Technical configuration and provisioning of Dealmaker includes configuring your users into the system, and can include adding your customers sales process(es) if you have purchased the Sales Process Optimization service, and integration with your CRM system. 11

ABOUT THE TAS GROUP (www.thetasgroup.com) The TAS Group is a Sales Performance Automation company that helps you sell smarter, and manage your business better. Our industry-leading TAS methodology has helped more than 750,000 sales professionals find and close more deals, and our proven sales process shows you what you need to do to move opportunities through the pipeline. The result is increased revenue, accurate sales forecast and pipelines, and timely information to make better decisions. It all gets delivered through our on-demand Dealmaker technology that integrates with your existing CRM system to produced sustained, measurable results. And to ensure that your sales teams get the full benefit, Dealmaker virtual learning delivers on-the-job training worldwide reinforced by expert coaching. The TAS Group hosts a range of free resources, including Dealmaker Genius, which generates a customized sales process in under 15 minutes, the Success Charter, which helps companies identify the revenue and behavioral objectives of their sales effectiveness initiative, and the Sales 2.0 Network, a global, virtual thought leadership forum to discuss issues relevant to sales professionals in a Web 2.0 world. The only sales effectiveness organization with continuous multi-million dollar investment in its own methodology and technology R&D center, The TAS Group is headquartered in Seattle, with international headquarters in Reading, England and Dublin, Ireland. CONTACT US TO EXPLORE YOUR BUSINESS DRIVERS, SALES PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS AND RETURN ON INVESTMENT: SEATTLE, WA 803 Kirkland Avenue, Suite 100 Kirkland, WA 98033 USA +1 866 570 3836 ATLANTA, GA 1117 Perimeter Center West E-113 Atlanta, GA 30338 USA +1 866 570 3836 DUBLIN, IRELAND Harmony Court Harmony Row Dublin 2 Ireland +353 (0)1 631 6140 READING, UK 200 Brook Drive Green Park Reading RG2 6UB UK +44 (0) 1189 253 251 www.thetasgroup.com marketing@thetasgroup.com The TAS Group Inc 2010 12